Who needs yeast packets to make bread?

Not me! I've been having great success making bread that is leavened only by sourdough starter. 
There is a great bread recipe called "Almost No-Knead Bread" from Cooks Illustrated that I love, but I love using real sourdough even more than the CI recipe for faux-sourdough flavor, so I gave the recipe a sourdough makeover. Granted, the time savings of the CI recipe are gone. Baking with sourdough as the only leavening is for those who like it a bit old-school.

My recipe assumes that you already have a sourdough starter available. If not, you'll need some time to refresh one you've received from someone you know or to start one from scratch. There are several from-scratch processes described in the books The Art of Fermentation and Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz, Sourdough Cookery by Rita Davenport and Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish.

Also assumed: that you own a cast-iron Dutch oven with a lid.

Crusty Sourdough Bread
yield: 1 loaf, approximately 1 pound

Step 1: Refresh the starter 
Stir 1/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour and 2 Tbsp water into the starter. Leave the container out on the kitchen counter several hours until starter is bubbly and increasing in size. 

Step 2: Mix up the recipe
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour (5 ounces)
1 cup unbleached bread flour (5 ounces)
1 cup whole-wheat flour (5 ounces)
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sourdough starter
1/2 cup water, plus a little more if dough is dry
 
In large mixing bowl, mix the dry ingredients, then stir in sourdough starter with enough water to make the dough into a shaggy-looking ball. Start with 1/2 cup water and add a little more water if dough is dry and not coming together.

Cover bowl with plastic wrap and leave out overnight.

Step 3: Prepare for rising 
Line a flat pasta bowl, a bread basket or an 8-inch cast-iron skillet with parchment paper and grease the paper with cooking spray. Remove your plastic wrap from the mixing bowl and spray one side with cooking spray.

Step 4: Knead and shape
Spread flour over your kneading surface and knead your dough just 10-15 turns until it is smooth and elastic. Gently pull sides down under the loaf to make a ball, squeeze bottom seam together and place loaf seam-side down in the parchment-lined bowl//basket/skillet. Cover loosely with the plastic wrap, oily side down. Allow to rise until nearly doubled in size, about 1 1/2 to 2 hours. About 1/2 hour before the end of rising, turn on the oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit with a cast-iron Dutch oven (lid on) inside it on the lowest rack.

Step 5: Baking a crusty loaf
Sprinkle the loaf with flour, then slash a 1/2 inch-deep line across the loaf with a sharp knife. Turn on the kitchen exhaust fan, if you have one, before the next part. Carefully bring out the Dutch oven, open the lid, pull up the corners of the parchment paper around your loaf, place the paper with the loaf in it inside the Dutch oven. Cover carefully with lid, turn oven temperature down to 425 degrees Fahrenheit and bake 30 minutes. 

At 30-minute mark, remove lid and continue baking loaf in Dutch oven another 20-25 minutes until it is well-browned and center temperature of loaf is 210 degrees Fahrenheit. Cool finished loaf on a wire rack.

Step 6: Eating and storing
I'm assuming that you will already start to eat the bread the same day it is made, as soon as it is cool. Who could wait longer? I won't tell you what to put on your bread, but storage is a piece of cake. Turn the cut side of the loaf down on a cutting board.

Alternatively, you could wrap the whole loaf in foil. If the crust is getting tough and losing its crispness, it can be re-crisped in the oven or toaster. This bread is still delicious on Day 2 and makes great toast for a couple days afterward. 

Keeping a sourdough starter: Once you've got your starter going, you can store it in the refrigerator in an airtight container between uses. I feed mine at least once a week by mixing in 2 Tbsp unbleached all-purpose flour and 1 Tbsp water. I feed it more, still in a ratio of 2 parts flour to 1 part water, if I will be baking often. If I baked nearly every day, I'd just leave the starter container out on the counter to keep those yeasts really active. If I know I won't be baking for a while, but the starter is getting close to filling the container, I discard some before the next feeding.

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Successfully avoiding a trip to the grocery again

You know the scenario: You're pressed for time to get that dish done by dinnertime or in time to leave with it for someone else's house and you realize you don't have as much of one ingredient as you thought you had. The recipe won't turn out the way you have come to expect. You're not sure whether you can fudge it with using less, but you have to try anyway because you've already started mixing the other parts.

This recipe is about embracing the unexpected and foisting it off on your friends at a potluck, which I did. And about avoiding a trip to the grocery for which there is no time, which I also did and made it to that potluck on time. And it's about finding another tasty use for backyard rosemary and other gardeners' summer tomatoes that show up unannounced at our place or appear in our Henry's Farm CSA box.

