How To Make A Sandwich

The Lowly Sandwich. For too long, the Sandwich did not get the respect nor the attention it deserved. Then two things happened. First, "Sandwich" (and the closely related "Sammich") became a meme.  I really like this one, just because I think Steve Balmer is a doofus...

A Filthy Rich Doofus, But Still a Doofus

... but you gotta like this one too.  Because Nigella.

Everything In This Picture Is Good

The second thing that happened was my writing of this blog post.  Srsly.

If your first thought of a Sammich is a slice of bologna with store-bought white sandwich bread, you’re doing it wrong. Very wrong.  I'm here to fix that.   It is time to dress The Lowly Sandwich up a bit and give it a chance to strut its stuff.

Nothing In This Picture Is Good

Now I’ll admit, I’ve long had pretty low Sammich expectations. I basically grew up on something much like the unadorned beast pictured above, taking a lunch to school for the majority of my school years in Grades 1 through 12. And in those days, lunch meant Sammiches.  Let’s just say I ate a lot of Sammiches over that time, and going back down that road didn’t initially hold a ton of appeal.

But appreciating and, even better, making your own good food means you’ve sometimes got to open your eyes and see a challenge in a whole new light. Sometimes, you’ve got to do that in territory that you might think has been well trodden. Can we turn the pedestrian Sammich into something that you dream about? Can a Sammich blow your mind?

The best way to answer this question is, of course, by example. I’m going to show you my take on a popular Sammich available in these parts: the Chicken, Brie, and Fig Sandwich from Earl’s Restaurant. Earl’s is a restaurant chain here in the Great White North that pairs a pretty decent menu with a pretty decent beer selection brewed on premises. What is not to like? Very little as it turns out.

The menu states that the Chicken, Brie, and Fig Sammich includes  "roasted apples, spinach, garlic aioli, fresh ciabatta".  Hmmmm... Bread. Brie. Chicken Breast. These are not exotic ingredients. You might have these ingredients or reasonable facsimiles thereof sitting in your fridge right now. That was the case in my refrigerator when this idea came to me anyway. What I ended up doing was making the best with what I had on hand at the time to put together an Earl’s-like Sammich.  I subsequently devouring said result. How did I go about it? Let me show you.  Let me show you exactly - to the gram.  Because that's how I roll.

First off, you need some decent bread. Bread is the foundation of a good Sammich, and a crappy bread is a crappy foundation. I recommend something like my No Knead Blue Cheese and Toasted Sesame Seed Bread (Jim Lahey's No Knead Bread with 40g each of crumbled blue cheese and toasted sesame seeds) described by a friend as “The best bread I’ve ever had”. And his mom was a baker. If you think you don’t like blue cheese, you are wrong. Blue cheese is amazing. The amount of blue cheese in this recipe is just enough to haunt the bread with its flavour, not beat you over the head with it.

Cut yourself a couple slices but don’t go too thick here. The bread is the foundation of the Sammich, but there is little worse than a Sammich that just tastes like all bread. That isn’t a Sammich. That’s just bread with some stuff on it. The slices in the picture below could probably be a little thinner.

This Bread Tastes Like More

Next up, you’ll want to lay a little mayo down. This serves a couple purposes. First and foremost, it adds a nice tang to the sandwich. Second of all, it serves as a kind of waterproofing layer so that the next ingredient up won’t make the bread soggy. I’m using a low fat mayo hear and can hear the boos from the audience even in advance of posting this. Haters gotta hate. I went this route because a) it is what I had in the fridge and b) low fat for a non-critical element like this lets me eat more of other stuff. Life is full of decisions. Make yours. Put on what you like.

Don't Hate Me

How about an option even at this early stage? Once in making this sandwich I made the “mistake” of putting on this ridiculously awesome concoction.

Best.  Mistake.  Ever.

If you see this stuff in your grocery store, buy it on the spot. It. Is. Spectacular. And by Spectacular (capital S), I mean it will clear your sinuses in one hell of a hurry. This stuff lays the heat down far better than any “hot” horseradish I’ve ever bought in a grocery store. Store-bought horseradish is an abomination that should stay in the store. I am convinced that if you want good horseradish, you need to make it yourself. But that is a post for another time. Go easy on this stuff if you got it.  You have been warned.

Next up we add a bit of sweetness with a little applesauce. Again, I’ve had bad luck with store-bought. I have been disappointed time and again with anything out of a can. Want good applesauce? Buy a pressure-cooker and make your own. We make ours from crabapples given to us by our friends in the fall, after they have picked multiple five-gallon pails for themselves and can’t bear to look at a single apple more. The tang you get from these apples makes a delicious applesauce, so don’t go ruining it by adding sugar. Oh, and make pie. Not too heavy here. The applesauce, I mean. If you’re making pie, make it as heavy as you like.

Mmmmmm.... Pie

The Earl’s menu says they use fig jam. Fig jam? I didn’t have no fig jam. What I did have was dates, to which My Lovely Wife has a habit nastier than anything cocaine or heroin could pull someone in to. I sliced a few dates as thin as I could and laid them down on top of the applesauce. This is easier said than done because dates are kinda mushy and very sticky, but I persevered Because Of Sammich.

Jam Would Have Spread Better

Next up: chicken breast. Cut up chicken breast and put it on the Sammich. This part isn’t complicated. Just use small pieces or thin slices and everything will be fine, just fine. It wouldn’t hurt here to pop it into the microwave for a bit just to take the chill off.

