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Chris Hennes

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  1. Chris Hennes
    @Eric Srikandan -- for the record, I put my dough in the "blast chiller" (a.k.a. outside on my patio) until it was cold enough to firm up and be rollable. And I did use a pretty large amount of cooking spray during the roll-out.
  2. Chris Hennes
    Indeed, most of the recipes in this book have either onions or shallots in them. Garlic is less common, but not omitted entirely. These recipes are home cooking that she encountered in her travels throughout the country and represent a great diversity of cuisines from various parts of India.
  3. Chris Hennes
    For the record, I used about 75% cake flour and when I ran out of that, King Arthur all purpose 11.7%.
  4. Chris Hennes
    A few weeks ago I checked out a copy of Madhur Jaffrey's Vegetarian India from the library, and it is well on its way to earning a permanent place in my collection. I've really enjoyed the recipes I've cooked from it so far, and thought I'd share a few of them here. Of course, if anyone else has cooked anything from the book please share your favorites here, too. To kick things off, something that appears in nearly every meal I've cooked this month... a yogurt dish such as Simple Seasoned Yogurt, South Indian-Style (p. 324)
  5. Chris Hennes
    How does the yeast quantity in MB compare to recipes you've used in the past? Or do you think it's the technique of testing for proof that's causing a problem, rather than the time? How long would you say you end up proofing after you shape?
  6. Chris Hennes
    @Anna N Wow, that color is dramatic. I’m not familiar with “black cocoa powder” — do you have a link handy?
  7. Chris Hennes
    Nutella Babka (p. 4•225) I had an unopened jar of Nutella in my cupboard that expired something like two years ago (I don't exactly eat a lot of Nutella). Of course, expiration dates for such things are a bit sketchy, and it still tastes and smells fresh, so away we go using the thing up. I used basically the whole thing for this loaf, which is a 25% butter brioche with Nutella swirls (they also have a more homemade filling, but librarians will eat anything so I'm bringing the Nutella into work tomorrow!). The baking time was a bit suspect, but I just kept a careful eye on it and pulled it when I couldn't imagine wanting the crust any darker.
  8. Chris Hennes
    Chocolate and Cranberry Sourdough (p. 4•80) Of course, any time I'm making a bunch of sourdoughs this one gets requested. I subbed in cranberries for the cherries this time: it's still delicious. My starter is also much more robust than last time around, so the flavor and texture are both better as well.
  9. Chris Hennes
    Compleat Wheat (p. 4•137) This is a "whole wheat" bread in that it's got white flour, bran, and germ all added in the appropriate proportions. You toast and soak the bran and germ separate from the endosperm, which lets you get a much lighter loaf than is typical of whole wheat flour, particularly naturally leavened. This recipe works very well and gives a terrific flavor and texture. The loaves are also beautiful, which is always nice.
  10. Chris Hennes
    Modernist Ciabatta (p. 4•160) I didn't get as much rise out of mine as their image shows: I suspect I called proof early on this one (it's hard to read because it's so slack). Honestly, I've gotten a bit spoiled by the very long fermentation times of the other loaves I've been working on recently, this one was sort of bland in comparison. I know that's the nature of the beast, but I definitely prefer the longer fermentation times of the French lean bread and the sourdoughs.
  11. Chris Hennes
    I've got something like five different breads in progress right now. The first one that was ready is... American Pumpernickel (p. 4•308) Lots going on here. First, this bread includes both levain and osmotolerant yeast (which I finally have and didn't have to substitute). It also calls for caramel color, which I don't have and didn't feel like making. So I used coffee instead. It also has a lot of cocoa powder in it, and a hefty dose of molasses. The upshot is that basically none of the color is "real" here, as is typical for this style of rye. Despite the inclusion of the levain, it's got enough commercial yeast in it that it gets created like a direct dough. It rises very quickly, and only needed to proof for an hour or so. The recipe calls for baking it in a loaf pan, but I was feeling retro tonight... You can probably guess where this is going... No, there is no soup mix involved in that spinach dip. It's a recipe from a 2002 issue of Cook's Illustrated: This is a delicious rye bread, with lots of flavor from the onions and caraway. It's got a nice, soft texture, but we ate it fresh enough that the crust was still crispy. Worlds better than the supermarket equivalent.
  12. Chris Hennes
    Are you looking for more sourness, or just something different?
  13. Chris Hennes
    I don’t know that such a thing is possible — it’s always going to come down to taste. I think the 2% salt most of these recipes call for is perfect, whereas @JoNorvelleWalker thinks it’s far too much. Obviously you can make bread without salt at all. So I can’t see any way around experimenting with it.
  14. Chris Hennes
    How's the texture? It looks better than the non-Modernist variant.
