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. :) )

Baked stuff

Time to look back here and put something new up. I think I maybe should try to make some kind of posting schedule in order to post more regularly. I actually started this post right before dinner, but I ended up setting the table instead, and here I am with half a glass of wine left waiting for D to make a raspberry sauce for the dessert. (No, I didn't find any fresh raspberries, but our freezer is somehow magically refilled with berries every once in a while. People who pick berries and just give them away are wonderful.) So, what have I been up to lately?

Well, yesterday I had another go at making macarons. Still no perfect results, but it's getting better. You could even spot something almost like feet, at least on some of them. If you're looking closely. And they certainly taste good.

This morning I also made a kind of weird scone, but it was oh so tasty. Especially with the left over lemon curd from the macaron making...

(Oh, sorry, I had to leave for a little while. Dessert was ready.)
So, anyway, today's breakfast was banana scones with lemon curd. I know, it doesn't sound like the healthiest breakfast, but common, it's Sunday. And it seems I'm only keeping D. here for a little more than another month, so I better spoil him. He's leaving for a post-doc beginning in April. Great news! (But I'll miss him.) On the other hand, I get to go visit. In France. Not far from Paris. Hmm.. I can certainly live with that. :)

So, to make not-so-healthy, but good for spoiling someone, scones I did something like this:

Mix 2.5 dl flour, a little oat bran (maybe 1/4 dl, just to add some crunch), a pinch of salt and 1/2-1 teaspoon baking powder together. Add 75 g of butter cut into little pieces. Cut into this until butter pieces are very small (as if making a pie crust or similar). Alternatively, put into food processor and pule until butter is in small pieces. Add 1/4 dl sugar, 1 egg and 1/2 dl milk. Mix together. Finally, add one banana cut into pieces, and knead into the mixture. If using food processor, take everything out and add the bananas by hand (beware of the knifes while getting it out of the bowl!) Bake in 175°C oven for about 15 minutes. Serve with lemon curd (or something else a little sweet, a little sour).

Swedish Mardi Gras Sweets - Semlor

So we are a day early, but we had the smell around all since we made the sweet bread for this yesterday. We just couldn't resist any longer...

Those are traditional Swedish Mardi Gras treats. It's really quite simple. A bun made from sweet bread dough (any recipe could be used, preferably a one that produces a light result.. many traditional recipes contain a leavener with ammonium bicarbonate in addition to yeast to achieve this). Some almond paste. A little cream and confectioner's sugar.

To put them together, cut a bun into two. Remove most of the interior of the bottom part with a spoon. Crumble this and mix with about an equal amount of almond paste. Add some cream or whole milk to get a mixture that holds together somewhat. Put back into the hollow bun. Spoon or pipe some cream, but the hat back on and sift on some confectioner's sugar.

Traditionalists eat it like D. did, in a bowl of hot milk. I prefer eating them as they are. Any way, this is how Tuesdays between now and Easter should be celebrated.


One more comment to add the day after (I just made a couple more for tonight which is, after all, the right day). The bread should of course contain cardamom. This is just the way sweet bread is to me, so I even forgot to mention it. The only time I ever make sweet bread without cardamom is when I make it with saffron, then I might choose not to have cardamom. (And that one time I tried to make cinnamon rolls in Prague, where I just couldn't find cardamom. The rolls didn't turn out as they should - no good idea.)

Can't Stop Munching - Roasted Chickpeas

This is again something I'm sure many people have done a million times or so. But I just did it for the first time ever, so I'm going to write about it. I really shouldn't be sitting here eating... I had a nice and filling dinner not so long ago, and I'm quite full. But while D. was washing the dishes and I was messing around with some bread that I'm making (my project with making enough dough for several loaves but leaving it in the fridge for baking one at a time is turning out great) I realised that we did have a small amount of chickpeas in the fridge that really needed to be eaten. So I decided to try something I had been thinking about for some time. It's quite easy. Turn on oven, rather hot (I used about 200°C). Heat some oil in a pan on the stove, mince a little garlic and pour into the heated pan together with leftover chickpeas and some dried chili. I used some of the chili that I tried to grow on the balcony this summer. (That didn't work, it's far to cold for chili to be out of doors up here, unless you have a nice southern wall or something. It got to grow in our bedroom window instead.) When everything is nicely coated with oil and garlic and chili (or use any kind of spice that goes well with chickpeas I think?) is well spread out, put into the oven for some 15 minutes. I've been eating they cooled down enough to not burn (to much).