[Insert Breast Joke Here]

Next up would be the Brie in the Chicken and Brie sandwich. But again, your options are open here. I think you want to stick to a softer cheese that will make the effort to get your attention, rather than a rather flavourless cheese that everybody goes with because they know it (mozzarella, I’m looking at you). I went with a garlic-flavoured Boursin cheese based on a tip from a buddy of mine. He was not wrong. But don’t get me wrong, Brie would have been good here too. I guess what I’m trying to say here is: get a damn tasty soft cheese and lay it down on the other piece of bread.  You probably want to use more than I did here.

That done, bring the two slices of bread together. You are so close now, you should be able to taste it. Patience. There is one more step to go.

What I’ve been doing up to now is tossing the entire sandwich into the microwave for a very short period of time. How short? I can’t remember to be honest, but I seem to remember it was in the twenty second ballpark. That is just long enough to take the cold out of the chicken breast and apple sauce, but not so long that the applesauce is steaming hot. The microwave also does a pretty great job of making bread that might not be at its freshest taste a lot better. I also like how the warming of the bread brings out the flavour of the Blue Cheese in my Blue Cheese and Toasted Sesame Seed Bread even more.

I present for your inspection below the end result, cut in half and ready to be devoured in no time flat. It is good. Damn good. Is it a dead-ringer for the Earl’s version? Not exactly, but I did take several liberties along the way.

How Good?  Damn Good, I Said.

As good as that sandwich was, one always needs to think ahead to Next Time.  Next time, I want to try something a little different. Something like this.

And What Is This I See Before Me???

This is my waffle maker. There are many like it. This one is mine. Inspired by The Waffleizer’s book “Will It Waffle” (the answer is yes), I made up this Sammich over Christmas with my now famous Diablo Bread, some leftover turkey breast cooked sous vide (with these seasonings but this cooking method), mozzarella cheese, and thin slices of dill pickle. Were you to have actually tasted this yourself, you would have wept uncontrollably with joy. I can say without fear of exaggeration that this is the best Sammich that has ever been made or ever will be made.

It didn’t hurt that I brought a nice new technique to the party.  I was finding the lid of the waffle iron didn’t put enough weight on the Sammich to transfer the heat to it like I wanted. So I put my water bottle (about half full) onto the handle of the waffle iron, and I jammed a chopstick in there to prevent the bottle from rolling off. The beauty of this technique is that you can adjust the amount of “press” this ghetto Panini press puts on your Sammich by tweaking the amount of water in the bottle.

Patent Pending

And why, you might ask, am I using a waffle iron instead of a Panini press to make this Sammich??? Jeez Louise. Really??? Can you make King Arthur Sourdough Waffles in a Panini press???  No. Can I make paninis in a waffle iron???  Yes. Are we done here???  Yes.

Based on the spectacularity of this Diablo Bread / Turkey Breast / Mozzarella Cheese / Dill Pickle Sammich, I can only imagine how mind blowing a waffled Blue Cheese and Toasted Sesame Seed No Knead Bread / Horseradish Mayo / Applesauce / Date / Chicken Breast Sammich would taste. But I have a pretty damn good guess. It would be definitive proof that there is a God and He loves me. I don’t know about the rest of you, but me for sure at least.

Good food is good food.  Go make some.

Diablo Bread, The Bread of the Devil

I first blogged about bread around three years ago.  I look back at that post discussing my tips and tricks for Tartine bread and it makes me cringe.  What I thought was a good loaf of bread back then is far below what I'm able to come up with these days.  What has made me a better baker?  The same way you get to Carnegie Hall.  Practice.  I make a loaf of bread pretty much every weekend.

Tartine Bread Try #43

And it isn't just Tartine.  I find I am making that recipe ever month or so, while the other weekly bakes will sometimes be a No Knead bread of some kind or another based on Jim Lahey's technique outlined here.  A post back in May 2012 gave a link to another excerpt from "My Bread" that has more recipes you should check out as well.

Now with familiarity comes the courage to strike out on one's own.  I've been on quite a Sriracha kick lately and I got to thinking, what about a Sriracha No Knead Bread?  Put that term into Google and what do you get?

No results found for "Sriracha No Knead Bread".

Not acceptable.  Time to blaze a trail.

I call this bread Diablo Bread, The Bread of the Devil.  The Sriracha in the recipe is amped up by copious amounts of crushed red pepper flakes.  The orange-red color of the baked result is a warning that this is not a bread to be messed with.

Before starting, watch this video from the man himself to get an idea what you'll be doing.

No-Knead Bread From the Master

My recipe is along these lines, but my method is somewhat different from the second rise onward.  I also use a round Lodge Combo Cooker rather than the oval shaped Dutch Oven Jim uses.  You'll have to tweak my procedure a bit if you are using the latter.  But I'll tell ya, the Lodge is pretty great for baking bread.  And it is an awesome abuse of Amazon's free shipping policy.

Lodge LCC3 Combo Cooker

So without further adieu...

