tartine - sourdough

LlTartine’s Country Bread

THE NEW YORK TIMES

YIELD2 loaves

TIME2 weeks (or 2 days with active starter)

The country bread from Tartine Bakery in San Francisco has reached cult status among passionate bakers, and deservedly so. Based on traditional principles, Mr. Robertson has developed a way to get a tangy, open crumb encased in a blistered, rugged crust in a home kitchen, from a starter you create yourself. It is a bit of project — from start to finish, it takes about two weeks — but well worth the effort. (If you already have active starter ready to go, then the process shortens to two days.) So know that you have to be patient, and that the nature of bread baking at home is unpredictable. The level of activity of your starter, the humidity in your kitchen, the temperature during the rises, the time you allow for each step — all of these elements affect the bread and any change can impact your final loaf. But that final loaf is a wonder, the holy grail for the serious home baker.

Featured in: Tartine’s Country Bread: Be Patient, Perfection Is Near. 

  

INGREDIENTS

FOR THE STARTER AND LEAVEN

1000 grams white-bread flour

1000 grams whole-wheat flour

FOR THE BREAD

200 grams leaven

900 grams white-bread flour

100 grams whole-wheat flour, plus more for dusting

20 grams fine sea salt

100 grams rice flour

PREPARATION

Make the starter: Combine 1,000 grams white-bread flour with 1,000 grams whole-wheat flour. Put 100 grams of warm water (about 80 degrees) in a small jar or container and add 100 grams of the flour mix. Use your fingers to mix until thoroughly combined and the mixture is the consistency of thick batter. Cover with a towel and let sit at room temperature until mixture begins to bubble and puff, 2 to 3 days.

When starter begins to show signs of activity, begin regular feedings. Keep the starter at room temperature, and at the same time each day discard 80 percent of the starter and feed remaining starter with equal parts warm water and white-wheat flour mix (50 grams of each is fine). When starter begins to rise and fall predictably and takes on a slightly sour smell, it’s ready; this should take about 1 week.(Reserve remaining flour mix for leaven.)

Make the leaven: The night before baking, discard all but 1 tablespoon of the mature starter. Mix the remaining starter with 200 grams of warm water and stir with your hand to disperse. Add 200 grams of the white-wheat flour mix and combine well. Cover with a towel and let rest at room temperature for 12 hours or until aerated and puffed in appearance. To test for readiness, drop a tablespoon of leaven into a bowl of room-temperature water; if it floats it’s ready to use. If it doesn’t, allow more time to ferment.

Make the dough: In a large bowl, combine 200 grams of leaven with 700 grams of warm water and stir to disperse. (Reserve remaining leaven for future loaves; see note below.)

Add 900 grams of white-bread flour and 100 grams of whole-wheat flour to bowl and use your hands to mix until no traces of dry flour remain. The dough will be sticky and ragged. Cover bowl with a towel and let dough rest for 25 to 40 minutes at room temperature.

Add 20 grams fine sea salt and 50 grams warm water. Use hands to integrate salt and water into dough thoroughly. The dough will begin to pull apart, but continue mixing; it will come back together.

Cover dough with a towel and transfer to a warm environment, 75 to 80 degrees ideally (like near a window in a sunny room, or inside a turned-off oven). Let dough rise for 30 minutes. Fold dough by dipping hand in water, taking hold of the underside of the dough at one quadrant and stretching it up over the rest of the dough. Repeat this action 3 more times, rotating bowl a quarter turn for each fold. Do this every half-hour for 2 1/2 hours more (3 hours total). The dough should be billowy and increase in volume 20 to 30 percent. If not, continue to let rise and fold for up to an hour more.

Transfer dough to a work surface and dust top with flour. Use a dough scraper to cut dough into 2 equal pieces and flip them over so floured sides are face down. Fold the cut side of each piece up onto itself so the flour on the surface remains entirely on the outside of the loaf; this will become the crust. Work dough into taut rounds. Place the dough rounds on a work surface, cover with a towel, and let rest 30 minutes.

