Chris Hennes

This looks like a nice way to try to stay a step or two ahead of the game -- I'm glad to see you planning for a long haul. I fear that those who are desperately trying to return to normalcy as soon as possible are going to get burned (if they haven't already). Maybe I need to rent an RV for my next trip to STL, though - I don't like eating in the car!

Tonight my impatience got the better of me: I was in a hurry, so didn't let the dough rise enough, or the oven preheat long enough. The crust was definitely substandard. For toppings, this is a quattro formaggi with mozarella di bufala, parmigiano, caciocavallo di bufala, and gorgonzola dolce. The sauce is a bechamel with a lot of red pepper flakes added. So, the taste was pretty good, though I think I used too much parmigiano, the balance was off a bit.

Modernist neapolitan crust, olives, mozzarella di bufala, and a sauce of crushed tomatoes, silk chili flakes, black pepper, and olive oil. Baked in the oven, since it's a bit cooler today.

Grain Count Sourdough This section of the book is one where it feels like they included it just to poke fun at someone. They have a sort of interesting analysis of the number of grains in various commercial n-grain breads, showing peaks at 7, 12, etc. But also mention the baker's pissing contest of who can include the largest number of grains in their bread, and then proceed to a) point out how dumb it is, when you have 50 different grains so any given slice almost certainly doesn't even have all of them in it, and b) of course they include some recipes for various grain counts, including one that's pretty absurd. However, I love grain inclusions, and these recipes do feature one unique point: vastly more inclusions than normal. For a 1kg loaf, this has 210g of inclusion. So there's no missing them! I used flax seed, poppy seed, black sesame seed, rye chops, steel cut oats, and walnuts. So not even touching the sheer number of their peak recipe, but it's still a delicious bread, with a great texture. Baked as a loaf because I really wanted slices of toast.

This dough was intended to be pizza, but not grilled! But when I slide pizza #1 off my peel onto my baking steel, I got a pretty good slosh of olive oil off the pizza into the oven, which of course was at 550°F. So, after a panicky couple of minutes setting up some ad hoc ventilation, we ate that pizza (which was delicious), but then made the second one on the grill. It's a quattro formaggi, with just olive oil as the sauce. The cheeses are mozzarella di bufala, ricotta, gorgonzola, and parmigiano. I also hit it with a pretty sizable dose of ground purple peppercorns from Burlap & Barrel.

But again, if they negotiated directly with the copyright holders, they could have acquired the right to publish without attribution. I wouldn't hold my breath on the likelihood, but innocent until proven guilty.

Well, in their defense it is possible that they got permission to use those images. I only thought to look because who the hell bakes cake in a loaf pan?! Their recipe doesn't state a pan size at all.

Has anyone tried baking cake in theirs yet? I see the Blumlein cookbook suggests using combi mode for their cake recipe and I'm wondering about the advantages of this versus just normal bake mode. I'm not making their cake recipe, but the one I'm using isn't that far off from it. ETA: Is it just me, or does the cake photo in the Blumlein cookbook look suspiciously exactly like the Sweet Potato Chocolate Cake from Lazy Cat Kitchen...

Open-faced pastrami on rye: the pumpernickel I posted about here, fried in rendered pastrami fat from the pastrami I posted about here. The sauerkraut is the juniper sauerkraut recipe from The Everyday Fermentation Handbook by Brandon Byers, cured for 30 days at around 80°F. The mustard is commercial, a Maille's "Old Style." Almost certainly the best sandwich I've ever made, and maybe the best I've ever eaten. This is the first time I've made that sauerkraut, and it is fantastic.

I can't say I'd forgotten how fantastic this pastrami is (it's pretty memorable), but it had been a while since I'd made it. I've been making a lot of rye breads recently, however, so this seemed like an opportune time to revisit. This is beef short rib pastrami with Wagyu ribs from Rockin' HD Ranch (one county over from me, they sell at my local farmer's market), served on the Pumpernickel I posted about here, itself fried in a bit of fat rendered from the pastrami.

The doubled cocoa powder amount results in a more-bitter-than-intended loaf, so I definitely recommend using the corrected amount. I enjoyed the bread, and also like the sort of cultural expansion of my own bread repertoire: until this cookbook I had never really considered naturally-leavened "New World" breads.

I mentioned up-topic that I am making a video of Bryan Ford's Choco Pan de Coco for work. In the process I noticed that the photo of the bread in the book is much lighter in color than mine, so I wrote to Ford, who said the book's got a typo in it. The book calls for double the amount of cocoa powder than it should! Oops. Of course, I had already filmed the video at that point. So at any rate, if you make this, make sure you only use 25g of cocoa powder! Here's the finished video in English: The Spanish version is here, if that's your preference!