Diablo Bread, The Bread of the Devil

Inspired by Jim Lahey's No Knead Breads 

Ingredients

400 grams unbleached all purpose flour
7 grams table salt
⅜ teaspoon instant dry yeast (down from the ½ tsp I originally called for)
1 ½ tablespoons crushed red pepper flakes (Yes.  That is a lot.  Not a typo)
260 grams cool water (55 - 65 °F)
60 grams (4 tablespoons) Sriracha sauce (Don't wimp out!  Not a drop less!)
Wheat bran for dusting

Tools

Cooking spray or oil
Parchment paper
Tin pie plate
Dough scraper
Plastic wrap
Lodge LCC3 Combo Cooker or cast iron Dutch Oven
Serrated knife
Oven mitts
An ice cube

 Procedure

1.  Mix the flour. salt, yeast, and pepper flakes together in a medium sized bowl.  Add in the water and Sriracha sauce.  Mix using a wooden spoon or your hand until all of the flour is incorporated and the dough is sticky.  This should only take 30 seconds or so.  Add more water if the dough seems too dry.
2. Transfer the dough to another bowl lightly oiled or sprayed with cooking spray.  This will help prevent the dough from sticking when you dump it out after the first rise, and this in turn helps to prevent the dough from deflating.  The dough will increase in volume probably by a factor of four at least, so be sure to use a big enough bowl.  Use a bowl that is red on the inside to amp up the viciousness that is this dough.
   
   
3. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap so the surface of the dough doesn't dry out during the bulk ferment (a fancy-schmancy baker's term for first rise).  Let it rise at a temperature around 70°F in a spot out of the sun for 18 hours.  Or you could be like me (everybody should be like me) and put the bowl in a water bath maintained by your home-built Sous Vide rig at a rock-solid 21.2°C.  You'll have to shorten the rise or use a little less yeast if rising at temperatures that are a lot warmer, but try not to get into this pickle in the first place.  The long rise time contributes to the flavor of the loaf.
4. While the dough is rising, cut a circular piece of parchment paper to fit the Combo Cooker using the pan as a template.  Cut it wide enough to stick up above the edges of the cooker.  You'll be putting this paper in the pie plate for the dough's second and final rise.
   
5. After the 18 hour bulk ferment (fancy-schmancy!), generously flour your work surface.  The circular piece of parchment paper should be sitting on top of your pie plate.
   
6. Gingerly tip the bowl containing the risen dough over the floured surface, taking care not to deflate the dough.  You don't have to have your dog looking out the window when you do this, but it helps.
   
7. I usually end up with a round blob of dough that I want to shape into a ball.  To do so, I first use a dough scraper (actually a plastic drywall knife, 'cause that's how I roll) or my hands to gently fold two opposite ends of the blob toward the center to make kind of a rectangle.  Then I use my hands and gently grab one long end of the rectangle and roll it up towards the other to get my ball of dough.  Place the ball of dough seam side down in the center of the parchment paper that is sitting on the pie plate.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
8. Dust the top of the dough with some wheat bran.  Cover the whole thing with a clean tea towel or plastic wrap to keep the top of the dough from drying out.  I use a shower cap stolen from a hotel - the loose elastic does a great job of getting around the pie plate without pulling the plastic too tight.
   
9. Place the pie plate containing the dough in a nice warm spot for the second and final rise (around 75 - 80°F).  I put it in the oven with the light on if the house is cool.  I let this rise go for two hours.  It should look something like this when it is done.  Note the little dimples on top.  I was giving this dough the poke test: the idea is that you poke the bread and the dough should hold the indentation when it has properly proofed.  Don't go longer than you need to here, or the dough will be over-proofed and rise poorly in the oven.
   
   
10. Half an hour before the end of the final rise, put the Combo Cooker into your oven with the rack set in the middle.  Set the oven to 475°F.  You want to be using the Combo Cooker with the shallow frypan part as the base and the deep cooker part as the lid.  It is beyond obvious that if you are doing the final rise in the oven with the light bulb on, that you should take the dough out first.
11. After the half hour preheat at 475°F, take the cover off your risen dough and place it next to your oven.  Have your ice cube and serrated knife standing by.  You are going to work quickly here.  Quickly and extremely carefully.
12. Put on your oven mitts and take the smoking hot Combo Cooker out of your oven and on to the top of your stove.  Take off your oven mitts, pick up your pie plate and gently set it about halfway into the pan of the Combo Cooker.  Slide the parchment paper with the dough sitting on top out of the pie plate and onto the pan, using your fingers on the parchment paper to maneuver it into place.
    
13. Once the dough is centered on the pan, use a serrated knife to cut a slash or two onto the top of the dough.  The dough will rise in the oven and expand where you make these cuts.
    
14. Working really fast, put an ice cube between the pan and the parchment paper under the dough.  The idea is to add extra steam inside of your cooking vessel and prevent a crust from prematurely forming on the bread that would inhibit its rise.
    
15. Get you oven mitts back on, flip the deep part of the Combo Cooker upside down, and use it to cover the pan.  You'll hear the ice cube sizzling away even with the cover on.  Put the Combo Cooker into your hot oven.  Keep the oven temperature at 475°F.  Let the bread cook covered for 30 minutes.
    
16. After 30 minutes, take the cover off the bread and gasp at its beauty.  You'll want it to go back into the oven until the top is a nice dark brown.  This usually takes only an extra five to ten minutes.  Keep a close eye on it so it doesn't burn.  I usually set the lid of the Combo Cooker under the pan to serve as a heat shield for the bottom of the bread to prevent it from getting too dark.  If you have a thermometer, you'll want to see around 205°F in the center of the loaf when it is done.
    
17. Once the loaf is a nice dark brown, take it out of the pan and set it on a wire rack to cool for at least an hour.  You'll be rewarded by a lovely crackling sound as the bread cools if everything went well.