Mix 100 grams whole-wheat flour and 100 grams rice flours. Line two 10- to 12-inch bread-proofing baskets or mixing bowls with towels. Use some of the flour mixture to generously flour towels (reserve remaining mixture).

Dust rounds with whole-wheat flour. Use a dough scraper to flip them over onto a work surface so floured sides are facing down. Take one round, and starting at the side closest to you, pull the bottom 2 corners of the dough down toward you, then fold them up into the middle third of the dough. Repeat this action on the right and left sides, pulling the edges out and folding them in over the center. Finally, lift the top corners up and fold down over previous folds. (Imagine folding a piece of paper in on itself from all 4 sides.) Roll dough over so the folded side becomes the bottom of the loaf. Shape into a smooth, taut ball. Repeat with other round.

Transfer rounds, seam-side up, to prepared baskets. Cover with a towel and return dough to the 75- to 80-degree environment for 3 to 4 hours. (Or let dough rise for 10 to 12 hours in the refrigerator. Bring back to room temperature before baking.)

About 30 minutes before baking, place a Dutch oven or lidded cast-iron pot in the oven and heat it to 500 degrees. Dust tops of dough, still in their baskets, with whole-wheat/rice-flour mixture. Very carefully remove heated pot from oven and gently turn 1 loaf into pan seam-side down. Use a lame (a baker’s blade) or razor blade to score the top of the bread a few times to allow for expansion, cover and transfer to oven. Reduce temperature to 450 degrees and cook for 20 minutes. Carefully remove lid (steam may release) and cook for 20 more minutes or until crust is a rich, golden brown color.

Transfer bread to a wire rack to cool for at least 15 minutes before slicing. The bottom of the loaf should sound hollow when tapped. Increase oven temperature to 500 degrees, clean out pot and repeat this process with the second loaf.

Tip

The remaining leaven is your new starter. Continue to feed it if you plan to bake again soon or hold in an airtight container in the refrigerator for future use. When you want to bake again, begin feeding the starter a few days or a week beforehand until it once again behaves predictably.

Lisbon Chocolate Cake

Ingredients

For Cake:
- 115g unsalted butter
- 30g unsweetened cocoa
- 1 1/2 tbsp corn starch
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp fine salt
- 5 ounces bittersweet chocolate
- 100g sugar (probably could cut down)
- 3 large eggs chilled

For Ganache:
- 1 3/4 cup heavy cream
- 6 ounces bittersweet chocolate

For Topping:
- 3 tbsp cocoa powder

Directions
1. Heat oven to 325F, line 9 inch pan with parchment paper and butter
2. Sift cocoa, corn starch, baking powder and salt into bowl
3. Melt butter and chocolate in bain maire, stirring until glossy. Remove from heat and stir in sugar. Beat in eggs, one at a time, beating vigorously for 1 minute after last egg added. Stir in dry ingredients and pour into pan.
4. Bake for 18-20 minutes. Transfer to rack and cool for 5 minutes before unmolding. Take off parchment paper and cool cake completely. Wash and dry pan
5. Pour 1 1/4 cup cream into saucepan and scald cream on medium heat (to 180F). Stir in chocolate until melted. Transfer to bowl and refrigerate, taking out to whisk every 10 minutes for 50-60 minutes.
6. Place cake back in bottom of pan.
7. Whisk remaining cream until medium peaks. Fold into ganache with spatula, then spread over cake in pan. Refigerate for at least 2 hours.
8. Before serving, sprinkle cocoa over cake using a strainer.

Overnight Cinnamon buns

I'm Ingredients

Buns
1 cup of milk
1/3 cup of butter
1 package (0.25 oz) of active yeast
1/2 cup white sugar
4.5 cups of flour
1 tsp salt
3 eggs

Filling
3/4 cup of brown sugar
2 Tbsp of cinnamon
(optional more butter)

Frosting
equal part butter and cream cheese and icing sugar
vanilla to taste


Instructions

warm milk in microwave, melt butter in it, let come to room temperature, add yeast, stir to dissolve.  Add 3 cups of flour, sugar, salt and eggs and stir to combine.  Add the remaining 1.5 cups of flour 1/2 at a time.  When the dough has pulled together, roll out onto a floured suface and knead until supple and smooth ~ 8 mins.

