So this morning, I made some bread: Crusty dinner buns, to be exact. They’re not perfect, or even as good as the first time I made them (for a burger dinner, when they turned out amazing!) but I’m pretty pleased with them. I’ll be digging into Peter Reinhart’s book The Bread Maker’s Apprentice this month, which I expect will give me some of the knowledge and skills to build on making bread the way I want a little more effectively — darker, crustier, lighter, fluffier, and so on. I figure I’m limited by my small toaster oven, but that’s all …
Category: COOKING
Cooking with Pork
UPDATE (4 Jan 2010): Wow, color me embarrassed! Yeah, so… I actually wrote this on the afternoon of the 1st, and then schedule it for posting on the 2nd. Little did I know I would be food poisoned by the evening of the 1st, and spend the day of the 2nd in bed, with a fever, pain, and the worst digestive issues this side of hell. Ironically, it’s not any of the pork that made me sick, as far as I can tell, but some yogurt. That said, the chops (which never got marinated) have been put off till I …
Not Quite Sourdough, But It Rose
I made some bread today, my 2nd try at making bread with Brettanomyces Claussenii yeast. Brett C. is, as you may know, a strain of wild yeast of the kind used in some kinds of brewing, and I brewed a beer using it as my sole yeast back in late October of this year. (It’s been in the bottle a week and I plan on testing out a small bottle this afternoon, to see if the carbonation is where I’d like it to be.) Anyway, I saw that The Mad Fermentationist had made some baguettes with a strain of Brett, …
Rye Sourdough Starter, and Brett Bread
So, yet another of things I’m experimenting with was inspired by The Mad Fermentationist, namely, Brettanomyces yeast in bread making. I’ve only found two cases online, one by TMF who used it to make some baguettes and the other by a guy who used Brett to make pizza dough. So a cxouple of days ago, I decided to make a sourdough starter using rye (the most easily fermented type of flour, apparently–all you really need to do is mix it with water and leave it warm, the lactobacillus and the wild yeasts do their thing quite happily, they say) but …
Kraut, Step 1
For those following my fermentative adventures at home, I just did some sauerkraut this afternoon, inspired by the efforts of The Mad Fermentationist (see here). I have to tidy up the inside of the jar, but I got a good amount of brine out of the cabbages, and I am pleased with how it’s coming along! The above picture is a pretty early shot, after the cabbage was in the pot for only a few hours. I had to leave in a hurry, so there’s a bit of mess, but most of the cabbage that’s not in the brine is …
Momo: What Really Fresh-Roasted Coffee Tastes Like
If you haven’t had it, and want to know the bitterness-free, rich, gorgeous taste of actually fresh-roasted coffee, there are probably a few places in Seoul to pick up some beans roasted recently. The place I know is called Momo, and it’s a coffee shop (not a Himalayan dumpling shop, much as I may long for one of those) near Shindorim station. The beans aren’t cheap, but they’re also good, so I’d say it’s worth it. To get to Momo (or it might be called Momo’s, I can’t quite recall) go out the front of the Technomart building. Turn right …
새해복많이받으세요, & Bread & Beer
In other words, Happy Korean New Year! (And yeah, they got it from the Chinese. Whatever.) Me, I’m stuffed with rice cake and dumpling soup, and am now having having a nice Leffe Blond, which brings back memories of Montréal. (Not my favorite beer, now, as it was then, but then, it was my first beer, followed by Sleeman’s Honey Brown Lager, Guinness, Harp, and whatever else I could afford. It took till my second year in Montreal to arrive at beer; the first year was taken up with red wine. Which is to segue gracelessly to the fact that …