Notes

• If you don't have a kitchen scale to measure out these quantities, go buy one.  I'll wait.  Every  baker should have a scale.
• The usual No-Knead recipe calls up ¼ teaspoon of yeast instead of the ⅜ teaspoon I use here.  It seems the spices kick the hell out of the yeast so extra is required.
• A little less salt is used in this recipe vs. the usual because of the salt in the Sriracha.  The liquid volumes were adjusted accordingly as well.

This bread goes great with pretty much everything.  It is a match made in heaven with chili.  Or pop it into the toaster oven with some sliced cheddar on top.  Me?  I often eat it plain without even butter or jam.  I just close my eyes and savor every bite.  If you are thinking there is something that this bread won't go with, you are wrong.

This bread is a favorite of mine, and not just because I invented it.  The Sriracha and crushed red pepper flakes are great in combination but are not overwhelming - the bread naturally moderates the heat and you are left with some pretty fantastic flavor that can stand up well with anything you dare pair it up against.

Go Make Some.  Now.

Here Comes The Rain

Today's weather at Mad Scientist Labs: Cloudy and Cold.  Wet and Miserable.  Rain, rain, and more rain.  In a word: perfect.

 This Takes Me Back...

As a (hopefully) interesting aside, The Cult used to go by the name of the Death Cult, and before that the Southern Death Cult.  I guess there is something to be said for brevity.  There's also something to be said for picking a name palatable to all those moms who buy music for their kids.  Music was on "records" or "LPs" back in those days.  And I walked to school uphill both ways.

With weather this lousy, going outside and taking care of various chores out there just isn't going to happen.  This gives me a perfect excuse to take it easy after a very busy week and do some stuff I enjoy doing.  What might this be, you ask?

Well, moments ago I pulled a good looking loaf of Jim Lahey's "Pane all’Olive" out of the oven.  This is a fancy way of saying No Knead Olive Bread.  How'd it turn out?

Damn Good, That's How.  And I Don't Like Olives.

I've been a big fan of his No Knead technique lately, since the taste to effort ratio is astronomically high.  Here is a link for this bread and two others that you might want to try.

I've also spent some time today reverse-engineering the STRMON data spit out from my weather station.  I had all of the weather-related parameters sorted out now with the exception of rain and humidity.  It was raining this morning, so that gave me the chance to figure rain out.  And figure it out I did.

Yay Me

In fact, I wrote up a bit of Python code to help me figure this out.  It grabs the STRMON data, timestamps it as the number of seconds since the script started, converts everything to decimal so the math is easier, and then writes the data as a CSV file.  I don't show the checksum bytes in the last two bytes of every message because that would just pointlessly make the file bigger.

2426.3,224,16,33,40,1,0
2428.9,80,15,31,66,83,0
2431.5,96,14,15,255,194,0
2434.0,128,12,39,29,27,0
2436.6,224,11,36,40,1,0
2439.2,80,14,20,66,81,0
2441.7,64,12,14,255,193,0
2444.3,128,10,19,29,27,0
2446.8,224,9,29,41,2,0
2449.4,80,11,25,245,65,0
2452.0,144,13,11,21,3,48
2454.5,128,12,8,29,27,0
2457.1,224,10,29,41,3,0
2459.6,80,9,32,245,67,0
2462.2,160,10,15,176,59,0
2464.8,128,8,21,29,25,0
2467.3,224,8,29,41,3,0

The rain was coming down pretty good and I watched this stuff scroll across the screen.  When the console added another hundredth of rain, I wanted to see the message that caused it to happen.  Let's cut the irrelevant crap out of the above.

2426.3,224,16,33,40,1,0
2436.6,224,11,36,40,1,0
2446.8,224,9,29,41,2,0
2457.1,224,10,29,41,3,0
2467.3,224,8,29,41,3,0

Message 244 is 0xe0.  I had suspected before that this message held rain, but I expected to see it in the second last field above.  What I thought would happen was the console would send a "1" any time the rain bucket tipped.  But then I saw this field bounce around between 1 and 3 randomly.  It turns out I was off by one byte.  Rain is actually in the byte before (40... 41).  What the ISS does is send a running total of rain between 0 and 255.  In the example above, it would continue to send 41 until the rain bucket tipped again.  Then byte 3 (counting from 0) in message 244 (0xe0) would change to 42.

This is smarter than what I was thinking.  My method could have had the console miss a count of rain every now and then if there were interference.  But by sending a running total, this can't really happen.  It is up to the console to track the changes in this byte.

I haven't figured out what those values bouncing around between 1 and 3 are.  I'm suspecting they are just noise from a sensor that I don't have and isn't connected.  Or something like that.  I plotted this field against the rain plot above and there was zero correlation.  In other words, I don't care.

One thing I discovered along the way and that I do care about.  In the example above where the STRMON 0xe0 message changes from 40 to 41, the change doesn't show up immediately on the display.  In fact, it didn't show up until the next 0xe0 message came along ten seconds later.  Interesting, and good to know as I continue my hunt for humidity.

"I'm an excellent driver."

Making

I mentioned last time round that I blew out my Davis Weather Station VP2 wireless console.  A new one should be here by next weekend, and I really am being held up on my alternative weather station console in the meantime.  What I need to understand is the preamble sent by the ISS before real data is sent.  I have a rough idea what this is, but there are enough permutations and combinations that just guessing my way through it would not be fun.

