Homemade buttery crackers

In case you need a kitchen project during this holiday week, why not make some homemade crackers?  Think of them as small, savory shortbread cookies; they’re perfect for serving turkey salad, leftover cheese or dips, or anything else spready in texture that you’ve constructed out of Thanksgiving leftovers.  A tiny bit of garlic powder gives the crackers a gentle zing, though the dough would adapt nicely to black pepper, cayenne, or other finely ground, dried spices.

This is another recipe from Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day. I was a bit suspicious, initially:  the butter & liquid content seemed too high to make a roll-out dough and avoid major sticking-to-the-counter problems.  Of course, I was wrong, and the whole recipe worked beautifully.

Buttery crackers

• 1-1/4 cups  all purpose flour
• 1 cup cake flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 T sugar
• 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 10 T melted unsalted butter
• 1 egg
• 6 T cold milk (or buttermilk)
• egg wash
• fine sea salt

Heat oven to 400 degrees.  Place all ingredients except the egg wash & fine sea salt in the bowl of a stand mixer.  Mix with the paddle attachment for 1-2 minutes, until the dough is cohesive and well-blended.  Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and roll to 1/8 inch thick (flour as you roll, and turn the dough over once or twice to roll on the opposite side).  Prick the dough all over with the tines of a fork, then cut out 2 to 3 inch circles with a floured biscuit cutter.  Transfer the cutouts to cookie sheets lined with parchment, spacing them about 1/2 inch apart.  Bake crackers for 16 minutes, rotating the pans from top to bottom after 8 minutes.  Cool directly on the pans.  If crackers aren’t sufficiently crisp, return to a hot oven for 5 minutes.

 

Wake up, light the grill, cook breakfast

Pork patty breakfast sausage is reason enough to roll out of bed in the morning.  If you can manage to grill it over hardwood lump charcoal, then it’s reason to get up extra early.  The Mini Big Green Egg is perfect for small grilling jobs such as a few sausage patties.  It creates a hot, focused fire in less than 15 minutes, and the 9″ diameter cooking surface is quite close to the charcoal (perfect for searing).

Important safety note:  if you own this Ridgid shop vac, pay attention to the hose connections, as it has separate “vacuum” and “blower” connections.  When attempting to vacuum ash out of your Big Green Egg, do not inadvertently activate the blower function, or you will need to replace your contact lenses due to ash abrasion.  This concludes today’s safety announcement.

 

White whole wheat, with an overnight rise

While waiting for my sourdough starter to perk up, I decided to bake my way farther into Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day.  Delving into the chapter on hearth breads, I selected a recipe for 100% whole wheat bread, slightly enriched with olive oil and sugar.  Rather than traditional whole wheat, I used white whole wheat, which is a whole-grain flour made from a light-colored wheat variety, with less tannic-tasting, milder-tasting bran.  It is nutritionally identical to traditional whole wheat.  (King Arthur Flour and Hogdson’s Mill white whole wheat flours are sold in local markets.)

The recipe calls for 5-1/3 cups whole wheat flour, 1 T kosher salt, 1-1/4 tsp instant yeast, 3 T sugar, 2-1/3 cups water, and 3 T olive oil, mixed for 1 minute by hand or stand mixer, rested for 5 minutes to hydrate the flour, then mixed for 1 minute more.  Next, the shaggy dough goes into an oiled bowl for a 10-minute rest.  Here’s the interesting part:  rather than rough kneading, the dough gets a gentle stretch-and-fold four times at 10-minute intervals, done directly inside the oiled bowl.  The stretch-and-fold firms up the dough, transforming it from sticky/slack to barely tacky and cohesive.  Then, the dough receives a long, cold ferment in the refrigerator:  up to 4 days! That’s the beauty of this method:  after an initial active period of about 30 minutes, the dough can be baked at any time from 1 day to 4 days later.

To shape and bake, the dough warms up out of the fridge for an hour before shaping.  As gently as possible to prevent degassing, turn the dough onto a generously floured counter and divide into long strips.  Using a light touch, gently stretch the strips to 7-9 inches long and place on a floured peel or parchment paper.  Bake, directly on a baking stone, for 15-18 minutes in a preheated 475-degree oven until deeply browned (the initial color of whole wheat can deceive–use a probe thermometer and cook to an internal temperature of at least 190 degrees ).

Verdict:  this method, known as pain a l’ancienne, requires little activity from the baker.  The only tricky part is shaping:  rough handling will deflate the dough.  A gentle touch yields bread with an airy, holey crumb as good as any artisan bakery….whereas hands of stone equal bread tasting of rocks!

See more yeast baking at Wild Yeast’s weekly YeastSpotting, a roundup of breads on the web.

