The Fermenter

Okay, this comes before I fully explain the four-fold dough recipe that is the backbone of my baking recipes, but several people have asked me, so I need to just get the basic recipe up here. Also, I don’t have time to convert this from weights to volumes, so order that scale, you’ll need one. No theory here, just practice.

Pizza is one of the rare occasions that I do not use a levain to build the dough, since I find the additional dough strengthening gives it too much chew, and I prefer the slight boozy aroma of a relatively short yeasted fermentation to the full-on funk of a sourdough. Nevertheless, I still like to develop flavor through an overnight fermentation of a poolish*, and at least one day of cold fermentation of the final dough (two days is ideal.)

* Poolish: a yeasted starter that is fairly wet, using around 50/50 water to flour. See also, biga.

Four-Fold Pizza Dough:

Makes 4 300g balls of dough, each of which will stretch to a 14” thin crust pie. (I usually make a double batch of this this recipe).

Poolish:

130g flour - 100%

Pinch Instant yeast (1/8 t)

130g cool water (70˚F) - 100%

In a medium bowl, stir flour and yeast together, then stir in water until mixture is smooth. Cover and leave for 12-24h, or until the mixture is bubbly and alive.

Final Dough:

560g flour (King Arthur AP, or Italian OO flour, if available) - 100%

370g cool water (70˚F) - 66%

240g poolish - 20%

20g Olive oil - 3%

17g sea salt - 2.5%

Overall percentages:

Flour - 100%

Water - 72%

Olive oil - 3%

Salt - 2.5%

In a large bowl or a plastic tub with a snap on cover (a fish box works nicely here), stir the flour, water, poolish, and olive oil together until uniform and no unincorporated flour remains. Cover and rest for 15-30 minutes. Sprinkle salt over dough and press it into it with your fingertips until incorporated.

Rest covered at room temperature for 30 minutes. Remove cover and fold dough over itself like folding a letter into thirds. (This is where a flat fish box helps: gently spread the dough across the bottom of the box with your hands, and then fold it over itself from both short ends. If you are instead working in a large bowl, then fold the edges into the center of the dough, working your way around the bowl, for a total of 8 folds.) Cover, and repeat the stretch and fold every 30 minutes for 4 times total. After the last fold, cover tightly and refrigerate for 24-48 hours.

Pour the dough onto a well-floured counter and divide it into 300g portions. Allow it to rest 10 minutes, shape into balls, oil slightly, and place in covered container (leaving plenty of room between each ball) for ~1h to allow to warm to rt before baking. You are on your own as far as toppings and baking temps, but I suggest a minimum of the former and a maximum of the latter.

December 02, 2009, 8:17am   Comments

A little belated, but then it’s never too late for thanksgiving wishes from ol’ Bill:

W. S. Burroughs - thanksgiving prayer -
by Maetthew

November 28, 2009, 12:21pm   Comments

Cranberry-walnut, cornmeal-pumpkin seed-sunflower seed, & country white, 12 loaves in total. I devised a new steaming method that lets me bake three 1-kilo loves in a single load. Instead of steaming the loaves in a dutch oven or under a flower pot, I simply loaded the loaves onto a hot baking stone and covered them with a 20” x 13” disposable aluminum roasting pan for the first 30 minutes. Worked a charm. With the dutch oven method, I’d have to let the pot come back up to temperature between bakes, but since the roaster is so lightweight, it doesn’t require preheating.

November 26, 2009, 12:16pm   Comments

(UPDATED on 11/25/09 to change the ratio to 1/3 starter to 2/3 fresh flour/water. In the past I was anal about recycling all of the old starter into a fresh batch, but I’ve gotten over that, since adding double the amount of fresh flour & water produces a stronger & cleaner tasting levain.)

I’m gonna assume you either a) are using a starter I gave to you, or b) your starter, like mine, is at 100% hydration (i.e., 1:1 w/w flour to water ratio.)

The basics: Each time you make up a batch of bread, first refresh your starter by mixing 1 cup of starter (discarding the remainder) with 300g white flour  (2 cups, for the scale-challenged) and 300g filtered water (1-1/4 cups), stirring until uniform. Place in a clean container large enough for it to double in volume with room to spare (to avoid the situation depicted above), cover loosely, and let sit out at room temperature until needed. Use what you need to make your dough, and return the remainder to the fridge.

Ideally, you want your starter to be at its peak activity when you add it to a dough. At some point following refreshment, the starter will bubble up with gas and then collapse. The moment just before it collapses is when it is at its peak. The simplest way to get peak activity is to refresh it the evening before mixing a dough. If you use or refresh your starter more than once a week, it should be at peak within just a few hours.

However, if you forgot to refresh it or have some kind of bread emergency and need to mix up a dough right away, just refresh as above and use immediately. Keep in mind in this case that it will take longer for the dough to fully ferment than it would had you used an active starter. This is usually not a problem if you are doing the long, cold ferments of my four-fold method.

