Chris Hennes

Russian Rye Bread or Black Bread (p. 4•376) This is an intermediate rye bread with a rye content of just over 55%. It begins with a soaker of old rye bread (I used some leftover Waldviertler Jausenlaiberl), coffee grounds, oil, and water. This is added to a quite high percentage of liquid rye levain, plus a blend of medium rye flour and high-gluten bread flour. The result is a very flavorful, somewhat dense rye bread. It smells quite a lot like coffee, though the coffee flavor is more subtle than I expected from that. The bread spices from the Waldviertler Jausenlaiberl are still quite evident in this loaf, even though it's a very small percentage of the overall bread. So take care when choosing your soaker, because if you use a strongly-flavored bread you will be able to taste it. In this case it worked well, but I don't know if it's quite what is intended.

Mine was for curing charcuterie, but I suppose it's much the same thing. I just overrode the refrigerator controls entirely and ran it via an Arduino.

Honestly, it will probably be an improvement - I'd guess the "gold" tequila in question is not "Añejo" or "Reposado", but "Cuervo".

I thought this was fun - I should have added my wife's phone number to the system, too, though, I wound up giving her my phone to see what was coming, and I looked at the (tiny) images on my watch.

I am eagerly awaiting you all getting this dialed in: I think I'm going to buy one for our kitchen at work, to use for basic baking stuff (not making toast), but I can't really spend the time here to figure out what the magic settings are. It sounds like @Kerry Beal is pretty close on getting bread to work, anyway.

I'll say just a few more words about my two favorite dishes of the night... The flavors and textures on this one were spectacular, I think in the truest sense of the word. The rye crisp was very crispy, with savory caramel and chocolate notes, which contrasted beautifully with the baby carrot and carrot top pesto. The topping had great little pops of coriander which enlivened the dish, and the overall combination was superb. I'd eat this every day. The rich, umami-heavy ricotta mousse was a perfect contrast to bitterness of the grilled shishito peppers, with little pops from the gooseberries. Amazing. Right - don't get me wrong, the dish was delicious. But Bulrush is attaining heights now where merely "delicious" isn't good enough! At its core it was white fish in beurre blanc. Where were the fermented whatsits and crispy thingamabobs and OMG WHAT moments? I joked with Justin that it wasn't complicated enough .

Well, although we tried to arrange an eG gathering this summer at Bulrush, a certain public health crisis intervened, and we've basically all been cooped up in our homes for the last several months. However, Bulrush is open again with very limited seating, and an expanded meal, so I ventured out to STL to give it a spin. This was without a doubt the best meal I've had to date at Bulrush... Asparagus - Dried chicken liver Fermented aspragus Foraged sumac Asparagus emulsion Carrot - Nixtamalized baby carrot Cinnebar mushroom powder Rye crisp Carrot top pesto Ricotta & Squash - Ricotta mouse Compressed squash w/ lovage Grilled shishito peppers Gooseberry verjus Cabbage - Garlic miso runner cabbage Buttermilk gel Blueberry anise sauce Pickled gooseberry & mulberry Sauercorn Corn Soup - Chanterelle Sauercorn Pork belly Acorn donut - Black walnut nocino Buttermilk roasted turnip Pecan praline White chocolate potato mousse Walleye - Fermented chanterelle sauce Grilled leek Daikon radish Leek oil Poached hen's yolk - Edible "shell" Fermented dandelion honey Cured yolk English peas Marigold Pork cheek - Sassafras root glaze "Grilled" grits Chanterelle Blueberry salt Gooseberry Mignardise - Mulberry & cherry pate de fruit Mulberry bonbon Rhubarb vinegar ice cream - Mulberry meringue Buckwheat honey cake Mulberry compote Overall the meal was characterized by surprising and delicious flavor and texture combinations: in fact, I thought the least successful dish was the walleye, because it was so... normal! Delicious, but out of place among all of the other flavor combinations during the course of the meal. I also chatted with Rob about the cured hen's egg a bit -- it hasn't been his guests' favorite. The savory gel thing isn't sitting well with diners here, which I think is too bad, because I thought that dish was really excellent. It's got great flavors and textures, but I guess cured egg yolk is just too "out there" for a general audience. I will also say that I appreciate the diligence of the staff's cleaning protocols, and the very large spacing between people in the dining room. You could hardly be in a safer environment, if you do choose to venture out of the house. PS - Of course, we are staying at the Angad Arts hotel again. On a red floor this time:

This is Bryan Ford's "Choco Pan de Coco" from his new cookbook, New World Sourdough -- I'm getting ready to make a video about this recipe, but figured I should do a test-run of the recipe first. Although it's a bit sweeter than traditional pan de coco, it's really not that sweet, especially considering the chocolate, which I find makes you expect a sweeter loaf. It's one of the few enriched sourdoughs I've made, and truth be told you'd be hard-pressed to recognize that it's naturally leavened. Not necessarily a negative, just interesting.