  15. Chris Hennes
    Well, I think that basically all of the various suggestions in the Ingredients volume for things you can do to grains apply here: you can sprout, nixtamalize, pressure-caramelize, soak, or just plain cook the whole berries. With a quick blitz in the blender you can make a porridge from the cracked kernels, plus you can soak, cook, or pressure-caramelize them. So that's a lot of different inclusions that you can add to various recipes. My recollection is that the Whole Grain loaf uses whole berries and potentially also cracked. I'd bet that most of the brick breads use one or the other.
  16. Chris Hennes
    I sense some pressure-caramelized rye inclusions in your future as well.
  17. Chris Hennes
    I didn't use a canister, I used a FoodSaver bag, but I was able to get mine to work by running the machine multiple times (I think five, if I recall correctly), interrupting the sealing between each go so the bag didn't close up. I think @Kerry Beal also had luck using a chamber vac, but I don't have one to test on.
  18. Chris Hennes
    Standard.
  19. Chris Hennes
    I expected a doorstop, I just think I overshot the mark a bit here. Their photo seems to show a (slightly) lighter texture than I achieved. How does one typically serve this stuff, anyway? It's not great for just munching on out of hand -- it tastes great, but that texture needs a counterpoint.
  20. Chris Hennes
    Volkornbrot (p. 4•435) I've never had this bread before so I am not really qualified to judge, but honestly I sort of hope I screwed this one up. I suspect I did, anyway, as I re-read the instructions for the final mix and look at their photo (and other photos online). They appear to get a bit of rise, whereas I don't think I got any rise at all. I know my levain is healthy because I used the same levain for several other breads that day and they all worked. Where I went wrong, I think, was the final mix stage. I never looked at their expected time for the mix, I just saw the instructions saying to mix until homogeneous. Well, what they wanted was a homogeneous paste, whereas what I had was a homogeneous... granola. Or something. It wasn't a paste. I probably only mixed for four or five minutes, not the 8-10 the recipe actually calls for. I think this one is borderline indelibly dense, but I guess it's possible that is the desired outcome. @Kerry Beal, maybe you need to try this one next so I can see a comparison!
  21. Chris Hennes
    Pain de Méteil (p. 4•371) This is a roughly 55% rye / 45% wheat dough leavened completely with a liquid rye levain. Pretty hard to go wrong here, the flavor is excellent, particularly the crust.
  22. Chris Hennes
    Modernist 100% High Ryes with Rye Porridge I really liked the Modernist High Ryes bread, and wanted to play around with the texture of it. So I made a rye porridge and added 200g of that to the standard recipe. This made the dough behave much more like the non-modernist variant, so I baked it in a loaf pan like that bread.
  23. Chris Hennes
    Modernist Naan (p. 5•22) I think this would have been more successful had I not docked the dough, I think the texture would be better if you let it puff up when baking. The flavor was fine, although I did not have enough probiotic powder, as it turned out. I bought one of those little single-serving packets thinking the recipe called for 1 gram (the packet contained 1.4g)... nope, the recipe calls for 10 grams! Which strikes me as an awful lot. Their volume conversion also seems fishy. It turns out they are calling for the same weight and volume of probiotic powder as the non-Modernist recipe calls for yogurt. Does anyone have a sense of whether that can be correct?
  24. Chris Hennes
    Kubaneh (p. 5•44) This is the closest the book comes to pastry work, and it's pretty close. These are really a laminated dough, although the purpose of the butter is really to help you stretch out the layers. It's in the chapter with flatbreads presumably because they simply didn't have anyplace else to put it. Obviously it's a flatbread the same way a croissant is a flatbread. They are a slightly sweet dough (enough that I was surprised the recipe didn't call for osmotolerant yeast) and end up very buttery. Delicious, of course. The shaping is quite complex here. You take a 125g roll and stretch it to a 60cm/24in square (this involves a lot of butter!): Then you fold it into thirds: The recipe calls for rolling it up here, but that would make an 8" roll which I couldn't see working. I wonder if they really fold it again here. I did: Then you roll it up: The recipe makes eight of them, which get arranged like this: These are then sealed up completely, proofed, and then baked: The recipe never instructs you to remove the lid, but as you can see when baked sealed up, you are really steaming them, so they don't brown. The photo in the book shows browning. So put them back in the oven for a few minutes:
  25. Chris Hennes
    OK, time to get caught up on the past few days' baking... Lavash Crackers (p. 5•69) My calipers are at my office right now, so I didn't really have any way of measuring the thickness. I just rolled it out through my pasta maker on its widest setting. In retrospect I should have taken it down one more notch, these ended up thicker than I'd have liked. The flavor and texture are good, although the toppings did not adhere very well and all fell off (except the salt). Probably need a starch slurry to make these big seeds stick.
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