 

Thanksgiving warm up

The best part about our turkey-centric national festival of giving thanks?  During November, boneless turkey breasts are abundant and often on sale.  I’m not talking about the frozen, “12% solution added”, processed boneless turkey roasts.  I mean a fresh breast, deboned by the butcher and tied with string or wrapped in netting.  To me, this cut is an ideal way to cook and eat turkey—no long cooking, no wrestling with an unwieldy carcass inside a hot oven, no three days of brining, and nobody has to eat the legs.  Since it’s a solid lump of white meat, it can be perfectly cooked to succulence.  Sure, you can roast it in the oven, basted with butter and rubbed with sage like every other food magazine reader, but why cook indoors when you can cook it outdoors, over lump charcoal?

Grilling a boneless breast is simple:  slather a three-pound, skin-on, boneless breast with your favorite poultry rub and cook, indirectly, for 30 minutes per pound between 350 and 400 degrees.   (This precise temperature control is how cooking works on a Big Green Egg; if you’re cooking with gas, you’re on your own.)  Go ahead, toss some wood chips in the fire for flavor, but go easy:  turkey soaks up smoke like a sponge (try fruitwoods like apple or cherry).  Take it off the grill when the interior temperature hits 150; tent it with foil and rest in a turned-off oven for 20 minutes.  The interior temp will climb to 160, and the breast will be succulent, delicious, and ideal for turkey-sandwich leftovers.

While the turkey cooks, it’s easy-peasy to roast a pan of sweet potatoes, onions, and mushrooms.  Cut ‘em into chunks and toss with olive oil, minced garlic, and lots of black pepper.  Spread into an enameled cast iron pan, sprinkle with salt, and cook alongside the turkey until sweet potatoes are tender (aout 45 minutes).

Notice how I re-purposed a le Creuset tart tatin pan; it gave the potatoes a crisp crust.  Can you imagine that some people worry about staining LC cookware?  I haven’t seen anything (turmeric, soot, burned sugar) that  won’t scrub off….makes you wonder why people will spend the dough for enameled cast iron if they’re afraid it use it.

 

Revisiting wild yeast sourdough: pineapple juice

My past attempts to cultivate a wild-yeast sourdough starter have all ended in failure.  Sure, everything looks okay in the beginning, but eventually, the poor little starters all died.  Or maybe they weren’t ever growing yeast at all?

As it turns out, the lively, early activity in my starters might not have been wild yeast at all.  A bacteria called leuconostoc, present in most American flours, gives off carbon dioxide just as yeast does, so an infected starter will indeed bubble merrily.  Except that leuconostoc, which is one of the lactic-acid producing microorganisms responsible for turning cabbage into sauerkraut,  inhibits the growth of wild yeast in the initial stages of starter cultivation.  As it turns out, lots of people have trouble establishing a starter, thanks to this inconvenient bacterium.

So what’s the solution?  Pineapple juice.  (Read more about the pineapple juice solution to the leuconostoc problem, and find out just how a group of intrepid bakers figured it out.)  Baker Peter Reinhart’s new book Artisan Breads Every Day contains sourdough instructions distilled from the experiences of hundreds of recipe testers and the bakers over at King Arthur Flour’s Baking Circle message board.  Pineapple juice immediately acidifies the flour mixture, inhibiting the bad bacterium and providing an extra bit of sugar to encourage the yeast.  The pineapple juice contains some added vitamin C (ascorbic acid), which is also a friend to yeast.

Armed with lots of new knowledge, I’m trying again.  I mixed 1/4 cup pineapple juice with 3-1/2 T flour (half unbleached bread flour, half white whole wheat).  For the first 48 hours, I’ll stir the starter three or four times, vigorously, for at least a minute (yeast loves fresh oxygen and leuconostoc hates it).  After 24 hours, the starter looks exactly the same….which is progress, I guess, as it seems I’m not growing bad, gassy leuconostoc!

 

Are you ready for some po-boys?

This Sunday (November 22, 2009), head on down to Oak Street in the historic Carrollton neighborhood for the New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival, where you’ll have the chance to sample poboys from more than 40 restaurants, poboy shops, and caterers, ranging from Di Martino’s and Dong Phuong to Emeril’s, Pascal’s Manale, and Ye Olde College Inn.  Last year’s event got crowded quickly; this year, the organizers have re-arranged food booths, craft vendors, and music stages to allow for better circulation (translation:  easier access to as many sandwiches as your belly can hold).

 

Gary Nabhan speaking tonight at Octavia Books

Hear authors Gary Nabhan and Kurt Friese at Octavia Books (513 Octavia Street, 504.899.READ), tonight, 11/18/09, at 6 pm.  Nabhan is a professor of sustainable environments at Northern Arizona State University; he writes & thinks about cultural and environmental adaptation as it relates to food. 

Nabhan’s 2001 book Coming Home to Eat is a fascinating account of his attempts to “eat locally” in the middle of the Arizona desert; it changed the way I thought about native foods (this was long before “locavore” became a buzzword, before random suburbanites started worrying about “food miles”).