Running-Out-of-Cornmeal Cornbread (with bell and whistles)
alterations to Cook's Illustrated "All Purpose Cornbread" recipe
at least 6 servings

5 ounces unbleached all-purpose flour
4 ounces whole-wheat flour
3 ounces cornmeal
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp table salt
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
3 1/2 ounces fresh cooked corn kernels (or thawed frozen corn)
1 cup unsweetened kefir (or buttermilk)
2 large eggs
8 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
large pinch dried rosemary, crushed (this is the bell from my backyard plant)
one to two ripe garden tomatoes (this is a whistle)
a pinch of kosher salt or sea salt (this is a whistle)

Heat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Spray 8x8-inch glass baking dish with nonstick cooking spray. Whisk flours, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda, salt in a bowl until combined and set aside.

In food processor or blender, process sugar, corn, kefir and eggs until combined. 

Make a well in the center of dry ingredients and pour in wet mixture. Fold together for a few turns of the spatula/spoon. Add melted butter and rosemary and fold until dry ingredients are just moistened.

Pour batter into baking dish. Smooth the top. Slice the tomatoes thinly and lay the slices on top of the batter so they just touch each other. Sprinkle with kosher/sea salt.

Bake about 25 to 35 minutes until golden brown and a toothpick inserted it the center comes out clean. Tomato slices will look as if they have sunken into the top. Take directly from oven to potluck and serve cornbread still warm out of the baking dish.

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Another try at breakfast strata

It's been quite a while since I toyed with the breakfast casserole strata in the kitchen. In the last documented attempt, the strata was really subpar.

In the new version, it's still two layers of bread with a filling of sausage and vegetables in between, all held together by an egg mixture and baked till the bread starts to toast.
The differences:
1. no turmeric
2. this time, I had the mustard I wanted
3. different sausage
4. different spices
5. cheese topping

"Let's try this again" leftovers-for-breakfast strata
 serves at least 4
4 large eggs
1 cup milk (I used almond milk)
1 tsp dried sage leaves, crushed (4 to 5 leaves)
1/2 cup chopped parsley (loosely in the measuring cup, not packed)
1 orange bell pepper, chopped finely
2 leftover bratwurst-sized sausages, sliced (I had chicken-apple sausage)
1 tsp dijon mustard
1 tsp salt
3 Tbsp butter
6 to 8 slices dry bread
1 cup shredded cheddar

Oil 8x8 baking pan. Lay 3 to 4 slices of bread down to cover the bottom of the pan. Saute chopped pepper and sausage together in butter. When heated through, add parsley and sage. Spread veg/meat mixture on top of bread in baking pan. Cover with half of shredded cheese and top with 3 to 4 slices of bread to cover evenly. Whisk eggs with milk, mustard and salt. Pour over contents of pan, soak at least 1 hour (can soak overnight if desired to bake at breakfast time). Top with the rest of the shredded cheese and bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for approximately 30 minutes or until eggs are set and top layer of bread is toasted.
This dish is great fresh out of the oven, but do let it sit 10 minutes before cutting into portions. This time, I made the dish the night before I wished to eat it and cut portions to reheat in the microwave for a couple of breakfasts for me and Andrew.

I'm getting more daring with the use of eggs and cheese as my sometimes-touchy guts will allow. I'll have to admit that this time, I still didn't get things quite right and the strata was once again not a Heather-friendly dish. I suspect there was something about the chicken-apple sausage that I wasn't digesting well because not only the leftovers affected me, but also the serving of sausage with lunch on an earlier day. Maybe I could have skipped the cheese topping, too.

Well, this dish was fun until it suddenly wasn't fun anymore. The flavor was much improved over the last strata, and I was glad to have a way to use up leftovers of chicken sausage and parsley.

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Historical baking in an outdoor oven

I was thrilled to have the chance to bake in a wood-fired, outdoor clay oven this weekend at the Society for Creative Anachronism event "For Hands" in Wood River, IL.

The leader of the hands-on experiment in building and using the oven is known in the SCA as Master Philippe de Leon. He said that he had used a design that had been used successfully at the Pennsic War http://www.pennsicwar.org/penn39/directory.html but that he found out through trial-and-error and further discussion with the Pennsic oven builders that the ovens are meant to be temporary structures. For that reason, Philippe thinks he'll use a different design for the next oven to be built right next to the current one at Wood River's Camp Dubois, a recreation of the winter quarters of 1803-04 used by the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Pictures of preparing the oven for baking and baking the first loaves of the day:

Philippe tells about the building process while tending the fire in the oven

Oven firing -- when the fire is really going, tongues of fire start licking around the top of the oven and out the top of the doorway

Repairs made to the clay skin of the oven. The basic construction was clay applied both over the base "igloo" of bricks and over a wooden plank supporting the igloo. The pedestal was masonry using local limestone from the Wood River area.