Place in oiled bowl, oil dough and cover with wet cloth.  Let rise in warm place for ~ 1 hr until double in size.  Punch down and then roll on a floured surface to 10X14 size rectangle.  Place filling, wet with water far long side, then roll.  Cut into 12 pieces and place into a greased 9 X 13 or 12 in deep dish pizza dish, cover with plastic wrap and let rise overnight in the fridge.

Next morning, set oven for 375 and take out of fridge, leave room temperature for 30 mins, then bake for 25 - 30 mins until browned on top.  Let cool slightly then turn out onto plate, and cover with frosting.

Ala Dorrie Greenspan - Bonne idea

Instead of cinnamon sugar fill with caramalized onions and chipotles in Adobe sauce 

Weekend Apple Cake

from Baking Chez Moi

Ingredients

- 1 1/3 (181gm) cup of flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp fine sea salt
- 1 stick of butter ( 8 Tbsp, 4 ounces, 113 gm)
- 1/2 cup (100g) sugar
- 1/2 (60 gm) confectioner's sugar

- 3 large eggs (room temp)
- 1 Tbsp dark rum (or additon 1 tsp of vanilla extract)
- 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
- 2 medium apples, peeled cored and cut into small chunks

- about 1/2 cup (106g) apple jelly or strained apricot jam (optional)

Centre rack in oven and preheat oven to 325 degrees
BUtter 8.5 x 4.5 inch loaf pan, dust with flour, tap out excess, put pan on baking sheet lined with parchment or silpat

Whisk flour, baking powder, cinnamon, salt together

Beat butter on medium speed until smooth, add both sugars and beat until creamy.  Add eggs one at a time, beat for 1 min after each egg.  (the mixture will look curdled and be thin) Add the rum and vanilla.  Reduce the mixer to low speed and add the dry ingredients, mixing only until they disappear into the batter.  With a flexible spatula, fold in the apple chunks then scrape into the prepared pan.

Bake for 60 - 65 mins

No knead bread

3 cups flour

1/4 tsp instant yeast ( or traditional dissolved in water)

1 1/4 tsp salt

1 5/8 cups water

Mix together dry ingredients 

Mix water in until it forms a shaggy dough cover with Saran Wrap for 12-18 hrs

Cover work surface with flour fold over 2 times then wait 15 mins

Work into ball then cover cotton towel with flour bran or cornmeal place ball seam side down the cover with flour again and towel and let rise for 2 hrs

Bake in 450 degree oven in lidded pot ( heat pot up with oven ) 30 mins then remove lid and bake additional 15-30 mins

Hogwarts-inspired Gingerbread Castle 2013

This year we made a Hogwarts-inspired gingerbread castle (inspired by the book, not the movies, since trying to bake as many cylindrical pieces of gingerbread as would be required to copy the movie Hogwarts was intimidating).

The recipe for the gingerbread was a Dorie Greenspan recipe, taken from NPR (here); it made a lot of dough, enough to make the entire castle (minus towers) with a single batch. We used melted sugar instead of royal icing to connect the pieces, however. Those amber spheres on the pointed roof are leftover melted sugar, rolled by hand into a ball. The towers are Rice Krispie treat, painted with chocolate. The stained glass windows (the colours are hard to see in the picture) are melted jolly ranchers. The Christmas lights strung along the towers and the front parapet are leftover jolly ranchers, melted and then rolled into shape. The other windows are Werthers Chewy Caramels, but that wasn't a great idea since they loose their shape after a couple of days. The clock was a cinnamon sugar cookie, covered with fondant and painted with edible paint. Hedwig was also made of fondant, and painted with edible paint.

