Croissants

These are sourdough croissants made with homemade vegan butter. They worked out pretty well (though they're nowhere near as impressive as their inspiration, txfarmer's gorgeous ones). They're much better than the last time I attempted vegan croissants.

The annoying thing about the recipe is that it asks for a 3 hour final rise at 26C. I couldn't see how to make that happen and still have them ready for breakfast, so I left them at cold room temperature (15 - 17C) for about 12 hours, and then put them near the oven as it preheated. They definitely rose a lot in that time, but they weren't (as the recipe puts it) 'soft and jiggly', so maybe they were slightly underproofed. 

The vegan butter behaved nicely for the encasement step, but I was a bit worried about the first turn after it had a rest in the fridge for an hour. I think the butter was too firm: it seemed to crumble as it folded. The final dough looked like pie dough, with specks of butter, which didn't seem quite right. I wonder if it would be better to let the dough rest at room temperature for 20 minutes between turns, as in Peter Reinhart's recipe.

100% sourdough bagels

Recipe from Wild Yeast.

Coconut-oil croissants

For the first time ever, I managed to make croissants. (Last time, I ended up with something like croissant-shaped brioche.)

The secrets of my success: (1) Lagusta's recipe and its use of coconut oil, (2) it not being the middle of summer this time, (3) letting the dough spend each rest period in the fridge.

I ended up making mini croissants because I had halved the recipe, but hadn't thought through the consequences when it came to the part where you cut the dough into triangles ready for croissantification. Also, my triangles should have been taller/longer, to make prettier croissants.

I used mostly refined coconut oil, but some non-refined. They tasted great -- not coconutty specifically, just delicious. I found the dough really easy to work -- I think that Lagusta's suggestion of refrigerating it for 10 minutes between turns is really helpful. Depending on the temperature of the house, I think next time I might let them have most of their final rise in the fridge (say an overnight rise, with an hour to warm up before baking.) As it was, although the coconut oil was fairly solid in the morning when I started, by afternoon when they were rising, it was melting out.

Doughnuts

First time frying up doughnuts, won't be the last:

I used Vegan Dad's recipe (based on Alton Brown's), but added some gluten to approximate bread flour, and replaced a little bit of the flour with some potato flakes for extra softness/moisture. Some were glazed with vanilla, or vanilla-lemon, and some were rolled in cinnamon sugar. Yum! I made half the recipe which was the perfect amount for us two.

(Bread-nerd notes: I gave the dough a first rise the night before, and then put it in the fridge, and then in the morning gave it an hour to warm up before cutting and frying. The first rise was accidentally too long -- I really only meant to give it 20 minutes as a head-start for rising slowly in the fridge, but left it for an hour by mistake. Interestingly, the ones that were cut out of the dough first didn't rise as much as the ones cut out of the re-rolled dough scraps. Overall, the texture of the doughnuts was nice and soft, but I would love to figure out how to make them really airy and light.)

Sourdough bread

All through the summer, I kept my sourdough starter alive by feeding it once a week and using it for sourdough pancakes. These days, with the cooler weather, I am back to baking bread with it.

Since I got a stand mixer, I have been drawn to recipes that require one, but it turns out that my current favourite sourdough recipe is actually based on the famous NYTimes no knead bread. The recipe is by JMonkey of The Fresh Loaf.

Bread nerd notes:
-- I have been using 400g white flour, 169g wholemeal flour, and 3 t vital wheat gluten.
-- It tends to need a little bit of extra water.
-- In our cold house I have been letting it have a slightly longer rise (up to 21 hours).
-- I had some trouble with the crust burning before the bread was done, so I lower the temperature to 375 for the uncovered baking period, and bake it for 30 minutes or a bit longer. (A few times, the crumb has been ever so slightly gummy, so I am careful to avoid underbaking.)
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UPDATE: I solved the gumminess problem. DO NOT add any extra water. When you mix all the ingredients together it takes a bit of effort, and the dough can be a little dryish and shaggy in places, but it works. I bake it covered for 30 minutes and uncovered for 20, and it works out perfectly.

Sourdough bagels

I used the sourdough bagel recipe from Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery. They worked out very well -- notable things about this recipe include the fact that the bagels are boiled really briefly (20 seconds) in nothing but water (other recipes I've tried include malt syrup and/or baking soda).

They didn't taste sour -- I guess this is because they spent most of their proofing time in the fridge. And they really got a lot of oven spring. Overall, I like this recipe, but I must say I have a bit of a weakness for the Montreal-ish bagels I make using the Artisan Bread recipe.