There is, however, other stuff to do.  But before I get in to that, here is an aside for ya.  A lot is being said these days about "Making".  Make Magazine is the poster child for the movement, and the Arduino is that child's favorite toy.  Sites like Instructables (make your own Light Saber!) and Hack A Day show you how to do stuff.  Places like Adafruit and Sparkfun are places where you can get stuff.  I remember the days of Radio Electronics and Byte magazine.  They had articles showing you how you could make a television descrambler or a taser.  But every project had at least one part that was impossilbe to buy (usually an inductor).  There was no Internet and I had no credit card, so I would mail a hand-written letter with a post office money order inside and hope for the best.  Now it is different.  Anybody can get almost anything, and almost all of it is ridiculously cheap.  An Arduino kit costs $20.  My first computer, an Apple //e, was something like $3000, and the Arduino is arguably much more powerful.  I really believe we live in a great time for stuff like this.

Case in point: item #3 on my list of goals for this year is getting  some basic home monitoring setup going.  I mentioned the plan to use some JeeNodes from JeeLabs to make this happen.  I had ordered these from Modern Device some time ago.  It was time to crack the box open and start playing with software.  There was only one problem.

Some Assembly Required

Time to break out my handy dandy Hakko FX-888 that I picked up from Solarbotics late last year.  This thing is great.  It was pretty quick work to go from that to this.

Wireless Goodness

But Making isn't always about electronics stuff.  Not to me anyway.  I want to make great food.    Try #31 of Tartine Bread, for example.  This bread has nothing in it besides flour, water, and salt, and it is fantastic.

I Love Carbohydrates

I am still searching for the perfect combination of a crispy crust and open crumb.  I now seem to be getting the crust right, but the big open holes I used to be able to get in the crumb have deserted me.  I'm baking this bread once a week now and I try a few different things each time in my search for perfection.  Once I get it, I plan to put up a page on this blog that will basically serve as "Tartine Bread: The Missing Manual."  While Chad Robertson has written a fine book, it is sufficiently vague in enough spots to leave a bread-baking noob like me up shit creek.  I hope to fix that.

Try #31 got served along with a Sirloin Butt Beef Roast cooked in my Sous Vide rig for 15.5 hours at 58C.  This was honestly so good that it was unfair to anybody else who ate something today.

I Love Protein

We seasoned it very simply with kosher salt, pepper, and rosemary.  We seared it in a smoking hot cast iron pan for a minute per side to finish it off.  It was so tender it was almost falling apart, yet the texture was absolutely fantastic. You could be served this meat in any fine restaurant, after which you'd go looking for the chef to give him a big sloppy wet kiss in appreciation.

That was lunch.  And then it was time for supper.  Keeping a sourdough starter going as we do gives you a bunch of discard that you've got to use up.  So we gave these sourdough waffles from the gang at King Arthur's Flour a shot.  They were good.  Really good.  Stupid good.

I Love Waffles

A couple flavor combination I can heartily recommend:

• Plain yogurt, Saskatoon berries, and chocolate sauce
• Cottage cheese, bananas, and chocolate sauce
• Pretty much anything and chocolate sauce

Not a lot of headway in the hacking department this weekend, but things got made nonetheless.  And I had a great weekend doing it.

Tartine Bread Tips and Tricks, Part 2

It was over a month ago that I posted for the first time on Tartine Bread Tips and Tricks.  I linked it from the Recipes from Tartine Bread Facebook group and got a pretty positive response.  Well, I've been playing with my technique a little more since then and thought that you might find it interesting.  If not, I'll give you your money back.

Last time I said:

One thing I'm finding is that my fridge is too cool to get much action going during the final rise.  In other words, it really doesn't rise in there at all.  Setting the fridge warmer to get more rise is a sure recipe for spoiling the rest of the food in there and killing me.  Getting a second fridge just for this seems a little silly.

Yes, but there is a third option that I've thought of.  I have a Sous Vide controller that I built myself that can hold a temperature very accurately.  And it just so happens that winter is hanging on enough where I live that it still gets below freezing in the evenings.  It occurred to me that I don't need a second fridge.  What I need is something I can leave out in my unheated garage that will keep my dough warm enough, not cold enough.  See where I'm going with this?  Behold!

Baby, It's Cold Outside

On the bottom left corner, we have my Sous Vide controller.  The power cord for the heater and the output of the wall wart power supply (more on this in a sec) are squeezed in past the lid of my Coleman beer cooler.  The temperature probe is a little more fragile, so I threaded it through the cooler's drain spout on the lower right, and then closed off the remaining opening with Kleenex.  It is all set up on a Black and Decker Workmate bench in my garage.

Rube Goldberg Would Be Proud

Here's what we've got inside.  From left to right:

• bread dough in a mixing bowl covered by a tea towel and plastic cap to keep drafts at bay
• temperature sensor taped to a coffee mug to keep the sensor in place
• light bulb for heat, clamped in a plastic vise, and controlled by my Sous Vide setup to keep an internal +46.5F (or +8C if you are metric inclined)
• an old PC fan to circulate the air and keep things at an even temperature.  This is powered by the wall wart power supply I mentioned above

Did this work well?  No, it worked awesome.  The controller kept this thing at a rock solid +8C as the temperatures dipped to around the freezing in the evening.  And why this temperature?  Well, I read someplace on the fantastic Sourdough Home website that suggested a temperature between 45F and 48F for a long cool rise like this.  And being mathematically minded, I just took the average.  Anyhoo, I left my dough in this rig from 10pm Saturday night until my bake the next morning at 9am.  The only problem I've got now is that this setup isn't going to work in the summertime.  Oh well.  That is a problem for a later day.