Pumpernickel You've already seen the first part of the pumpernickel adventure, above. The dough itself is fairly uncomplicated: soaked rye berries are added to a huge quantity of liquid rye levain along with a bit of pumpernickel rye flour (a very coarsely ground dark rye -- I used Arden Mills), and a bit of salt. This makes an amount of dough that you'd normally make two loaves of bread with, but in this case it's all crammed into a single 9x4x4 Pullman pan. With predictable results, it seems to me! The most unusual part of the process is the very, very long bake: 15 minutes at 500°F (convection), and then the oven is turned off and the bread is simply left there for 16 hours, undisturbed. It did not achieve as dark a color as I was hoping for/expecting based on the write-up, so I might give this a go with the non-convection timing (30 minutes of baking) next time, and making sure to kill the power to the oven right away (it didn't occur to me to flip the breaker until the oven had been furiously venting itself for 20 minutes). That said: a) the bread is delicious, I love the base flavor here, b) it's not as dense as the 100% whole wheat brick, since so much of this loaf is actually the levain, which is relatively soft, and c) sliced thin and sauteed in butter until toasted and crispy and topped with good cheese, this bread is pretty amazing. I think I will make this again at some point, and probably just take 200g of the dough and mix it into something else, instead of letting it ooze out of the Pullman overnight. I bet it would be a delicious addition to a plain sourdough.

Landbrot This is a relatively high hydration (88%) bread made from 50% medium rye and 50% whole wheat flours, leavened with a wheat levain. Of course, the high hydration and low gluten flour blend means that you kind of end up with a disc of bread, but I guess that's intentional. The flavor of mine came out quite sour, but I've found that my levain develops very quickly when you use rye flour with it, so that isn't really surprising. Not, perhaps, the most beautiful loaf, but worth eating.

Mine bulged more than a bit, and I lost about 220g of dough: This dough quantity is crazy for such a small pan! I have no idea what's going to come out of the oven tonight. Definitely a "brick bread" anyway. I hope it doesn't destroy my pan.

I actually have a drinky bird on order from Amazon for this purpose

This just bit me yesterday -- I was making bread at work (where room temperature is a solid 10°F cooler than at my house) and the dough just wasn't rising or moving the way I was used to. I am embarrassed to say that it took me every bit of four hours for it to occur to me that the temperature was the culprit. I moved the dough to our outdoor balcony (where it was 95°F) and lo and behold, the yeast was alive after all!

@jer_vic, funny that you made that just now, I'm about three days behind you! I'm also making the Pumpernickel, but I just started the rye berry soak last night. I'm glad to see it turned out well, or at least the right color. How did you slice it? I found the Whole Wheat brick loaf to be very tough, and wondered if this was going to be similar.

Everything turned out well in this first attempt at using the oven. It's a great size for baking a single 9x5 loaf of bread, there is plenty of room for air to circulate. I find the user interface a bit daunting, but at this price point you can hardly expect physical buttons for all of the features this machine has, so I think the tradeoff is worthwhile. I did get a fair amount of water buildup in the base of the oven during the proofing stage, but that didn't seem to negatively affect the baking -- even without mopping it up the coconut browned with no issues when baking. I did let the oven run at full temperature for a half hour before baking -- the built-in preheat mode seems strange to me, I don't understand the temperature limitation. Finally, although it will affect basically no one except me, I wish the light stayed on instead of turning off after 30 seconds. Taking time-lapses of things baking or rising is going to require a separate robot to keep pushing the light button. It's a sort of hilarious robot to build, but it does mean some extra work.

And baking, on convection mode:

And here it is proofing that dough:

Since the library's meeting spaces are all closed to the public right now, I've converted our catering kitchen into a TV studio . I'm currently making a video about Bryan Ford's "Choco Pan de Coco" from his new cookbook, New World Sourdough.

Aw yeah, look what showed up at my office this morning:

Naan - Butter Chicken Spice Flavored As with many of their breads, following the master recipe they have a couple of pages devoted to "stuff you can put in this" - for Naan, that means various purees that replace some of the water. This particular puree involves cooking down an onion with some crushed tomatoes, then adding commercial butter chicken spice mix. Truth be told, even the puree by itself didn't actually have that much of the butter chicken spice mix in it, the flavor was pretty subtle. In the naan, what you get is the onion, mostly, plus the color from the spice mix. I wasn't sure that the flavor of the butter chicken spice wasn't just my imagination, even eating the naan plain. Topped with a lentil curry, it was basically just naan. If I try this again, next time I am going to use a lot more of the spice mix.

This dough was not originally intended to be pizza - it's just the basic sourdough recipe from Modernist Bread, unmodified. But, then I wanted pizza. When grilled it gives a soft, puffy crust, and doesn't really take on much charring. Of course the flavor is excellent, though a little drowned out by too many toppings, so I went with simple.