Liege waffles

Recently in a conversation with R about waffles, I promised I'd make him the best waffles ever. And so I finally got around to trying gaufres de Liege (Liege waffles). They're like brioche, but cooked in a waffle iron. The dough is full of pearl sugar, which melts and crisps on the outside. Delicious!

Veganizing notes: I used the recipe linked above, replacing the butter with vegan margarine, and the egg with a pinch of lecithin and some vital wheat gluten (I got the lecithin and gluten tips from Parsnip Parsimony's post on brioche).

Sidenote: if anyone can tell me why lecithin is so widely available here, I'd love to know. Seriously, it's in every supermarket's health food section. I don't think I ever noticed it in the US. The pack I bought suggests sprinkling it on cereal, soup or salad as a 'pleasant addition'. If I'm going to be sprinkling some strange granules on my cereal, I want the packet to be selling me on how awesome it's going to taste, or what miraculous things it's going to do for my health. The mere promise of pleasantness doesn't really do it for me. (Plus, I tasted some, and... NOT TASTY.)

It lives!

A confession: I forgot about my sourdough starter for months, and when I finally did unearth it from the fridge, it had completely dried out. Bad, bad baker!

I rehydrated it, and started daily feedings, but things weren't looking good. It smelled okay, but never got bubbly, and I thought it might be hopeless. But then, after about 10 days, there were bubbles. And now, we have bread:

I used the Natural Starter Bread recipe from Chocolate and Zucchini. I used a mixture of white, wholemeal and rye flours (about 200, 300, 100 grams respectively), plus some vital wheat gluten. One of the things I like about this recipe is that it has a long rising time -- my starter is kind of slow, and the 8 hour rise worked nicely for it. I wasn't sure about the recipe's suggestion of starting the bread in a cold oven (I've always assumed that you get the most oven spring from a preheated oven) so I used my usual technique based on the no knead bread one (where you preheat the cast iron pot, and bake the bread in that, for 30 minutes covered and about 20 minutes uncovered).

The bread worked out very nicely, with an excellent sourdough flavour.

Election night baking

I had to do something to ease my nerves. And so, bread:

Even though the results were coming in and not looking too good, when I pulled this beautiful loaf out of the oven, I cheered up for a bit. (Basic boule from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, with a bit of sourdough starter added, baked in a Dutch oven.)

Rosemary and basil

So here we are in the middle of winter in Perth, and I find myself obsessed with basil and rosemary. Luckily winter in Perth is sort of a joke, compared to Massachusetts (a typical winter day time temperature here is 18C or 64F) so I actually still have basil growing in the garden.

And as for rosemary, many of our neighbours have rosemary hedges in their front yards. I don't feel bad about grabbing a few sprigs here and there while walking the dog.

So this is how we ended up eating some pretty summery looking meals this week. Here you see beans with pesto and cherry tomatoes, green beans and mushrooms, and baked polenta 'fries'. (The polenta was pretty great -- I made it quite cheesy-tasting with miso and nutritional yeast.)

And here is baked eggplant with a quick tomato sauce and pesto, stir fried cabbage with lemon and pepper, a quick focaccia topped with rosemary, and rosemary-roasted tofu cubes (from Vegan Soul Kitchen). The tofu was great -- the baking technique is really cool. The tofu cubes puff up and get crisp on the outside.

New toy

On Sunday, I went to a charity second-hand sale and scored this beauty for $5.

It's a vintage Kenwood Chef, probably about 35 years old, in perfect working order. In the UK and Australia, these guys have the same sort of reputation as old Kitchenaid mixers. (Of course, they're not as pretty, but oh well.)

In the picture, the mixer is kneading bagel dough. It did a great job on the dough -- after 6 minutes, it passed the windowpane test easily.

I'm looking forward to making lots of bread with this thing. And marshmallows!

Bao

Here you see (a cross-section of) a steamed bun, filled with leftover tofu scramble, cabbage and mushroom. These were fun to make, and really tasty.

I used a recipe from Essentials of Asian Cuisine (but used regular white flour rather than cake flour, and canola oil in place of lard). You make a yeast dough with baking powder in it, let it rise until doubled, shape the buns and fill them, and then steam them for about 15 minutes. (I found that the water should be really boiling rapidly while you're steaming them -- it makes the buns rise better and get much fluffier.)

Bagels

Oh I love me some boiled-then-baked breads. Last time it was soft pretzels, this time: bagels.

