Many of the procedures we invoke involve making our own bread. It's about time we let you know exactly what that entails. Bread is really easy to make — a far simpler process than most people think — and it doesn't take terribly long. We'll tell you how to make a basic
boule (round bread) — in this case, specifically a Portuguese
broa recipe. This is enough to give you a solid bread-baking foundation, and after you're comfortable with it you can work in some flair and whip up some egg-based
challah bread or an oat-based multi-grain bread. All of it uses the same basic technique.
Equipment for baking bread
We bake our bread in a table-top convection oven, using half the ingredients recommended in the recipe found in
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.
If you're interested in baking bread frequently, I'd highly recommend picking up a copy on Amazon — it makes an excellent "bread bible".
The dough is mixed in a 3 quart container, which typically gives us two loaves to work with, or two half-loaves in the case of pan breads. We measure with a glass liquid measuring cup, a set of metal dry measuring cups in various sizes, and a set of linked measuring spoons. We'll stir the dough with a silicone spatula.
When we've mixed our dough and let it rise we'll cook it in the convection oven on a clay baking stone to distribute heat more evenly in the oven, and absorb moisture from the baking loaf. A lot of retailers and kitchen supply stores sell commercial baking stones for anywhere from $15 for a cheap quarter-inch thick stone, to $40 for a set of half-inch stones. Thicker stones will better withstand the repeated stress of heating and cooling; thinner stones will crack sooner rather than later.
Wanna know a secret? Baking stones are really just differently-marketed terra cotta tiles. You can pick them up from home improvement stores for around 50 cents to $2 for a 6-8" square half-inch thick tile. That's what we've been using, and it's served us well for six months now. A caveat: the floor tiles have to be seasoned before you use them.
To use the floor tiles as baking stones, first make sure that you get
untreated tiles. They usually are, but since you are using them for food, under high heat, it's best to ask and confirm it before you bring them home.
Once home, wash the tiles thoroughly with dish soap and hot water to clean off any dust and dirt, and let them dry completely. After that, take a paper towel and neutral-tasting vegetable oil, and rub the entire baking surface of the tile with the oil. You'll need to do this in multiple coats, as the oil gets absorbed into the tile. More is better than less, and keep rubbing it in, using a circular motion, until the surface is no longer shiny. Then place the oiled tiles into a cold oven, turn it on to 300 degrees, and bake for at least four hours. Cool before moving them, although many people just store them in the oven, too.
The four basic foundations of bread (and corn meal)
Our basic
boule bread uses very simple ingredients; the raw building blocks of bread, at its most basic, is just water, yeast, salt, and flour. For the
broa, we'll need 1.5 cups of lukewarm water, a 3/4th tablespoon of yeast (one packet), 3/4th tablespoon of kosher salt, 3/4th cup of corn meal, and 2.5 cups of unbleached all-purpose flour.
This will bake us two loaves, good for sandwiches or toasting or whatever it is you feel like using bread for.
Unlike other forms of cooking, baking is fairly precise. You don't want to seriously over- or under-measure ingredients. Flour, for example, measures very differently when freshly sifted than when it's packed. You want to make sure, when you're measuring the flour, not to pack it tightly as that will give you too much flour. On the other hand, bread — especially the "bread bible" recipes — is pretty forgiving. You want to end up with a fairly wet dough, but there's no need to be super-exacting.
Making bread dough
We fill our mixing cup full of water, microwave it until it's lukewarm (not hot!), and add the 3/4th tablespoon of yeast and the salt into it. If our recipe called for it, this is where we'd add other 'wet' ingredients — milk, vegetable oil and maple syrup for oat bread, an egg for challah, etc. We pour it into the plastic container we've been keeping our dough in and mix it up. You may have the traces of dough from previous mixings left in the container; this is totally fine and actually recommended as it acts as a sourdough starter.
To this mixture we add the flour and corn meal, and — in other recipes — other dry ingredients like wheat bran or rolled oats. We measure the dry ingredients simply by scooping it into the measuring cup (1-cup-measure or less so as not to over-measure) and leveling off with a butter knife. This isn't a kneaded bread — we just mix it all up until there aren't any dry spots of flour left and it all has a nice even consistency.
Let the bread rise
At this point the dough is left out to let it rise, for at least two hours, but basically until it stops and gets flat on top. The dough is covered, but don't make it airtight — there
needs to be an airflow for the yeast to do its work. After it's risen, unless you plan on using it right away, refrigerate it (covered but not airtight) — the dough is easier to manipulate when it's colder.
Shaping and baking the bread
Boule is french for "ball", and that's the shape of the loaf we'll be making. When you're ready to get baking, grab yourself a double-fist-sized lump of dough. Dusting it (and your hands) with flour will make it less likely to stick to your hands while you shape it. What you want to do is basically stretch and fold it in your hands, turning it a quarter-turn and then doing it again, until you've made four folds and turned it in a complete rotation. This develops the "gluten cloak" and will give you a round lump of dough.
After shaping the bread you'll want to let it sit out for 40 minutes on a cornmeal-covered pizza peel. At the 20 minute mark you want to preheat your oven — with the stone on the rack and an empty broiler tray on a different rack — for the latter 20 minutes.
Baking your bread
Immediately prior to putting the dough in the oven you'll want to score the top with a sharp knife to allow for the bread to rise as it bakes. With practice, you can perfect the sharp forward-backward shake of the pizza peel to drop the loaf from the peel to the baking stone; until then, you can also shove it off the peel with a spatula. Pour a cup of hot water into the heated broiler tray just before closing the oven. This will create steam that gives you the crispy crust of artisan breads, while the inside remains moist and soft.