Oh... I just emptied the camera to get the chickpea photo and found a few other ones that I took because I considered posting about it but forgot to write anything. Now I decided I'll just share the pictures here. Both are dinners from last week, two of those that turned out good. Onion tart with endive and Rochefort sallad, and a fish which I don't know the English name of (Röding anyone?) with a lemon pilaff, grated carrot and green beans. Yum. Now I almost got hungry again. Maybe some more chickpeas...
Argh.. Blogger's spell checking does not seem to work today. You'll have to do with a non-spell checked post. Hope it's not too bad

Lemon Meringue Pie - The Daring Baker's January Challenge

This was my second DB challenge, and this months challenge was Lemon Meringue Pie. Lemon Meringue Pie is not a standard dessert around here, but my Mom made it a few times in my childhood (she is half American, which means that she makes some food that might not otherwise not have been known to me). I always loved it, so many thanks to this month's hostess, Jen at The Canadian Baker for making it a challenge. Since there is only two of us here, and the recipe seemed to be a rather large one, I choose to make only two fifths of the original recipe. (The recipe used five eggs, so making something that would require a whole number of eggs seemed convenient.) This turned out to be quite a lot for two people anyway!
So, here is what they looked like. Since my only pie form used to be a non-stick thing that some time during December decided to deliver pies with a non-stick coating I decided to go for the free-form tartletts. I was really nervous about how the filling would manage this, never having made a lemon curd before, but everything worked out perfect. Actually, D. thought that I had piled the curd up a bit too high, I think he would have preferred more meringue and less lemon. I must admit that I cheated a bit to get the nice browning marks by using a kitchen torch. Since we ate them almost immediately there was no problem at all with weeping meringue or something like that. The red stuff on top is dried cranberries which I thought looked pretty on top of the meringue. I never had cranberries before, but found them in the supermarket a few days before making the pie and decided to buy them without a plan of what to use them for. Don't they look pretty on top of the white meringue? I hope this isn't cheating, I just put them on top as a decoration.

Would I make this again? I still love lemon meringue pie, but since I had a success with this I actually went on and made some more lemon curd with another recipe I wanted to try. Most of the result is now in the freezer, so next time I will probably be lazy and just use that. I'm still to unsure about translating measurements to know how different the crust was to the one I usually make, but it worked fine, cooked beautifully golden and tasted great. And the meringue was fluffy and tasty, so yes, I actually already made it again for another pie.

Again, thanks for a yummy challenge Jen! Now, I'm looking forward to the February challenge.

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... :)

Late Resolutions

Lately, when reading other blogs, I've seen so many New Year's Resolutions. I don't usually do that. My resolutions of that kind usually turn up in September, due to the new school year. I might be grown up by now, but going to grad school and part time teaching means that I'm not out of schools yet. So the year in my mind seems to start around when fall term starts, which is around the first of September. But reading all good ideas and worthy ambitions people have, I've gotten inspired. Maybe I'll give it a try, but I'll do it my way. My resolutions are, mainly about having fun I'm afraid...

First of all, I want to try to learn to make more desserts. There's a lot of stuff that I'd love to try. And I do love sweet. Preferably, I'll do this systematically, so that I also can learn to improvise on my own. But, I really don't need to put on weight, so the other part of this resolution is to learn to make them the very best, but real small.

Secondly, I want to make breakfast more interesting. Our breakfast, at least at weekdays, always consist of one of three things: Either bread with some topping (cheese, ham, vegetables, jam etc), or müsli and fil (Swedish type of soured milk - somewhat like a thin yogurt), or oatmeal with lingonberry jam and milk. I'd like to add some new variations, though I don't know what yet. Some mornings there just isn't time for anything else than müsli... (but on the other hand, müsli is good. I have a newly roasted batch on the counter right out of the oven at the moment, and I do know I will want that for breakfast tomorrow.)

And third, occurring to me as I write is one more thing, which sort of contains both the first ones. I'd like to try to make as many meals as possible in the coming year into good meals. Meals that are tasty and created with some thought. Containing good foods that I feel comfortable about buying. Meals that, at least most of the time, are healthy. As few of I-just-have-to-eat-something meals as possible. This is a resolution both about energy and about organisation, and I don't believe that I will manage to make every meal so. But I'll go for as many as I can.


And then some comments on this. I actually made a first try for making new desserts today. I tried to make crème brulé, but a very small batch. I never tried it before because I always believed it contained a lot of egg white, which can sometimes give me allergic reactions. But then I read through a recipe not that long ago and realised that just the yolk was used. And I really liked the taste. (I also liked the fact that I got to use my new kitchen torch on it, that's fun!) But I'm not sure whether the recipe I used need some adaption, or if I just had the oven a bit to low, a little to short, but they were a bit runny. On the other hand I adjusted a recipe for four normal size servings to one that gave two small (more like two half) servings, that is, one that used one egg yolk. The amount was about as much as I wanted though, so if anyone has a good recipe this size, please tell me. :)

Finally, the photos in this post are of D. turning the pancakes he made for breakfeast this morning. That is not really part of any making new kinds of breakfast - he makes it now and then when he feels like making something extra for me. Or maybe just when he wants pancakes, I don't quite know (and I'm not going to complain).
I was playing around with my new camera which can take pictures bursting rather quickly which is a lot of fun!