Super Food

I emailed myself a link to this website called The Italian Dish over a year ago with the intention (intentions are good, right?) of making the mushroom bolognese recipe.  I love mushrooms.  And as you can see from the box, they are a super food.  Before you get picky, I usually buy loose mushrooms because I like to inspect them.  Yesterday the market didn't have any loose brown mushrooms so I bought them in this package.

The recipe calls for dried porcini as well.  My pantry isn't lacking in dried porcini.  But I didn't use them.  Instead, I pulled out a one ounce package of mixed dried wild mushrooms from Far West which I picked up at the Ferry Building in San Francisco on a lunchtime outing.  I intended to make the sauce last night but continuing COBRA drama interfered with my plans.  So the dried mushrooms got a good long overnight soak.  This morning my kitchen smelled a bit like wild mushroom heaven!

 This was the other ingredient that I didn't have at home.   I love the label on this bottle and thought I'd give it a try.  The wine was added to the sauteed onions, carrot, celery and garlic and allowed to cook down a bit.  By the way, the wine was a lovely dark red and looked quite drinkable.  However, it was morning and I was drinking coffee.  Somehow, the idea of even a sip of wine right after drinking coffee doesn't appeal to me.

Then the chopped fresh and reconstituted dried mushrooms were added to the pan along with crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce, water, the strained mushroom soaking liquid, herbs and a touch of sugar. 

I followed the recipe with some minor changes.  I used mixed wild mushrooms instead of porcini.  I used water with a dollop of Better Than Bouillon reduced sodium vegetable base instead of beef or vegetable broth.


Now that everything is in the pan, it just has to cook down to a pleasing thickness.  It smells really good.  I'll cook up a suitable pasta shape, something with ridges that the sauce will cling to.  After all, I want all the mushroom goodness I can get.

I will sop up any sauce left in the bowl with this:  salt and pepper focaccia.  (This is one of rounds of sourdough focaccia I made a few weeks ago and put in the freezer.)

For the love of bread

Today I am torn between editing a sock pattern which has been languishing on my desk for a few months and making focaccia with sourdough starter.  Plus, I have an eye doctor appointment.

Obviously, the focaccia dough can be made now and set aside to rest and rise.  But in order to make the dough I have to make an adjustment to the recipe because my sourdough starter is wet.  The recipe calls for a starter that is more dough-like.  This is always a conundrum for me.  I want the math to be simple, as in a simple ratio of flour to water.

Flour to water ratios are rarely simple, usually involving decimal points.  In the US, we are allergic to decimal points.  Our weights and measure system can't be bothered with units of 10.  My solution is to round up or down as the case maybe in the flour to water ratio and then adjust based on the feel of the dough.  Too sticky, add a bit more flour.  Too dry, add a bit more water.  All measurement is cast out the window in these situations.

The other thing that the recipe calls for is unbleached all-purpose flour, preferably organically grown and stone-ground.  I don't have any of this in my kitchen at the moment.  Instead of running down to Whole Foods (which I'm avoiding at the moment for soft political reasons) and buying such flour, I will settle for Trader Joe's unbleached all-purpose flour.  Besides, it is raining.  Otherwise, I have all the exact ingredients called for.

So here’s the plan.  Make focaccia dough with half the additional yeast called for to allow for a slow rise to bring out more flavor.  Edit the pattern.  Go to the eye doctor.  Check on the dough to see how much it has risen.  Continue to edit the pattern.  Check dough; prepare it for  shaping and second rise.  Finish editing pattern.  Check dough and prepare it for third rise.  This is the fun one because you get to poke it all over with your fingers and drizzle it with olive oil.  The oil will pool in some of the dimples, looking a bit like golden ponds.  Bake the focaccia and eat while still warm.

Cinnamon Swirl Bread

 I've been rediscovering the joy of baking bread.  A few weeks ago I started making focaccia, which was eaten very quickly.  Then the other day I was flipping through the recent issue of Cook's Illustrated and read an article on perfecting cinnamon bread.  I think that Cook's Illustrated has some very interesting ideas but find their processes fussy.  Their premise was that one can make a cinnamon bread at home that doesn't have the big gaping holes that occur where the cinnamon filling meets the bread dough.  I wondered if one could achieve a similar effect using a pullman loaf pan.  So I tried it.  I made a challah dough using the recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart, which I tweaked just a bit by using regular yeast instead of the instant yeast called for and allowed for longer rising times.

Here is the dough before it's first rise. Challah is a very forgiving dough.  Plus it is super simple to make in a stand mixer.  It has a lovely pale yellow color due to the eggs and egg yolks in the dough, which according to Peter Reinhart was probably a way to use up excess eggs before the Sabbath made it impossible to harvest new eggs. It also has a very small amount of oil in it; I used a lovely pale green grapeseed oil.  I let it rise twice in the bowl.

Then I patted it into something that resembles a rectangle and let it rest under a towel for about 10 minutes.  Then I rolled it out into an even larger rectangle, really it was more like a parallelogram, which really didn't matter much to me since I was going to roll it up jelly roll style.  Then I brushed it with a small amount of melted butter, spread cinnamon sugar over the surface, rolled it up, tucked under the ends and put it in a lightly oiled pullman loaf pan.

A pullman loaf pan has a lid and makes a loaf with a flat, rather than rounded, top.  It also doesn't allow much of a crust to develop so that it is easy to make crustless finger  sandwiches with bread baked in one.  But, my quest was for a cinnamon swirl bread that didn't have a bunch of giant holes in it.

I put the cover on most of the way--I left it open about 1/2-inch and let it rise until it was about 3/4 of the way up the sides of the pan.  I closed the lid the rest of the way and put it in a 350F oven to bake for about 50 minutes.

 Here is the loaf as it came out of the pan.  The filling leaked just a bit but not so much that the pan had gooey filling all over it.  So I considered that a success.  Of course, the real telling was when I cut into the loaf.  There were some holes where the filling and dough did not stick together.  But wasn't not so bad that the slices didn't hold together.  I put two slices in the toaster this morning, which maintained their shape.  Again, I think this is a success.

Oh, and the toast was very lovely.  This is an experiment worth repeating.