Regarding hooch: occasionally, especially if your starter has not been refreshed for awhile, it will have a thick layer of funk-ass-smelling grey or brown liquid on top of it. This is what is known as hooch, the term of art for yeast and bacterial effluent. If your starter has produced a lot of hooch, not to worry, chances are it is not dead, only a little sickly. Just stir it back into the starter and feed as usual. To nurse it back to health, you might want to feed it for three or four days in a row, until it is sweet smelling and active again.

November 25, 2009, 12:00am   Comments

Brooklyn baker Matthew Tilden is a man on a mission:

SCRATCHbread: A Brooklyn Chef Creates Food from Scratch to Start A Movement from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

October 28, 2009, 6:31pm   Comments

From the Atlantic Monthly Food Blog:

PHOTO BY THEBITTENWORD.COM/FLICKR CC

The historic Turkish-Armenian talks last week probably had more to do with lucre than with justice, but I will take the opportunity nonetheless to pay tribute to an essential element of shared Turkish and Armenian cuisine: the manti. Manti is comfort food, home food, a steaming bowl on a cold night in kitchens throughout Central Asia, the Caucasus and Anatolia. Where was it born? The debate rages, loaded with political charge as such debates about origin often are.

What is manti? Basically, it’s a tiny ball of spiced ground lamb (or beef) enfolded in a small square (or triangle) of fresh pasta. This is cooked in one way or another: the Armenians usually fry them lightly in butter first, then boil; Turkish recipes say boil them directly; I’m told in Central Asia they’re usually steamed; some renegades bake them. Cook them how you will; the key thing is that the steaming hot, slippery manti then be spooned into a bowl and smothered in yogurt with crushed garlic, and topped with abundant dry mint. Additional toppings may include melted butter, dry sumac, or red pepper.

The result is heavenly (…)

Read the rest here.

October 28, 2009, 2:39pm   Comments

I have two posts up at Eat Me Daily, on two food-related art exhibits currently on show at the Bunker Hill Community College.

Check ‘em out:

‘Eat the Art’:

‘Canstruction Boston 2009’:

October 27, 2009, 6:08pm   Comments

Recipe is in the works, stay tuned.

October 05, 2009, 10:22am   Comments

(Full-sized image here.)

For years, I have been using a spreadsheet to calculate amounts and keep a record of the doughs I make for bread and pizza, and thought others might find it useful. I adapted mine for use with most any kind of bread dough, from one created by Jeff Varasano for his pizza doughs (thanks, Jeff!) . It works for both yeast- and levain-based doughs, or hybrids*.

It should be pretty self-explanatory, but if anyone has any questions or problems, let me know.

Download it here

*Just place a zero in the column for whichever you are NOT using. Also, if you aren’t using yeast in the dough, you can use that column for any other ingredient, such as oil or seeds, to include it in the overall calculation.

October 03, 2009, 12:35pm   Comments

The following recipe was lifted from Eugenia Bone’s wonderful new book, Well-Preserved, a thoughtful and straightforward guide to small-batch canning of seasonal foods. What I like most about the book (aside from eye-candelicious photography) is that it combines practical information about putting up all kinds of foods with creative and unusual takes on the standards. E.g., instead of a recipe for “grape jelly”, Bone gives us Concord Grape Walnut Conserve. It’s easy enough to work your way back to the basic recipe if you need to, while her riffs are interesting enough to inspire your own. I also appreciate that it’s the first modern canning book not afraid to recommend use of a pressure cooker for canning non-acidic foods (though I would have liked to have seen more recipes of that sort).

When I saw the picture of salsa foriana in the excerpt that Saveur printed earlier this year, I knew this recipe was right up my alley. Golden raisins, garlic, walnuts, pine nuts and olive oil? Bring it on. It’s wonderful on spaghetti, as a topping on pizza*, or just slathered on crusty bread.

Salsa Foriana

• 1 cup walnuts
• 1 cup pine nuts
• 3 tbs sliced garlic (~10 cloves)
• 1 tbs dried oregano
• 3 tbs fruity good olive oil, plus more for topping up
• 1/2 cup golden raisins
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Place the nuts and garlic in a food processor or suribachi and process until the mixture resembles damp granola. Add the oregano, and process a little more to combine. Heat the olive oil in a medium skillet over medium heat. Add the nut mixture, raisins, and s&p to taste. Cook for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly to avoid burning. The 3 T of olive oil makes for a somewhat dry mixture, so you might want to add more at the end to get the consistency you want.

The book includes instructions on how to prep mason jars for longer term storage, but you’re gonna have to get your own copy for those. But really, once you taste it, you’ll find it won’t hang around long enough to put up anyway.

*UPDATE: If you want to use this sauce on pizza, I suggest adding the raisins to the food processor toward the end of chopping, or chop them a bit by hand before adding to the mixture. Otherwise the heat of the oven will cause them to inflate, where they will look exactly like engorged ticks sitting atop your pies.

October 02, 2009, 8:30am   Comments