Just Like A Teenager

Oh my. It's ages since I did anything like this. And on a Sunday... And now I'm all awake, and it's past eleven and I don't know when I'll be able to go to sleep. You see, I've been drinking something like a liter of tea tonight. Give or take some...

A friend had been given a bag of different teas to taste. The store he got them from are considering to get some for selling and they wanted an opinion. And we were certainly happy to give them that, but since we got very enthusiastic we tried something like six different teas. Or was it eight? Don't remember anymore. And I just got home. It's totally lovely tonight by the way, I wish I could keep walking for an hour or so instead of going home and trying to get sleepy. It's 17°C (60-65°

F somewhere) and still almost daylight. If this place was like this all the year I would be totally happy. Also, if I got to drink teas like this every day, I would also be v

ery happy. That was one great way to spend an evening, but sadly I didn't bring the camera. Well, 

maybe not so interesting to see lots of different colors of tea in the same cup though...

I do have some pictures though. I finally made a very good bread again. Lately I've been eating through a sort of decent improvised bread I made two weeks ago, but now I managed to get myself together and make the real stuff. Though I hadn't made any sourdough, so I had to make do with some quickly thrown together rye flour and water, so it wasn't quite as sour as usual.

I can't remember if I actually ever wrote down the recipe for this bread.  This is how I make it...

You need a piece of dough from the last batch, about 300-400 grams, and about the same amount of rye sourdough (I make it by mixing equal parts in volume of water and rye flour, usually feeding it for a couple of days, but then, this time I made it maybe an hour before I started baking). 1 kg of flour and about 600-700 grams of water, and some yeast (depending on how long rising times you want, I've used everything between 3 grams and 15 grams) then after most of the mixing is done, 10-20 grams of salt. I let it rise twice, once in a box and second time after I divide the dough in four and carefully put it into baskets. One of the rises is usually done overnight in the fridge. This time I did the second rise in the fridge, and so I got to bake it for breakfast in the morning. I just can't resist fresh bread out of the oven... (I know I should wait until it's cold, but honestly... Can anyone resist that smell?)

Daring Bakers February Challenge - French Bread

So, time to post about another Daring Bakers challenge. This month's challenge was hosted by Mary of The Sour Dough and Sara of I Like To Cook, and the recipe they chose was a recipe for French Bread from a book by Julia Child. Julia Child seems to be one of the most famous food personalities in the US, though the only reason I ever heard of her is that I once bought one of her books on a book sale. It seems as if two of her books were translated to Swedish, one of them the one the challenge recipe is from. Sadly enough, the translation seems to contain some mistakes (one that I'm sure is a mistake is that 70° Fahrenheit certainly doesn't translate to 18° Celsius? but rather about 21° I'd say). The book in question (not the one I bought a long time ago) is out of print, but I found it at the public library. (The title is "Det goda franska köket, del 2".)

The recipe can be found here, thanks to our hostesses (it's really long so I'm happy with linking and not putting it into my post). To Mary and Sara: Thank you for a great challenge!

Now to my bread making. I made this bread a couple of weeks ago. The recipe was really time consuming, and since I wanted to keep true to the recipe I didn't fiddle with the timing. I was really annoyed, and quite sleepy in the end. But I consider it a challenge in itself to keep to a recipe different to the ones I'm used to. At times, you can really learn new things that way...