Another thing that has been bugging me is that my bread is always darker on top than it is to the sides.  I figured that this is because I don't have the Lodge combo cooker that is recommended in the book.  All I've got is a KitchenAid dutch oven that I got for a steal at Canadian Tire this past fall.  I figured that the tall sides of the DO were shielding the bread from the heat on the sides somewhat.  I'd have to break down and get a combo cooker, or do the pizza stone / metal lid thing.

Or not.  Here is a picture of my KitchenAid dutch oven.  A combo cooker is really just an upside-down dutch oven.  I noticed that the concave indentation below the handle would provide a stable surface for the dutch oven if the handle wasn't there.  And it is just one screw on either side of the handle holding it on.  I had that bad boy off in a minute.

Am I the First Person to Hack A Dutch Oven?

I first took my boule out of the cooler and turned it upside on top of a piece of parchment paper I had pre-cut to the shape of the lid.  Then I made a deep X-shaped cut and used the parchment as a sling to set it on to my smoking hot dutch oven lid, blurrily seen below sitting on top of my stove. The stuff on top of the boule is wheat bran, which I use to prevent sticking instead of the wheat flour / rice flour combo recommended in the book (I think the wheat bran looks better and tastes better to boot).

Probably...

I had a bit of a screwup here.  The bread was heavy enough that it wanted to spill over the sides of my parchment sling as I carried it from the countertop to the lid.  That partly explains why the cut from top left to bottom right is so ridiculously open.  But only partly.  I was able to build up the tension very nicely after the final shaping, and the overnight rise in the cooler vs. what I normally get in the fridge surely helped as well.

Things were looking good.  I put the big part of the dutch oven over top of the lid and put the whole thing in the 500F oven.  I dropped the temperature to 450F, waited 20 minutes and went in to take the lid off.  Here is what I got.

WOW!

You heard me.  WOW!  We are talking some good looking oven spring here.  And I was pumped to see that a puff of steam escaped when I took the lid off.  And in that moment, it all made sense.  Inverted, the dutch oven is able to prevent the steam from escaping out the top.  When sitting as it normally does, the steam rises and sneaks out the gap in the oven's lid.

Back into the oven it went.  This is what I got 25 minutes later.

WOW WOW!

WOW WOW is right!  A beautiful deep brown all the way around, and just burned a bit at the thin edges of the ears.  Without a doubt, the best looking loaf I'd every pulled out of my oven.  And this was Try #18 at making this bread.  I set it on the cooling rack and was delighted to hear the song of the crackling crust as it cooled.

And no bread porn would be complete without a crumb shot.

Oh Baby

Nice and open.  Notice the funny curve underneath the bread though.  This is from sitting on the inverted concave surface of the oven's lid.  It actually makes the bread easier to cut through because the knife cuts through the top arch of the bottom crust first and then goes down progressively, rather than hitting all of the tough crust at one time.

And the pluses just keep on coming. The KitchenAid lid actually has a bunch of dimples on the concave part of the lid, probably so that steam condensing on the lid collects on the dimples and drops back in to the stew, or whatever. For upside-down bread making, it creates a bit of a gap between the bottom crust and the heat coming up from below. This does a great job in preventing scorching of the loaf's bottom.

All this wouldn't mean much if the taste wasn't there. But the taste was great. The crust was crispier and more flavorful than I'd ever tasted. The crumb wasn't too far different from previous efforts, but perhaps it was a bit lighter than previous attempts because of the great rise I got.

All in all, I was ecstatic. I got more rise and oven spring than ever. I got a beautiful deep brown crust and a flavorful crumb.  If you are making this bread and just putting your boule in the fridge overnight, you have got to try to find a way to do it in the range of 45F - 48F.  And if you are using a regular dutch oven, take a close look and see if there isn't some way to use it upside down.  Do both of these things, and then thank me later.  If you are going to all the trouble of making Tartine bread, it is worth it to go the extra mile to make it the best you can with tricks like these.

Both of these tweaks to my technique easily added up to the best bread I'd ever made. I don't know if this is the best bread I can make, but I have the feeling I'm getting pretty close. And that feels good.

The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection

I have been accused in the past of being a perfectionist. I don't think the moniker fits, but I do try hard to do well in the tasks I take on. And I must say, baking a good loaf of bread is quite a challenge.  As I detailed in an earlier post on the topic, making good bread is as much an art as it is a science.  There are a lot of different things going on in sourdough, which is surprising given that it is as basic as a bread can be: flour, water, and salt.  No instant yeast, no eggs, no extras.

The essence of the bread's flavor comes from the starter.  The starter is a mix of flour and water that has had the good fortune of some wild yeast stopping by and taking root.  There are two kinds of bacteria that are at work here, and the two contribute a different flavor to the bread depending on their proportion.  I can't be assed to look up the details of what they're called, and which contributes to the sour flavor and which contributes to more rise.  But I do know that I wanted a little more sour flavor than I got out of Try #12.

So for Try #14, I took the same approach as Try #12.  To my half batch of Basic Country Bread from the Tartine Bread book, I did as before and built my leaven from only a half teaspoon of my starter that is now being fed twice a day (see here on why you want to use so little starter if you want more sour).  The smell of that starter has only the slightest hint of sourness to it after letting it reach its peak and letting it come down a bit.  But this time, I also added a half teaspoon of pretty powerful smelling starter from my discard container.  My thought was that I'd get the good rise I did on Try #12 thanks to the vigorous starter, and some extra sour flavor from the discard.  I also presumed that the discard wouldn't do much to change the rise time of the dough since it is pretty burned out by now.  In a nutshell, the fresh starter would give me rise and the old starter would give me flavor.

