Experiment: Bread
I watch a lot of the Food Network, I mean a lot! Pretty much any
time I am able to change the channel away from Treehouse or Disney
Junior I watch food. I watch it when I'm on the elliptical and I follow
the competition shows they have. I often wonder how I could wrangle my
way into being in one of the locations for Top Chef challenges or if I
could somehow be chosen as a judge for Iron Chef. Sadly I haven't come
up with any good ideas yet.
Even though I watch a lot of shows about food I can't say that I really try out to much of what I see. For one thing I have 2 little mouths to feed who are sometimes reluctant to try new things as well as 1 big mouth to feed who is sometimes reluctant to try new things. Actually I shouldn't say that, the grown up will eat pretty much anything but he doesn't really enjoy eating and want to try new things the way that I do. The other draw back to making Food Network quality nosh is my grocery budget. I just don't have the cash to be buying top quality meats, seafood, artisan cheeses or even expensive vegetable varieties. As much as I would like to be preparing shitake mushroom risotto and lobster thermidor it's just not going to fly. Plus it sort of makes me nervous to experiment with such pricey ingredients.
This might be why I was so excited when I saw an episode of The Best Thing I Ever Ate quite a few weeks ago now. It was a messy edition and the one chef touted a dark chocolate sourdough bread as the best messy food of all time. All of a sudden I thought, I might actually be able to make that! I took to the Internet, where I find most of my good recipes and was soon disappointed to discover I would not be dining on warm, chocolatey, tangy bread that evening. It turns out I needed something called sourdough starter. As I did my research I discovered this sourdough starter is pretty amazing stuff. Basically, you mix a few things together and let it rot on your counter for 4-8 days and then you bake with it. Sounds sort of nasty, I know. But once the starter is made you can remove some, for example 1 cup and replace it with a cup of flour, a cup of water and a pinch of sugar to make it sort of a renewable resource. They said in the articles I found that it actually gets better over time and some people would pass down their starter from decade to decade. This seems a little crazy to me but I thought, what the heck, I'll give it a try.
My daughter really loves pumpernickel bread and I have tried to make that at home to poor results. I think I was the only one that sort of thought it was alright. I imagined sourdough to be just as complicated and unsuccessful. Turned out I was wrong, on both counts. I mixed up a sourdough starter using this recipe and sat back to wait, and wait, and wait. Honestly it was sort of like a science experiment. I could watch as it sort of settled and separated, a sort of froth formed on the top and the colour changed to a slightly more beige shade. Then the day came where I thought it would be fine to make my first attempt. I decided not to put chocolate in this first batch simply because I didn't know if it would work at all and I couldn't see wasting dark chocolate on something doomed to failure.
This recipe I found seemed almost too simple. It was also a lengthy process, even
with the starter already made. There is approximately 15 hours of
downtime where you wait for it to rise. This bread takes patience but
it was worth it! It actually turned out great and not only that but it
was a hit with everyone in the house! That is a rare occurrence!
So today I have decided to make the chocolate kind. I'm rather excited. We stopped on the way home from church to pick up dark chocolate bars from the dollar store (yes, that's where I buy my cheep chocolate) I broke up 2 bars and worked them into just under half the dough. We will have one plane loaf for grilled cheese sandwiches tonight and the other will be desert.
It's now been baked and come out of the oven. My house smells like a wonderful combination of fresh baked bread and chocolate chip cookies. It was easy and best of all it was cheep! I love cheep! Once you have the starter there really isn't a lot of ingredients. Seriously, only a couple tsp of salt and sugar, a half tsp of corn starch, water and 6 or 7 cups of flour. I'm pretty sure that is really all that's in this. Even the chocolate loaf cost less than $3 to make. Tell me that doesn't look fabulous! Really, I'm having a hard time with waiting for it to cool!
This was the second time I took from my sourdough starter and it seemed like it might have worked a bit better this time. The bread seemed to rise a fair bit better than the first and it took an extra cup of flour. This is an experiment I'm very glad I tried. Now I'm trying to thing of other things I might be able to mix in to this bread. If you have fun ideas let me know.
Even though I watch a lot of shows about food I can't say that I really try out to much of what I see. For one thing I have 2 little mouths to feed who are sometimes reluctant to try new things as well as 1 big mouth to feed who is sometimes reluctant to try new things. Actually I shouldn't say that, the grown up will eat pretty much anything but he doesn't really enjoy eating and want to try new things the way that I do. The other draw back to making Food Network quality nosh is my grocery budget. I just don't have the cash to be buying top quality meats, seafood, artisan cheeses or even expensive vegetable varieties. As much as I would like to be preparing shitake mushroom risotto and lobster thermidor it's just not going to fly. Plus it sort of makes me nervous to experiment with such pricey ingredients.
This might be why I was so excited when I saw an episode of The Best Thing I Ever Ate quite a few weeks ago now. It was a messy edition and the one chef touted a dark chocolate sourdough bread as the best messy food of all time. All of a sudden I thought, I might actually be able to make that! I took to the Internet, where I find most of my good recipes and was soon disappointed to discover I would not be dining on warm, chocolatey, tangy bread that evening. It turns out I needed something called sourdough starter. As I did my research I discovered this sourdough starter is pretty amazing stuff. Basically, you mix a few things together and let it rot on your counter for 4-8 days and then you bake with it. Sounds sort of nasty, I know. But once the starter is made you can remove some, for example 1 cup and replace it with a cup of flour, a cup of water and a pinch of sugar to make it sort of a renewable resource. They said in the articles I found that it actually gets better over time and some people would pass down their starter from decade to decade. This seems a little crazy to me but I thought, what the heck, I'll give it a try.
My daughter really loves pumpernickel bread and I have tried to make that at home to poor results. I think I was the only one that sort of thought it was alright. I imagined sourdough to be just as complicated and unsuccessful. Turned out I was wrong, on both counts. I mixed up a sourdough starter using this recipe and sat back to wait, and wait, and wait. Honestly it was sort of like a science experiment. I could watch as it sort of settled and separated, a sort of froth formed on the top and the colour changed to a slightly more beige shade. Then the day came where I thought it would be fine to make my first attempt. I decided not to put chocolate in this first batch simply because I didn't know if it would work at all and I couldn't see wasting dark chocolate on something doomed to failure.
This recipe I found seemed almost too simple. It was also a lengthy process, even
with the starter already made. There is approximately 15 hours of
downtime where you wait for it to rise. This bread takes patience but
it was worth it! It actually turned out great and not only that but it
was a hit with everyone in the house! That is a rare occurrence! So today I have decided to make the chocolate kind. I'm rather excited. We stopped on the way home from church to pick up dark chocolate bars from the dollar store (yes, that's where I buy my cheep chocolate) I broke up 2 bars and worked them into just under half the dough. We will have one plane loaf for grilled cheese sandwiches tonight and the other will be desert.
This was the second time I took from my sourdough starter and it seemed like it might have worked a bit better this time. The bread seemed to rise a fair bit better than the first and it took an extra cup of flour. This is an experiment I'm very glad I tried. Now I'm trying to thing of other things I might be able to mix in to this bread. If you have fun ideas let me know.
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