Learn more about Nabhan here.

Kurt Friese is a chef, educator, and author of Slow Foods in the Heartland.

 

Tamales as art

Printmaker turned performance artist Jenny Leblanc rolls hot tamales with her family at The Front Gallery (4100 St. Claude Avenue, 504-920-3980), weekends through December 6th, noon-5 pm.  Read Times-Picayune art critic Doug MacCash’s take on the performance.  Sadly, MacCash neglects to mention the important part:  how did the tamales taste?  As compared, say, to Manuel’s (RIP), or Old Style (Gretna), or D&S (Houma), or the meat-n-masa-all-mixed-up style of tamale as sold by Joe Sepie’s in old Jefferson?

 

Key lime blondies

While I am on the record as a white chocolate hater, I just can’t resist a good sale.  Tucked into the back of all Williams-Sonoma stores is a rack or two of discounted goods.  Forget the silicone trivets, holiday plates, scented dish soap and decorative towels–I head straight for the food.  W-S discounts by half any food items about to expire.  It’s the perfect time to buy things like Guittard chocolate, or smoked paprika.  This week, I scored a box of Guittard milk discs and 3 boxes of Guittard white discs.  But back to the first line:  I don’t even like white chocolate!  I now needed to find a way to use 36 ounces of expiring-in-December, yet fine quality, white chocolate…using the milk chocolate won’t be a problem.

My backyard key limes provided inspiration:  the mild character of white chocolate pairs well with citrus.  Why not make a key lime/white chocolate brownie?  I started with this Crazy Blond Brownie recipe from King Arthur, with some citrus & white chocolate modifications.  The resulting bars are mostly chocolate & nuts held together by a bit of blondie batter.

Key lime blondies

• 2 cups brown sugar, packed
• 1 T key lime zest, finely grated (use a Microplane; from 4-6 key limes)
• 1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter
• 2 large eggs
• 1/4 cup key lime juice (from 4-6 key lime)
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup white whole wheat flour
• 3/4 cup unbleached all purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 12 oz white chocolate discs (I like Guittard brand)
• 1 cup chopped pecans, toasted
• 1 cup chopped macadamia nuts, toasted

Heat oven to 350.  Line a 9 x 13 inch baking pan with foil; grease lightly.  Place the brown sugar in a bowl; rub the zest into the brown sugar vigorously with the back of  a spoon, until the sugar is fragrant.  Melt the butter in a medium saucepan; remove from heat and cool to just barely warm.  Stir the brown sugar & zest into the melted butter (in the saucepan); continue stirring until smooth.  Beat in eggs, one at a time, then vanilla extract and key lime juice.

In a separate bowl, stir together flours & baking powder, then add to the mixture in the saucepan.  Use a rubber spatula to combine thoroughly, then stir in the white chocolate & nuts.  Spread the mixture evenly into the greased, foil-lined pan.  Bake for 35-40 minutes until lightly browned.

 

 

Cookin’ on a Big Green Egg mini

Saturday-night-college-football grilling:  one ribeye, a baked potato, and for dessert, an apple crisp.  Within 25 minutes of lighting the coals, my Big Green Egg mini hits 550-600 degrees.  A few additional minutes’ preheating ensures a clean-burning fire for a perfect sear on the ribeye. Not only does the mini heats up in a flash, and it burns an incredibly small amount of charcoal to get to incendiary temps.

Next, I dialed the temperature down to 400 to cook the potato, achieved with a 3/4 inch opening at the bottom air vent and pinky-finger-sized opening at the top daisywheel air vent.   (Yeah, yeah, I should have cooked the potato first since it takes longer, but I was hungry for steak).  Ordinarily, no foil jacket is necessary on a Big Green Egg baked potato.  But I lightly oiled and salted the potato’s skin, so I didn’t want it to brown too quickly.  A bit of foil provides just enough protection from any leaping flames.

For dessert, an apple crisp:  I added an 8″ round baking stone, waited 20 minutes for it to heat up at the higher temperature, then baked the apple crisp at 350.  The crisp cooked quite a bit faster than I expected (translation:  it was a bit more browned at the edges than usual)!

The crisp is made from one of those great non-recipes that allow for expansion, contraction, and improvisation….peel, core, and dice 1 apple for every 2 servings.  Toss the apple chunks with cinnamon & sugar in a bowl.  In another bowl, combine equal parts softened butter, rolled oats, flour, and brown sugar to make a crumb topping (about 1 T ingredients for each apple used).  Put the apples in an oven-proof (grill-proof, in my case) dish and sprinkle the crumbs atop.   Bake until browned.  Nice variations:  add plumped raisins, dried cherries, or fresh blueberries to the apples, chopped pecans to the topping, or toss in a teaspoon of finely chopped candied ginger.  It’s all good….