So, as a personal challenge, I decided to knead by hand (stand mixers were allowed). I hardly ever knead by hand anymore, since it's just very convenient to let a machine do it. The mixing and kneading all went very well. The dough was somewhat sticky, and I guess I did add some extra flour by trying to keep the dough from sticking to the counter by dusting the counter with flour. But the hand-kneading went much better than I was afraid it would. I may have been helped by the fact that air is quite dry here (temperatures below freezing for extended periods of time tend to do that). The recipe makes not very much bread, so the whole dough wasn't that big. And the kitchen was nice and warm, actually so warm that some time into the first rise I decided to move the dough into the living room. D was making chili in the kitchen, and the thermometer started to be steadily above 71°F (I changed the thermometer to Fahrenheit rather than run into troubles with conversions... I have ways to measure almost everything in american units by now, cups, a scale that can do lb and ounces and thermometer... Still don't understand "stick of butter" though.) The living room was cooler, about 68°F so the dough took a little more than 3 hours to rise for the first time. Pictures show it after first (right) and second (left) rise, second time it rose slightly less than first. For shaping, I decided to experiment a little. The bâtard and the triangle shaped one turned out fine, but the supposedly daisy-like thing was to wide for my peel, and sunk to much... I used my usual setup with a baking stone in the oven and water sprayed onto the heated stone right before the bread goes in. I also determined the times with a thermometer, those different shapes required slightly different timing.
The taste was fine too, pretty mild and quite like the "French bread" you can buy (franskbröd). This is not my favourite type of bread, I'm from the north and I prefer the deeper, more subtle tastes achieved by preferments, coarser grinds or sourdoughs (or a combination). But the bread was nice and fluffy, and not at all hard to make except for the investment in time. If I ever make it again I would probably do one or both rises in the refrigerator, overnight and during a working day. But I would certainly recommend anyone who wants a rather cooperative dough that gives a fluffy and good result. And I'm very happy with my hand kneading experiment, which reminded me both of that it's perfectly possible to do it, and that I really enjoy the kneading experience. Thank you again to Sara and Mary who gave us this challenge!

(Now, D is making chocolate mousse... and wants me to help whipping up the meringue. So I'd better stop writing if I want dessert. :) )

Just can't believe it's been almost two weeks

I don't know what happened. I really didn't intend this to happen. I wanted to create a blog that I would use, all the time, since it is about something that I enjoy doing daily. But those last two weeks things just were to much I guess. Work has been kind of very very busy. And last weekend we had a wonderful break from everything, and went south to see my family. We didn't see them at all during the Christmas season, not at all actually since last summer, so it was really about time. My parents had even had time to move house since I was there. Anyway, my not writing does not mean that I haven't been cooking of course. I'll just have to get better at reporting it :)

So, right now I made real homemade vegetable stock for the first time in my life today. Can't say anything about the results yet, since I haven't cooked anything with it (but I'm planning to use it for some polenta with shiitake and fava beans tonight). Right now I can just say that maybe the taste of soy sauce is a bit to much (I followed a recipe, but maybe I shouldn't have?). But we'll see what happens when it's put to use.
Second thing is that I'm working out a method to keep us with fresh bread throughout the weeks. Usually I do this by making a lot and putting what's not going to be used for a day or so into the freezer, and even though it works fine, it's not the same as really fresh bread.
(If anyone is wondering, this part of the world isn't for bread snobs like me, that is, people who don't like the bread at the supermarket, if you don't bake your own. Unless you were living right in the middle of town here there is no way to get fresh bread daily without going quite far to obtain it. And besides, I like baking, and I certainly like the taste of my own bread. )

My latest idea was to try out leaving some of the dough for one of our favourite bread in the fridge a bit longer than it usually stays there. See, usually it goes into the fridge overnight for a long and slow proofing. This time, I made a full batch, but I only put one bread into the oven. The other two (or the dough for two more planned got to stay in a plastic box in the fridge. Today I took out enough dough to make another loaf and put it into the oven. Haven't tried it yet, but it looks as good as the loaf made at the time prescribed by the recipe. If this thing seems to work I might write down the plan.

I've also been thinking a bit. About the time I spend on cooking, and how and why I do that. I mean, most people don't. Most of the people I meet daily certainly also cook daily (maybe not all of the old professors at work, they might rely on wife's cooking, or maybe I'm just prejudiced :) ). There's not much choice, you need to eat to live, and to eat you need to cook, right? But most people wouldn't spend an hour on Friday night planning what to buy when buying groceries on Saturday, in order to have a number of nice meals to choose from when wanting to cook throughout the week. We had a quite nice Friday night in the sofa, with a glass of port wine, doing exactly that. Does this make me obsessed? We just had no other plans, and it's so much easier to get things to make sense while shopping with a list than when you're just trying to come up with some ideas while at the supermarket...
On the other hand, cooking has lately turned into one of my most time consuming hobbies. And why not? I have the time, I also have the money I spend on it (most of which I would have spent anyway, since, like I said, you need to eat to live). And at least sometimes the results is delicious enough to justify the effort... :)

Yellow

Yay! I just realised that if I use the camera in my mobile phone instead of my camera I can get the pictures to the computer EVEN THOUGH THE CAMERA CABLE IS LOST! So this morning is for making "lussekatter", a sweet bread made for Christmas. It contains a lot of saffron, and my dough does at the moment look like this:
Hmm... The mobile phone camera is really crappy. The bright yellowness doesn't come out, at least not on my screen.