Sweet Melissa's Fallen Chocolate Souffle

A recipe from the book Meagan Nui Jai gave to me. Super yummy and surprisingly, super easy to make. Only required 6 ingredients !!! May, Ben and I each had two pieces at one sitting = )

Savory Sweet Melissa

For lunch today I made savory muffins from The Sweet Melissa Baking Book (courtesy of Meagan !) The variation I chose was sun dried tomato, mozarella & oregano. Also for lunch I continued the Italian theme and made spaghetti squash with veggies in tomato sauce. Both were yummy. I kind of over baked the muffins so they were a little dry. I kind of made too much sauce for the spaghetti squash. Therefore the only solution I saw was to dip the savory muffin into the tomato sauce which was super yummy.

Apple Pie Cake

Brown & Green Amish Friendship Bread

HAVE NO FEAR MEAGAN !!!

I figured out how to get the "graduation" cake = )

Somehow, when I combine the Amish Friendship recipe with banana, the bottom turns kind of green. This is my third attempt and all three times the bottom has been green. When I do not use banana it is all one colour, boring.

Banana Almond Butter Yeast Rolls

Well, I was going to take a picture because they looked really cute. Instead of the 12 rolls it was supposed to make, I rolled the dough along the long edge making 24 rolls. However my camera was out of batteries. By the time the batteries were charged, all the rolls had disappeared. Half into my stomach the other half I traded for some home grown zucchini and tomaotes. Maybe next time I will be able to wait until the batteries charge. I doubt it though. I cannot resist warm bread that has just come out of the oven.

Apple Cinnamon Raisin Bread

Dough after first rise
Dough after filled and shaped into a jelly roll

Baked product

So this was attempt #2 at the yeast apple cinnamon rolls. I did two things differently. This time I started at 9:30pm and let the rolls have a "cool rise" overnight. The second thing was that I used probably 1/2c more sugar and 1/2c less flour. Still used the same old yeast that expried in 2007 = )The results were much better this time. Not (as) sour !!! I used the following site to get good tips. http://www.baking911.com/bread/101_intro.htm. I highly recommend it.

Ginger-Fruit Tartelettes

Fruit tartelettes with a ginger-cardamom tart-crust and ginger pastry cream, adapted from Pichet Ong's "The Sweet Spot".

Apple Cinnamon and Almond Yeast Bread

Loaf before 2nd rise. Loaf after baking.Inside of baked loaf.
Same thing, different shape before 2nd rise.
Samething, different shape, after baking.

Took the whole day !!! Started at 9:30 am and was finally finished at 7:30 pm. I decided I needed to use my yeast which expired June 2007. So just a tad over the exipry date. Did the proof test and the little guys did just fine. The only thing though ..... ummm ..... kind of tasted like sourdough. Probably because I used very little sugar. Those little yeast guys must have been super active. Okay I just went to the fleishmann's yeast page to figure out why it might be sour. They said old yeast can do that. Soooo, even though the little guys were super active, no good if trying to make a sweet bread.

Sweet Potato Doughnuts with Roast Apple Filling

Adapted from Pichet Ong's "The Sweet Spot: Asian-inspired desserts"

There is so much confusion over the term "sweet potato" and "yam" that I had a little trepidation before deciding to try and make Pichet Ong's "Sweet Potato Doughnuts with Roast Apple Filling". When I was a cashier, and needed to be able to recognize produce, I was told that sweet potatoes were white on the inside, whereas yams were orange on the inside. Other than that, I deduced that sweet potatoes must have less moisture than yams, based solely on what happens when you try and roast them - yams start oozing moisture, but sweet potatoes don't.

The problem is that, not everyone agrees on this distinction between yams and sweet potatoes. When I moved to Toronto, I didn't seem to be able to find the white sweet potatoes everywhere, and the orange kind was usually marked as "sweet potato." Further research on Wikipedia informed me that both of the vegetables I was considering are "sweet potatoes", and that true yams are not readily available in North America.

I didn't really care that much - I just wanted to make/eat some baked goods. So I bought some orange "sweet potatoes", as these were the only ones available to me, and began making the dough.

