In this month’s Chronogram I review some books by local authors: three cookbooks, the Fleisher’s book, and a memoir about earning a degree at the CIA in Hyde Park.
Also, unrelated to the article but impossible not to boast post about, behold the single most beautiful loaf of bread I have ever made:
I know, right? Need some more?
Over the course of the last couple of years, I’ve been baking bread pretty regularly. Thanks to Andrew, who set me up with a recipe, sourdough starter, banneton, dough whisk, and bench scraper, I had no excuse but to make bread. And over time, I got pretty good at it; by accident and on purpose I modified his recipe and tried all sorts of things with it. And now I feel comfortable sharing what I’ve learned with all of you. The master dough that I’ve developed can become almost anything with proper handling: I have used this dough to make bread (all kinds of shapes), pizza, bagels, pita, and rolls. They’re all exemplary, and very easy to make.
The chorizo from last month is finally ready for eating as is. I’ve used a couple for cooking while they were still soft in the middle, but now they’re firm all the way through. I celebrated by making the sort of lunch that I would happily eat every day, and which neatly encapsulates my motivation for spending all the time that I do making all this food from scratch: pleasure.
My normal baking routine is to make dough in the evening and then let it rise overnight for baking in the morning. The wild starter likes a long ferment, and gets even better after a day or two in the fridge after the first rise (if I’ve planned ahead, which is not always the case). But sometimes one needs of the baked goods in a narrower time frame, and it is for that very reason that I always also have a bag of dried yeast on hand.
It’s funny how sometimes we randomly reach the critical mass needed to push us headlong into a new endeavor. Recently I was talking to some friends about their homemade bagels, and then I saw this post on a reader’s blog and it suddenly hit me that making bagels is just making rolls with some toroidal geometry and boiling thrown in. And the presence in the fridge of homemade lox and cream cheese provided all the impetus I could possibly have asked for to shove me face-first into the wonderful world of bagel making.
I had a hankering for Korean-flavored beef skewers grilled out on the porch, but lateness as always altered my plans a bit. The result was less elegant than it could have been, but sure tasted good. Plus, it’s a safe bet that nobody has ever made Korean-flavored water buffalo meatball sandwiches with ramps, charred green onions, pak choi, and homemade feta-yogurt-ramp sauce before.
Not so kosher for pesach, but then I’m pretty treyf. Having made yogurt recently, and then strained it to a Greekness, I had a nice little jar of whey to use for something. That something turned out to be raisin bread, and a good thing too.
An inevitable result of making cheese is having lots of whey on hand, which can be either a curse or a blessing depending on how well you can dispatch it in ways that are more useful and nutritious than pouring it down the drain. If you have pigs, you’re in luck; they love it and will reward you with excellent proscutto. Otherwise, after extracting fluffy, gorgeous ricotta–which is ludicrously easy compared to making whatever the first cheese was–you’ve got to use it up or the ghosts of your peasant ancestors will torture you with heavily-accented guilt and spectral finger-wagging. To spare you that Dickensian horror, here’s a list of some things I’ve been using it for.
So this month’s Charcutepalooza process was brining. The day they announced it was the day I finished off a lovely pastrami, and the week before we had eaten the last of a tongue pastrami. So that was bad timing. But it did give me an excuse to make something else.
Various forms of grilled sandwiches with home-cured meat played a big part in getting me through this winter. Versions of the reuben in particular really spoke to me, and I’ve been missing them since the last pastrami ran out. (Here’s an account of my from-scratch reuben, and here’s the post about the recent tongue pastrami). I love Moroccan flavors, and in general I prefer lamb to beef, so I thought I’d make lamb pastrami. It’s logical if you think about it; both the brine and the crust can be easily tweaked towards the Maghreb, and lamb takes smoke and strong spices really well. The Reubenesque aspects of the final sandwich all got similar modifications, and the result was a hell of a sandwich.
While I work on my bread page (which is coming, really) I thought I’d put up this easy variation, which also represents the first meal I’ve cooked in a week. It felt good, and doubly so because it coincided with my amazing discovery of a new form of locomotion somewhere between hobbling and limping.