I whipped up a batch yesterday and otherwise followed the same guidelines as Try #12 (Try #13 was the disaster I had trying to push a 40% rise during the bulk ferment: let us never speak of it again).  My rise with this extra starter was actually a coupler hours longer this time than last time.  Remember, I am going for a 30% rise and will wait as long as I need to to get it.  Was the rise slowed somehow by the addition of the old starter?  I don't think so.  I think it is more likely that it was cooler in the house this weekend, so that just slowed everything down.

Let's cut to the chase, shall we?  How did it turn out?

Try #14

I got my best rise yet this time around with a crumb that is nice and open.  But did I get more of a sour flavor?  Indeed!  The 50-50 mix of the starters gave noticeably more tang to Try #14 than Try #12 without any old starter.  The bread went great with some eggs done over easy and some turkey bacon on the side.  It was stellar toasted in the toaster oven with some ham, old cheddar cheese, and grainy mustard on top.  It will be interesting to see how the flavor develops as well: we've found that the sour flavor builds a day or two after baking.

I might try even more old starter next time around just for grins, but I now think I'm at the point where I can call this bread a job well done.

Tartine Bread Tips and Tricks

For reasons I don't understand, I started getting interested in being able to make really good food a year or two ago.  Perhaps it is all the traveling I've done that has given me the opportunity to try all kinds of different things.  Or perhaps it is just the idea of gastronomical hacking that appeals to me.  Dunno.

It was about a year ago that I put together my Sous Vide rig, and My Lovely Wife and I had many fantastic meals from it since then.  Going to restaurants doesn't hold that much appeal to me anymore, because after a meal I often feel that I could have cooked better at home.  I don't consider myself a foodie, either.  In my mind, a foodie is somebody who goes to some expensive restaurant to try wild and exotic things without lifting a finger themselves.  That is not me.  What appeals to me is using simple techniques to create something amazing.  And that is why I like Sous Vide.  It is almost foolproof.  Anybody can do it.

But I also like bread.  Real bread.  I have been to places like France and Italy, where bread is a key part of the culture.  The bread I had in Italy was easily my favorite.  The crisp crust and the big holes on the inside (what I'd later learn is referred to as an "open crumb") hooked me and hooked me bad.  Toast this stuff, brush on a little olive oil, rub a half a garlic clove over it, and then top it with fresh chopped tomatoes and a little kosher salt.  Heaven on a plate.

Bread where I live is typical mass-market North American crap, suited for little more than making egg salad sandwiches.  This just wasn't acceptable to me any longer, with the memories of the bread I had in Italy lingering in my brain.  Thinking that I had the protein thing down with Sous Vide, I decided to take on another popular macro-nutrient: carbohydrates.  I began a quest to make good bread.

I can do better.  I know I can.

As always, it starts with research.  I had always been under the impression that great bread required a wood-fired oven and other things out of the reach of mere mortals.  But Google quickly brought me to sites like Northwest Sourdough (Free Ebook!), BreadTopia (Great Videos!), Sourdough Home (Clearest Explanations on the Net), and of course The Fresh Loaf (Amazing Forum!).  I then bought myself a couple of books off of Amazon: Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice and Chad Robertson's Tartine Bread.  I was taken by the bare-bones approach and beautiful pictures in Tartine Bread.  This is where I would start - Tartine's Basic Country Bread.  And, to make a long story short, this is where I would fail in eleven straight attempts to make a good artisan sourdough bread.

Where Sous Vide was pure science and easy to get right, I was finding that there was much more of an art to making bread.  I was having a terrible time trying to get the right combination of rise, texture, and flavor.  I would tweak this and tweak that trying to get a bread that lived up to the pictures in the book.  Then I hit what I simply refer to as Try #12, where things started to come together and I felt I was getting a decent grip on the many variables involved.  So I thought I would jot some things down that might help out other aspiring bakers trying this recipe.  I'm not going to go into all the nitty gritty details of how to make this bread.  If you want a rough idea of what is involved in baking the bread itself, you could start here.  A great thread on the care and feeding of sourdough starter can be found here.

My biggest problem with Tartine Bread right from the start was the, erm... starter.  We left it on top of the fridge and fed it once per day in a ratio of 1 part old starter to 1 part new flour to one part water, by volume.  That was a recipe for failure.  Before refreshing it, the starter always smelled very sour.  This was a sign that it was burning itself out.  We weren't feeding enough to maintain a healthy culture that is key to a good rise.  This explains the many "bricks" that I made.  So we still leave the starter out on the top of the fridge, but we feed it twice a day in a 1:1:1 ratio by weight.  This ratio and frequency seems to be recommended by most successful bakers.  We've been keeping a healthy starter with just 5 to 10 grams of each element to keep the amount of starter discard to a minimum.  However, ever since we found this amazing pizza crust recipe, we have the opposite problem: how do we get more discard to keep up with our hunger for great pizza!?!?  By the way, if you try that crust, you'll want this awesome sauce to go with it.