At first things were going well - the yeast was foaming, I had all the ingredients...the problem came with the yams. Or sweet potatoes. Whatever they are. I strongly suspect that I was supposed to use the dryer white "sweet potatoes," because the dough was ridiculously wet! Like pancake batter! Although Ong mentions that the dough is soft and wet, I have no idea how on earth I was supposed to shape a dough that wet. Either the amount of sweet potato Ong refers to in the recipe (343g) is supposed to correspond to the post-steamed sweet potato, as opposed to the pre-steamed sweet potato, or I did something else very wrong (but I was careful this time! I used a kitchen scale!), I have no idea how I was supposed to form such a wet dough into balls. So I added about an extra cup of flour, and stuck it in the fridge for two days. The original recipe just asks for a 1 hr rise, but since I am a bad planner, I realized I didn't have enough time to finish the recipe.

Two days later, I took the dough out of the fridge to let it unchill (it was still very, very wet - my hopes that it would dry out a little, like the infamous no-knead dough, were squashed), and got to work on the apple filling, which was quite straightforward.

I spooned 2-3 tbsp of dough into tartelette tins, and then tried to "pinch the top seam" of each doughnut, although it was rather more like gathering dough together and letting it stick to itself. In the end, however, I did manage to surround the apple with dough. Trying to get these guys into the oven was fun - the tartelette tins all slid around on the cookie sheet, so that the separate doughnuts were stuck together at their edges. Trying to separate them was an exercise in futility, so I ended up just sticking them in the oven,stuck together and all.

I was supposed to bake them for about 20 mins, until "puffed and golden brown", but considering that the dough started off ORANGE (another clue that I should have used the non-orange variety?), I was not quite sure the "golden brown" part. I baked them for 25 minutes.

Verdict?

The extra flour made the doughnuts more chewy than I think they were supposed to be. Perhaps if I had a stand mixer, instead of doing this by hand, the texture would have turned out differently. Or perhaps if I used less sweet potato - I used 343 g, as per the directions, but this wasn't "1 medium sweet potato" as Ong suggests, but more like three sweet potatoes.

Would I make them again?

Not the same way - I would definitely try the dryer variety of sweet potato, and hopefully wouldn't need to add the extra flour. But actually, I like Uncle Jack's apple tarts much more than these, in general, so perhaps if I was taking the effort to make filled-pastries, I would just make those instead.

Amish Friendship Bread or Amish Spinach Bread?

Amish Frienship Bread starter batter Day 1

Amish Friendship Bread finished product Day 10


This is probably my fourth or fifth attempt at this recipe. I have used vanilla pudding as an ingredient for several recipes and this was the first attempt with chocolate pudding. The recipe states that you can attempt it with various flavours of pudding. This was also the first time for this interesting discolouration of the finished product. Looks like I made it with spinach pudding instead!!! I brought it into work withou knowing about the discolouration and a coworker asked me if it was safe to eat = ) I told her I didn't even notice the discolouration but it tasted fine to me. I hope nobody at the office gets sick.

April Baking...(and Fish-steaming)

Blackbean-Steamed Fish with SuiChoy on Rice
Korova Cookies with Almonds
Chocolate Tea Loaf (Moomin)
Ichigo Daifuku (Strawberry, redbean paste, rice flour dough)


Sesame-Seed Cake

Coffee-Walnut Biscotti, Strawberry tarts, Peanutbutter-banana-oatmeal Scones

Coffee-Walnut Biscotti, Strawberry tarts, Peanutbutter-banana-oatmeal Scones

Muffins, Brownies and Experimental pizza...

Oatmeal buttermilk muffins, brownies, zucchini-onion-chicken-mushroom-hoisin pizza, mushroom-greenpepper-onion-chicken-curry pizza...

Banana Oatmeal Chocolate-Chip Cookies

This recipe I found at Alpineberry, adapted from Tish Boyle's "The Good Cookie." It was very good!
Of course I am incapable of following recipes completely, I used a microwaved-from-frozen banana instead of a fresh banana (I have about a million frozen bananas in my freezer), and I also used less walnuts - I used about 1/2 a cup instead of a cup. The only reason for this is that I ran out of walnuts! I think it would have been even better with the full amount of walnuts. This cookie had a good amount of sweetness, and I think it could even stand alone without the chocolate.