This particular
broa will bake for about 30 minutes, until deeply brown with a firm crust. All bread recipes will follow this basic pattern, and once you have the confidence to follow it you can really bake just about anything.
Beat the egg, and mix in the rest of the stuff until smooth. Heat up a griddle (or frying pan if you're a griddle-less savage like me), melting a little butter in the pan to prevent sticking.
For our muffins we needed a cup and a half of flour, half a teaspoon each of baking soda and salt, three-quarters cup of brown sugar, half a cup of buttermilk — or use sour milk, or milk mixed with a half-tablespoon of lemon juice — three-quarters cup of vegetable oil, an egg, a teaspoon of vanilla, and half a cup of chopped nuts.
Cookin'
The history of this sauce is pretty boring. I was trying to eat healthier and couldn’t continue to make Alfredo (my go-to sauce), but regular tomato sauce was too boring to me. I crave a variety of texture and flavor in all things i do. I had made a decent tomato sauce recently using cream cheese and roasted red peppers, and while I liked the creaminess I was looking for something chunky to go with tagliatelle or cavatappi, but knew I wanted to keep the roasted red peppers for sure. At this point I stumbled on an unrelated recipe that involved mirepoix, and I knew I had to use this. It’s as simple as can be: a 2:1:1 mix of onion, celery, and carrots.
I know Michael and Kat don’t usually spit out a list of ingredients in their posts, but I figured that, what the hell, this is my show today, so here you all go:
Putting the Egg in Eggnog
We used four eggs in our nog, beating 1/3 cup of sugar into the yolks and putting the whites aside. The base was two cups of whole milk and a cup of half-and-half (though you can use anything up to heavy cream) seasoned with a teaspoon of nutmeg. Some people don't bother cooking their eggnog, but it's a general good practice whenever you're doing anything with eggs — Rocky Balboa notwithstanding.
Gently Roll Them In Your Hands
Improvisational Meal Planning
We started by sauteing an onion, a spicy pepper, and three minced cloves of garlic in a tablespoon of olive oil. We added this saute into three cups of water, along with a cup of chopped tomato and a cup of dried red lentils. The mixture was brought to a boil and then simmered until the lentils grew tender, which took us about an hour.
This vegetarian meatless-loaf is healthy, hearty, and delicious. We use, as in most of our recipes, locally sourced ingredients. The base for our loaf is firm tofu purchased from Phoenix Bean. I never really liked tofu as a kid, but after tasting some of their demos at the farmer's market, they've really grown on me. We're also using previously cooked brown rice, bread crumbs, and shredded vegetables – a carrot, a beet, a small onion, and a jalapeno for a little kick, but you can basically use whatever veggies you have on hand. We're also mixing in chopped walnuts, and a few spices – garlic (or Dijon) mustard, soy sauce, and a few grinds of black pepper.
Preheat the oven to 350. While it's warming up, blend 16 ounces of tofu with a mixer until its achieved a smooth consistency, and mix in the spices – we used 2 tsp of the garlic mustard, 3 tsp of soy sauce, a quarter cup of the barbecue sauce, and just a few grinds of black pepper. You'll want to mix the chopped vegetables (one of each), walnuts (a cup), bread crumbs (2 cups), and brown rice (1 cup) together in a separate bowl.
This is the fun part. Or the gross part. Probably a little bit of both, depending on your individual predilections. You're going to dump the vegetable mix into the tofu, and sort of squelch it all together with your hands, like you're making mud pies. This is messy. And cold. But it's gotta be done, so enjoy having your hands wrist deep in food that you're going to be serving later. I really wish I didn't have to remind you to wash your hands, but... yeah. Wash your hands first. And after.
Grease yourself up a baking pan, pack your goop into it, and top with a layer of barbecue sauce. Bake that sucker for an hour, and let it stand for about ten to fifteen minutes afterwards before serving.
Have your lovely assistant pick the seeds out of the pulp while you get on with the scooping and carving. Like I mentioned earlier, carving is an opportunity for a fun social communal activity – the more people you get involved the better, and Lovely Assistants are always appreciated.
When you're done you'll have a lot of leftover material – pumpkin flesh, seeds, and the stringy membrane the seeds are suspended in. You can just toss the membrane, but the seeds and flesh can be eaten. There are a ton of recipes out there for using the flesh – make a pie – but what I like to do with the seeds is roast them, almost as part of the carving process.
While you're carving, your Lovely Assistants can rinse out the pumpkin guts to get any leftover membrane off of the seeds. When they're clean you want to boil them in salt water and let them simmer a good ten minutes to infuse them – 2 cups of water and a half tablespoon of salt to every half-cup of seeds. We ended up with a cup of seeds, so that's 4 cups of water and a tablespoon of salt.
After they've simmered coat a pan with a tablespoon of olive oil and spread the seeds out in a single layer in it. Roast them at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes or until a nice brown. We added in chunks of pumpkin flesh as well, and they came out very tender and pumpkin-y.
Guac
Beans
Our basic boule bread uses very simple ingredients; the raw building blocks of bread, at its most basic, is just water, yeast, salt, and flour. For the broa, we'll need 1.5 cups of lukewarm water, a 3/4th tablespoon of yeast (one packet), 3/4th tablespoon of kosher salt, 3/4th cup of corn meal, and 2.5 cups of unbleached all-purpose flour. This will bake us two loaves, good for sandwiches or toasting or whatever it is you feel like using bread for.
Let the bread rise
