american pumpernickel

What the heck is pumpernickel anyway? Well, in Westphalia (Germany), it's an extremely dense, crustless bread, made with rye flour and cooked very slowly to achieve a deep brown color, sweet, dark chocolate, coffee flavor, and earthy aroma. Not bad...

In the US however, pumpernickel is an entirely different beast. Instead of relying on a slow baking process, American bakers add molasses, coffee, or cocoa to emulate the flavors of the original German bread. Wheat flour is also usually added to help provide additional lift. On its own, rye flour doesn't have that much gluten, so you have to add something to get create the gluten structure that results in a light crumb. By using wheat and all-purpose flour, and a faster cooking time, you get crusty, light loaf. Carraway seeds are also almost always added to pumpernickel bread in the US to give it a unique anise-like flavor.

With all do respects to the Germans, a light, crusty loaf sounds far more appealing to me. So that's what I set out to recreate today. The resulting loaf was pretty much exactly what I was after, even though I didn't use wheat flour. I did however use the now well known no-kneed recipe, my homemade sourdough starter, and a fair amount of all-purpose flour. The only thing I would do differently is lower the cooking temperature. At 500F the bottom of the loaf burned a little (because of the molasses).

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Tom's No-Kneed Pumpernickel Bread

Ingredients
100grams sourdough starter (or 1/4 teaspoon commercial yeast, and add 50g AP flour and 50g water)
15g salt
250g water
150g rye flour
200g AP flour (can replace with 100g AP and 100g Wheat Flour)
50g mollases
10g carraway seeds
10g cocoa powder

Directions
Stir all ingredients together until dough is "shaggy"
Let rest 12-16 hours at room temp, covered with kitchen towel
Pour dough out onto flowered surface and let rest 15 minutes
Shape into ball and place in very lightly oiled bowl for 2nd rise - 2hours
Preheat oven to 450F
Cook bread in covered Dutch Oven for 35 minutes (pyrex or cast iron dishes work as well)
Remove lid and finish cooking for 15-20 minutes

blue crab soup with sunchokes and poblano peppers

Sorry I disappeared for two week - things got a bit busy, and I was trying to polish off a few things that were "living" in the back of our fridge. In any event, I'm back! Figured I owed everyone something relatively interesting, so here's my attempt to come back with a bang.

I returned from the supermarket earlier this week with four live Atlantic blue crabs and a small bag of sunchokes. I've never actually cooked either ingredient, but I absolutely love crab, and these were very much alive and kicking as I picked them out of the bin with tongs. Hard to resist very fresh seafood. Blue crabs are relatively small (each the size of a hand), popular in Maryland, and the four cost about $4.50 total - cheaper than a couple chicken breasts!! As for the sunchokes, I've eaten them at restaurants, but never cooked them myself. They're simply the root of a flower very much resembling the sunflower. They can be cooked just like potatoes, have a similar texture, and a slightly nuttier taste. A nice change of pace.




Making the soup wasn't too tricky. I started by steaming the crabs. Next I sauteed some carrots, onions, celery, garlic in pork fat and seasoned the whole thing with old bay seasoning, salt, pepper, and a bay leaf. I crushed the crab with a meat mallet, added them to the veggies, and added a splash of sherry wine. After cooking for a couple minutes to soften the veggies, I covered the whole thing with water, brought it to a boil, and simmered everything for an hour. Once the stock had a nice flavor, I strained out the shells and added a diced potato, the sunchokes, a poblano pepper, and a couple carrots to the broth. I cooked the whole thing another 25 minutes, until the veggies were fork tender. Incidentally this is about the same amount of time it took me to get crab all over my face as I picked out the meat from the shells I strained out - think McNulty & Bunk from The Wire. The final step was to mash the potatoes, sunchokes, and carrots slightly to thicken the soup.

The "garnish" was a couple slices of garlic bread I made with a loaf of fresh homemade sourdough. De-li-cious!

sourdough

Using the no-knead bread recipe has really significantly increased my interest in making good home-made bread. The major revelation was that baking the bread in a dutch oven results in an amazing crust. The fact that you don't have to knead the dough... well that simplifies the process somewhat, but truth be told, I actually enjoy kneading dough once in a while. But while the crust is as good as any you’ll find, the flavor of the crumb remains limited by the use of commercial bakers yeast. The yeast you buy in stores certainly helps the dough rise and results in a reasonably light crumb, but despite 20 hours of proofing, the flavor just doesn’t live up to what you expect when you cut through the crust. 

I didn’t use to enjoy San Francisco sourdough all that much. It’s certainly very different from the light sweet crumb of French baguettes. However, after living in the Bay Area a few years, I began to really enjoy the complexity sourdough bread adds to any meal, sandwich, or snack. As I searched for ways to improve the flavor of my breads, it became clear that making my own sourdough starter was probably the easiest way to add substantial flavor to my bread.

There are thousands of types of yeast. But the stuff you buy in supermarkets is always the same strain, regardless of the brand you buy or whether it's dried or in cake form. It gives a fast, predictable rise, but is lacking in flavor. All other bread yeasts are usually called sourdoughs. So what exactly is sourdough? In short, a sourdough starter actually consists of two separate organisms. There is the yeast which gives the bread its puff. Then there is the lactobacilli, which converts sugars into lactic acid and gives the bread all of its delicious sour flavor.

I won’t go through a step by step description of how to make a starter. Suffice it to say that I followed these instructions, and used King Arthur Organic Whole Wheat Flour and tap water. That’s it, just two ingredients. The goal of the process is to grow the yeast and lactobacilli that is naturally occurring in the flour into something that’s strong enough to lift and flavor bread. It is not to capture wild yeast from the air in your kitchen, though that may happen. Using organic whole wheat flour is key, because if you use bleached, processed white flour, it won't contain the natural yeasts and lactobacilli you are trying to harvest. The process took me about two weeks, feeding the starter twice a day with flour and water. Your starter is ready when it doubles in size between feedings and smells like your might expect sourdough starter to smell like (like sourdough!).  Since it’s doubling in size every twelve hours or so, you have to chuck half of it away before feeding it more flour and water. Otherwise you'll have enough starter to fill an Olympic-sized pool after a week. When it’s strong enough, you simply use some of the starter where you would normally use yeast. One cup of starter is roughly equivalent to one packet of yeast.

With my bubbling starter in hand I tried my no-knead recipe once again. As you can see it looks great, and lo and behold it actually has that sour flavor I was after. Oh and that crust... Perfect. Now I just need to work on not eating an entire loaf in one day! As for the starter, it stays semi-dormant in the fridge, slowly developing more flavor until I'm ready to use it again.

manjala

Amity's friend Ross was in town this weekend and Friday evening we decided to cook a meal at home rather than go out. So I put together an Indian mini-feast with food for at least ten people. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) there were only three of us. On the menu: Paneer Tikka Massala, Chicken Vindaloo, Aloo Matar, fresh Naan, and Raita. The recipes primarily came from YouTube. Specifically, I've been watching videos from "Manjula's Kitchen," who specializes in Indian vegetarian food. While her video presentation skills are perhaps lacking a bit, her food looks and tastes authentic and her recipes are thorough. She has nearly 28,000 subscribers on YouTube along with a website where you can find all of the recipes she has been compiling over the last four years. In the end, this is an amazing resource for anyone interested in Indian and/or vegetarian cooking and the primary way I've been learning. More generally. I find that I use YouTube very frequently when I'm trying to learn a new technique or recipe these days. I'm sure there are plenty of great YouTube channels, so if anyone has good links, feel free to share in the comments sections!

bread

in case you were worried... still baking bread :)