The second problem that I had was with the rise during the bulk fermentation.  I had fallen into the trap of following Robertson's guidelines for time (three to four hours) and temperature (80F).  I went to great lengths to try to duplicate this environment exactly.  I used my oven as a proofing chamber with my Sous Vide temperature controller turning a light bulb on and off to keep 80F exactly.  A small DC powered fan circulated the air within to ensure an even temperature throughout.  My temperature probe was twist-tied to the oven grill to give enough thermal mass to ensure accurate readings.  I did all of this, and I never got the 20%-30% rise he talked about in the book in that time frame.  I thought it was just some peculiarity with my approach and would give up on the bulk fermentation rise when it looked like things weren't going anywhere.

This is just wrong, and he sort of says so but doesn't make it obvious.  Here is probably the most important thing I figured out after 11 tries:

It isn't the time or the temperature that is critical.  It is the percentage rise.

The big thing about Try #12 was that I figured I would wait for that 30% rise no matter what.  It was just a bit of flour and water, after all.  Try #12 just sat on the counter with some plastic wrap over the bowl to prevent the surface from drying out.  I used a tip from the Recipes from Tartine Bread Facebook Group and did a S&F (Stretch and Fold) every half hour for the first two hours and then a more gentle S&F every hour after that.  I would do this for as long as it would take.  And it took five hours, but I finally got the 30% rise I wanted and, subsequently, the best bread I'd ever made.

Judging the rise isn't straightforward if you don't do the bulk fermentation in a steep sized container with graduated marks on it.  All I have is a glass mixing bowl.  So all I did was get a piece of masking tape along the side of my bowl, put it on a scale, and added water 100 grams at a time.  100 grams = 100 mL, so I was basically marking off a measuring cup.

You've got to work with what you've got

After the autolyse, I put the dough in my mixing bowl and use the backside of a wet spoon to flatten the dough out.  That gives me the initial volume.  Multiply that volume by 1.3 or whatever rise you are after, and you know when to stop.  Simple.

Or not.  I was having a bit of a problem with parallax errors.  In other words, the level of the dough in the bowl changes if your eye isn't lined up properly with the surface of the dough.  So what I do is measure the height of the final rise point on my bowl and measure that same height onto my dough blade (actually a plastic drywall knife).

Precision is a big deal with me

So as my dough starts to reach the point where it is getting to the end of its rise, I stick my dough blade at the back of the bowl and line up the tape with my final rise point on the front.  That lines my eye up straight across.  When the dough hits that line, I'm done my bulk fermentation.

Parallax be gone!

The next problem I stumbled with was the initial shaping.  Robertson is terribly imprecise here, and there are no good pictures to give you a really good idea of what the right amount of tension during shaping is.  It wasn't until I saw this video linked from TFL that made it all very clear.  Watch this video.  And then watch it again.  It gets good around 1:20.

Other small tips that work very well for me:

• Don't overwork the dough when you first mix it.  Just work it enough to combine all the ingredients together well.  Then stop.
• Cover everything all the time.  I cover my leaven after mixing it with a bit of cling wrap.  I cover my bowl during the bulk ferment on the counter and the final rise in the fridge using one of those shower-cap like bowl covers like this.  This prevents crusts from forming on the dough surface at any point in the process.
• When adding the salt, don't just dump it on top of the dough and then dump in the extra bit of water.  Mix the salt and water together first, dissolving as much of the salt as possible.  Then dump that into the dough and mix.  Speaking of salt, I find the bread a little salty for my tastes.  Ever notice that you are kind of thirsty after a slice of bread?  In the half batches I make, I cut back the salt to 8 grams instead of the 10 grams he calls up.
• Try wheat bran instead of the 50-50 mix of wheat flour and rice flour that Robertson suggests in preventing the dough from sticking to the towel during the final rise.  This is what Jim Lahey uses for his no-knead bread.
• Scoring the loaf with an X instead of a square just seems to work better for me, for some reason.   I use a razor blade with a bit of spray oil to minimize sticking, and I make deep cuts.  I don't go for pronounced ears by making shallow angled cuts because these thin ears just turn into pure carbon when the bread is toasted.  And we toast this bread a lot.

Throughout the book, Robertson writes about how you're supposed to be flexible as you go based on the signs the dough is giving you.  And there's the rub.  If you haven't made a good loaf of bread before, you don't have the instinct to know when the dough is ready to move on to the next stage or not.  How do you know what is good and bad when you don't know what good and bad are?  Hopefully some of the tips here will help people get on the road to good bread that much sooner.  It is worth the effort.

My success lately has been good, but I'm still experimenting.  One thing I'm finding is that my fridge is too cool to get much action going during the final rise.  In other words, it really doesn't rise in there at all.  Setting the fridge warmer to get more rise is a sure recipe for spoiling the rest of the food in there and killing me.  Getting a second fridge just for this seems a little silly.  So what I'm trying this weekend is pushing the rise during the bulk ferment to 40% from 30% and seeing what happens.  I might also try sticking with a 30% rise and just leaving it in the fridge for several days.  That would likely help develop more sour flavor in the final product that I'd like to have.  I have already pulled a few tricks like using the starter after it has peaked and started to fall back a bit, and by using a mere half teaspoon of starter in my half batch of leaven to add time to the process to try to bump the sourness a bit.  But I'd still like more.  Adding a higher percentage of whole wheat flour or maybe adding in some rye flour are other possibilities.

I'll leave you with one final picture: my friend, Try #12

Success At Last

Update: I mentioned above that I was pushing for a 40% rise this time. FAIL. The dough seems to hit equilibrium at around 30% with this hydration and doesn't go any higher. Now I know why Robertson recommends what he does.  The moral of the story when working at this hydration is to wait it out until you get a rise from 20 - 30%, but don't get greedy and expect more.