Two-Step Sandwich Loaf (p. 4•302) Sourdough and Whole-Grain Bread with Pistachio, Cocoa Nib, and Apricot One of the reasons I was interested in the brick bread above is because I wanted to experiment with their two-step sandwich loaf. In this bread, you make one conventional high-strength dough, and then treat the brick bread dough as an inclusion (scaled at about 30%). In my case I made a conventional 1kg sourdough, and then added 275g of the pistachio, cocoa nib and apricot dough to it. This gets baked in a loaf pan, as it is ostensibly a "sandwich" loaf, though to be honesty I don't know what sandwich you'd make with it. I thought it made pretty good toast, though.

Hazelnut Pistachio , Cocoa Nib, and Apricot Loaf with Spices (p. 4•427) This bread is in their section on "brick breads," as a sub-recipe to the Whole Grain bread (where here by "whole grain" they truly mean "left whole" as in, not ground into flour). It actually doesn't have any whole grains in it, but it exists in the same spirit as those breads: just enough flour to hold together a massive quantity of whole ingredients. In this case, nuts (I used pistachios), crushed cocoa nibs, and diced dried apricot. It also has a very large amount of cloves, some cinnamon, and some thyme. I had much more success with this bread than I did with the Vollkornbrot - it's much easier to eat, and you don't need anything special to slice it. In many ways it is reminiscent of a quick bread, though of course it is not one.

Are you using a Finnish dark syrup, or molasses? Or something else? And malted rye?

Yeah, I buy lots of flour from them, they have an excellent selection of Rye from Ardent Mills, and will repackage almost anything into 5# bags. So I didn't have to buy 50# of dark rye!

I do not - you'd need a really big freezer, and the round buckets would waste a ton of space. It takes me about three months to go through 50# of white flour. The rye takes me more like a year. Those buckets are airtight, though, I've been happy with them.

There are lots of online stores that will sell you single 50# bags of flour, I usually just Google around for the best price. Shipping brings the cost up, obviously, but it's still cheaper per pound than buying at a local store (plus, I don't have to set foot in a store!).

The Rancho Gordo website explains each with decent clarity, I think: Mexican oregano Oregano indeo

I use LifeLatch buckets. Each one holds about 25lbs.

I have not had any changes in mine, but I buy in the 50# bags, which I think are probably less likely to be affected by the current supply issues. I also use the organic stuff, which again is probably less affected.

Yes, for sure. Look at the 100% High-Ryes as an example of this. That dough works almost like an all-wheat dough, there is so much added gluten.

Waldviertler Jausenlaiberl (KM p. 225) Spellcheck is not super happy with this bread! It's a yeast-raised rye bread with a large amount of rye levain added for flavor. It also uses a soaker, which for me used a three-day-old sourdough, and includes a pretty large quantity of bread spice (caraway, fennel, anise, and coriander). In addition to the rye, it's also got a pretty large amount of spelt flour, as well as some wheat flour for structure. The quantity of wheat flour is low enough to yield a pretty flat, dense bread, however. I've never had this anywhere, so I can't really compare, but the flavor was quite good, and though it is dense, as long as that's what you are expecting I didn't find it unpleasantly so.

I don't normally bake much bread at this time of year, but I was able to get an early start on the oven today because of my weird work schedule. These are the Modernist Sourdough from Modernist Bread -- exactly as published, no modifications. One of my favorites.

I've been producing cooking videos for work to promote our digital cookbook collection -- these brownies are from Dorie Greenspan, and they were quite good...

In light of this, I'm going to head up a bit earlier in July, on the 11th, instead of waiting until the 25th. I'm still happy to wave at any other eG'er from across the room, but obviously now is not a great time to be planning a group outing.

Are you using that as an insulator? 10 minutes of preheat doesn't seem like it would be long enough for a tile.

It was crushed tomatoes, red pepper flakes, and Dubonnet Rouge -- all told, once combined with the chiles, a reasonably respectable sauce, I thought.

I haven't made enchiladas in a long time, but I had some old tortillas to use up, so tonight I went with stacked, grilled enchiladas for dinner. The filling is Rancho Gordo Rebosero beans, fire roasted jalapeños and onions, pickled jalapeños, and a little bit of Cabot extra sharp cheddar. The sauce is "stuff I had in the fridge." So leftover pizza sauce, ground dried chiles, and Valentina hot sauce. It was cooked in a hotel pan on the grill because it's hot and I'm not turning the oven on. That resulted in a sort of toasted/crispy base tortilla, which was an interesting change, but sort of un-enchilada-like.