I used the recipe for Montreal-style bagels from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, with a few changes (no egg, 1/4 of the white flour replaced with whole wheat, less sugar/honey). Now, I LOVE Montreal bagels (from Fairmount Bagel, please) but I was sort of aiming for a NYC-Montreal hybrid here, to satisfy the Long Islander.

This recipe is great. You can have fresh bagels out of the oven less than an hour after you wake up! The secret is that you mix up the dough a day or so (even up to a week) earlier, let it rise for a couple of hours and then stash it in the fridge. When you want bagels, you take the dough out, form it into balls, let them rise for 20 minutes, shape them, boil them, and then bake for about 25 minutes.

Pretzels

These were so good.

I used the soft whole wheat pretzels recipe from Papa Tofu, with a few small changes (halved the recipe, used half white flour and half atta flour, added a couple of tablespoons of lively sourdough starter, let them rise a bit longer than suggested, made 6 pretzels).

When it came time to twist the pretzels, I forgot how to shape them. Luckily it turned out that R's pretzel eating expertise extends to pretzel shaping.

Croissants

I don't know what possessed me, but I decided that it is totally unfair that vegans miss out on croissants, and that this injustice needed to be rectified, at least for the resident vegan.

I used this recipe, except I used atta flour (only because we have completely run out of white flour). Oh, and my folding technique was a little idiosyncratic (I consulted a few different recipes on this, and it turns out that understanding written instructions on how to make laminated pastry is not my strong suit. I wish they would draw pictures instead!).

The croissants smelled spot on, and they tasted pretty good but they didn't turn out flaky. The texture inside was more like an airy brioche. I guess I didn't chill the dough enough between foldings. Oh well.

The most important part: they conveyed this stuff to our mouths perfectly.

Pumpkin cinnamon rolls

I know I promised green vegetables in my next post, but I figured that the pumpkin-deprived NOLA-ites deserved some pumpkin foodporn: pumpkin cinnamon rolls (recipe from the zine Don't Eat Off the Sidewalk).

My copy of the zine is currently on a ship bound for Singapore, so luckily the author has posted the recipe online. (I made half the recipe, and used half whole wheat flour, and added some pecans to the filling. Yum! I like how the filling worked out -- the recipe has you add some flour to the usual mixture of sugar, cinnamon and butter and I think it really helped to keep the filling from oozing out too much.)

At least the NOLA-ites have access to canned pumpkin. No such luck for the Aussie contingent.

Gluttony

I spent about 10 hours wandering all over Manhattan today. Sustaining me in my travels were many wonderful bread products:

• a sesame bagel from Absolute Bagels (So good! Crisp on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside -- light textured and substantial at the same time.)
• pizza patate from Sullivan Street Bakery (Imagine pizza and potato chips had a love child. Crisp, rich dough topped with thin sliced potato (crisp and brown at the edges), rosemary and lots of olive oil.)
• vanilla bomboloni from Sullivan Street Bakery (This prompted fond memories of my Polish grandmother's homemade doughnuts, but was many times more amazing than they were, and they were good!)
• pizza at Motorino East Village (I had the filetti: mozzarella, cherry tomatoes and thyme. It was excellent. I will never be a restaurant blogger, because taking photos of food is embarrassing, but here's a review with some nice photos.)

I also went food shopping at Zabar's and Fairway. I really liked Fairway. Here's what I bought there:

Noho lunch

Back in Noho for a lightning visit, we had a perfect lunch of baked beans (a Deals & Steals score: two cans for 99c) and rosemary bread from the Hungry Ghost (still warm!) plus a mini (vegan) apple pie also from the Hungry Ghost. Yum.

No wood pulp!

In case you can't make it out, the first sentence of the second paragraph reads: Light buns are made with oat fiber, and no wood pulp!

Cans save the day

I threw this soup together using various canned goods from the pantry, and it was good. Tomato, hearts of palm, okra and field peas, plus some leftover brown rice. We had it with soda bread, made with a mixture of flours (mainly spelt and oat). (I'm trying to empty out the pantry before our upcoming move -- all the little bits of random grains are getting ground up in the spice grinder.)
In the soup there was also some corn stock that was made in the pressure cooker (6 corn cobs, about 4 cups water, 20 minutes on high pressure, natural release). I had been intending to make high intensity polenta with the corn stock... that'll have to wait for next time we have a bunch of corn cobs.

I got the canned okra and field peas from the local discount shop, and they were brands I'd never seen before (maybe they're from the south?). I'd never had field peas before, and it looks like the name can refer to any number of peas. These ones were tiny and red, and I liked them.