A few more minutes of proofing, and a quick breakfast for me. Now it's time for shaping. I used to love this as a kid, now I haven't done it for a couple of years. I'm afraid my dough is a bit sticky and not kid friendly, but I expect good bread from that. And there are no kids around here. Be back later when finished baking!

Days passing

Just realised I didn't write here for a couple of days. I still haven't really told very many people about this place, guess I need to do that to motivate myself to write. I'm still annoyed with the lack of pictures, I have quite a few of them in the camera but the stupid cable still haven't turned up.


The bread for soup day, however turned out wonderful. It was only my second try with the recipe, and even though there was also yeast in there, with a new sourdough starter, you never know... The recipe is called "Olof Viktors ljusa bröd" (means light or maybe white bread of Olof Victor's) from "Bröd". I use this book a lot for baking. I recently bought two more bread baking books (Bröd och marmelad från Rosendals trädgårdscafé - Monika Ahlberg, and Crust and Crumb - Peter Reinhart), but I still haven't read them enough times to really start using them. Everyone seemed to enjoy the bread, which was good since our soup turned out to be filling but not extremely interesting. D. loves this bread, and I'm not sure he will allow me to make any other kind for a while. At least not as long as I give him a choice. On the other hand, maybe it would be good to make one kind of bread several times? I tend to skip around among different recipes, maybe I should spend some time perfecting one version instead?

Anyway, this weekend it will be time for baking "lussekatter". This is a Swedish sweet bread with saffron made in December, to be eaten before and around Christmas. Since I decided not to make pepparkakor (gingerbread cookies) for this Christmas (D.'s mother makes awfully good ones, and we're likely to get a large box any day now) lussekatter will be my Christmas baking this year. Though I'm considering some fudge making...

Talking about fudge. I have this idea about trying to make a cloudberry fudge. I have made rasberry fudge with good results so far, but I think the taste of cloudberry would go well with the caramel.. But I really don't know. I love cloudberries, and it seems as if we can get any amount from D's parents. For me, who grew up in southern Sweden this is such a luxury, cloudberries are not at all as common there as they are up here. But, short of making cloudberry jam (which is good enough! I just had a little warm cloudberry jam with some vanilla ice cream) I don't really know what to do with them. Any suggestions? I even bought a book earlier this fall, hoping that it would help me. I mean, in Swedish it was called "Mellan hjortron och oliver" which means "Between cloudberries and olives", and the original English title was even "Falling cloudberries". Alas, I was so dissapointed. The book didn't contain a single recipe with cloudberries (I suspect the name was chosen because it might sound exotic if you've never seen or eaten cloudberries). So I'm still searching for cloudberry recipes... And a cloudberry fudge would be nice...

Sourdough

My sourdough has been coming along since I first put it together, and yesterday it was actually bubbling in a rather satisfactory way. So I decided to make a rye bread. It's the basic sourdough bread from "Bröd och marmelad", the first sourdough bread I ever made actually. I remember having such a success with it that after making it and similar breads for a couple of times I went on to make an all wheat sourdough and a wheat bread which totally didn't rise. After that I gave up sourdough untill last spring. But I remember really liking this bread, so I hope it's still as nice. It's a very basic bread, with some sourdough made from rye, which is fed with more water and rye twice and then added some more rye flour, some water, a little salt and a little all purpose flour. Right now my thermometer is showing about 90°C, so I'm waiting for a few more degrees. The kitchen smells just wonderfull.

(Picture will be added as soon as I manage to find a cable. I went looking in a number of shops yesterday, but it seems to be a speciallized camera-to-USB-cable which neither the computer stores or the photo store I went to had. So I'll have to make another search around here...