Raking the coals out of the oven

Sweeping out the oven before inserting loaves of bread (in baskets in foreground)

Uh-oh. The floor of the oven has a hole, which proves to be part of some problems later in the day with keeping stable high temperatures in the oven.

Simon Hondy slashing loaf on the peel before baking

First loaves of the day in the oven, before and after

Simon removes the first loaf of the day

Foibles and all, the oven was great fun to play in and watch, and I'm glad the baker known as Simon Hondy in the SCA invited me to bring a recipe and make something myself to bake in the oven for the evening's feast at the event.

My recipe is not provably a pre-1600 recipe. I know the ingredients themselves would have been known, but I don't have a definite date on when these shaped buns were first seen in Italy. I got a happy feeling from watching the dough rise outside on a sunny day.

Panini all'Olio

3 cups white bread flour (I used all-purpose this time because it's what I had on-hand)
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 tsp salt
4 Tbsp olive oil
1 cup homemade wild yeast starter (obtained from Simon)
1 cup lukewarm water
cornmeal

Mix together dry ingredients. Add starter, oil and wet the dough with as much of the one cup of water as is needed to make shaggy dough. Pull dough together and knead about 10 minutes on a floured surface. Grease large bowl with additional olive oil and turn the dough inside the bowl to cover it with oil. Cover with a cloth and allow to rise until doubled. Punch dough down and break into 12 to 16 equal-sized pieces. Preheat oven (modern ovens to 400 Degrees Fahrenheit). Form into shapes as desired and cover with flour.  Place buns on a cornmeal-dusted peel or baking pan, cover with a cloth and rise about half an hour. Bake about 15 minutes in baking pan (or on clay oven floor) or until buns make a hollow noise when their bottoms are tapped. Dust off the excess flour before serving.

Shape options:
1) artichokes: form dough into a small ball and let it do the second rise. Then snip horizontal cuts in rings around the bun with scissors to approximate artichoke leaf tips.
2) pretzels: before second rise, make dough "snakes" and twist into pretzel shapes.
3) fingers: before second rise, make flat ovals of dough and roll up like crescent rolls.
4) twists: before second rise, make dough "snakes" and twist them, then join the two ends together
5) spirals: before second rise, make dough "snakes" and form into a spiral shape.

Some photos of my own baking in my persona of Heregyth Ketilsdottir:

 Mixing dough

 Kneading dough

Buns on the baking peel waiting to go into the oven

 The closed oven during baking

Finished buns, ready for feast!

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Baking disappointment

I baked bread today with some yeast that has been in the cupboard for a while and if it had an expiration date on the package, the date probably would have passed already.
The yeast was sluggish to form bubbles in the liquid I started it in, but it didn't do too badly, so I figured I'd just need to give it some extra time with the risings. I gave it some extra time to rise and the bread rose nicely, so into the oven it went.

The disappointment: no oven spring. The bread had risen to the tops of the bread pans before I put it in the oven, and the bread was still only at the tops of the bread pans when it was done baking. It didn't rise another millimeter while it was baking. I think I'm going to be in for some pretty dense bread when it comes time to eat it for dinner. I fear the center may not be cooked all the way through.

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Stuffed dough pockets: the food of many folk

These scrumptious, savory pockets of bready dough with a surprise inside are beloved in many cultures. They come in fried versions, like empanadas in Latin America or samosas in India. Some are boiled, like German Klösse and (sometimes, when not fried or baked) Polish pierogi. Some are baked, like Italian calzone or Jamaican patties or like this week's experiment, Russian pirozhki.

A Russian-speaking colleague of Andrew's and neighbor of ours in Calgary gave me a cookbook for my last birthday, Cuisines of the Caucasus Mountains by Kay Shaw Nelson. Following her recipes, I made pirozhki and a vegetable-anchovy relish that tasted pretty good as a dip for the bready pockets. Our dinner was freshly-baked pirozhki (including one for each of us that I stuffed with cherry jam for dessert), relish and leftovers of lentil-barley stew flavored with smoked turkey tail.

Most interesting parts of the recipes: the mushroom filling for the pirozhki is flavored with nutmeg and the thickener for the relish is ground almonds. I had plenty of both to spare for a meal for two new parents.

I was amazed at how much the relish's flavor mellowed out over time. The first meal, eight hours after I made the relish, the taste was predominantly green onion and anchovy. Two days later, when I ate leftovers, the flavors were fully incorporated into a fresh, herby mixture with a hint of salt and fish. 

Note to self for next time: seal the pirozhki better before baking. Many of them broke open along the seam and leaked some juices onto the baking pan. Maybe instead of just folding over and pressing closed, I should have rolled the filled bundles in my hands to make them seamless.

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