Karl Heinz Kremer’s Ramblings

Here is my first attempt to bake on of the breads in Daniel Leader’s
Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe’s Best Artisan Bakers. As usual, I had a problem with following instructions, and I had to modify the recipe a bit: Instead of 500g of all purpose flour, I used 400g of AP and 100g of whole wheat graham flour. I did not want to replace too much flour with whole wheat to not change the character of the bread and the consistency of the dough too much.

And, because of time constraints, I had to “rush” the whole process a bit by shaving off a few minutes of every step. The temperature on that day (it was very hot) may have worked to my advantage because the dough did rise a lot faster.

French bread is best fresh, and I did not want to eat three loafs within an hour of baking them, so I also cut short the baking time a bit - hence the somehow pale look of the finished bread.

That allows me to freeze the loafs and then just pop them into my convection toaster oven for 8 to 10 minutes and have delicious fresh french bread.

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How Did You Get Here?

I did some research on why and how visitors come to my site. One interesting finding is that a number of people are searching for information about PDF content streams. Here is the list of the 50 most common Google searches that contain the string “content”:

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I like bread. There is nothing better than bread fresh out of the oven - yes, I know you are not supposed to cut right into a freshly baked loaf, but still, there is nothing better…

Good bread recipes are hard to find, but I think I just hit the jackpot: Daniel Leader’s
Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe’s Best Artisan Bakers.

How to I judge a baking book? Of course, I look for the pretzel recipe. Most recipes I find online result in a dough that is too dry - Leader’s recipe gets it right (it took me quite a bit of experimenting to come up with my recipe). I’m not yet convinced that his baking soda/water ratio is correct, and I don’t want to know what boiling the dough for 1 minute will do to the pretzels… Actually, I think I do know: It will turn them into bagels, and that is not quite the texture that I’m looking for in a pretzel.

I looked at a bunch of recipes, and they all look good. In addition to the actual recipes there are enough illustrations in the general section of the book that show the finer points of processing and shaping the different breads.

This is a great book, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be busy over the next few months baking all sorts of artesian breads.

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I have a bag of corn meal that I use to bake pizza, so that it comes off the peel without sticking. What else can you do with corn meal? Hmmm… There is this recipe for corn meal pancakes right on the bag. So let’s see what I need… OK, I’m out of baking soda (I guess I made to many pretzels lately), but I can probably get by without, there is enough baking powder in the recipe so that it should not matter that much. I don’t have buttermilk, but I have saco cultured Buttermilk Blend, so that’s not a problem either. Other than that, I have everything: corn meal, flour, eggs, oil, salt.

By replacing the buttermilk with the dry stuff, I have to modify the recipe a bit, and I keep telling myself: Don’t forget the eggs!

The batter is done, I start baking the pancakes, and I start noticing that they are not quite the way I imagined them… But I manage to get nicely brown pancakes after a while. While I bake the last batch it hits me: I forgot the eggs. Doh!

But, there is not much that a bit of fresh fruit and a lot of maple syrup cannot fix:

The pancakes were a bit flat (flatter than your usual pancake or Kansas), but once soaked in maple syrup quite tasty. But I guess next time I’ll remember the eggs…

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What are Maultaschen? Just one more variation on your standard filled pasta dough - your ravioli, tortellini, wontons, mantı, 餃子, …
As you can see, every culture came up with their own way of filling pasta dough. In Swabia the dish is called Maultasche.
Historically, this is a dish that uses whatever leftovers you have, wrapped in dough.

Let’s assume that we already have a mixture of our leftovers (which is how I started this process, I had a bag of filling in my freezer - hence no pictures of preparing that). If you don’t have that mix available, try this:

2 onions (chopped)
1 pkg frozen spinach
1/2 pound ground beef (I use meat loaf mix)
a few strips of sauted bacon
salt
pepper
2-3 eggs
some slices of dry bread, soaked in milk
some fresh parsley

As you can see, the recipe is not very accurate, just use what you have, it’s traditionally a dish made from leftovers: Just throw in what you have (mushrooms, veggies, …)

For the pasta dough use the following:

[more after the jump]

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I have an image on Flickr that’s titled “Coffee Sludge Pattern” - it’s a picture of the dried coffee sludge that remains in the drip pan of my Rancilio Silvia espresso machine.

Every now and then I check the stats for my Flickr account, and yesterday I noticed that somebody did actually search for “coffee sludge” and found my picture. That of course piqued my interest, and I needed to know what else somebody would find when searching for “coffee sludge”.

Here is one such link:

http://www.mailman.srv.ualberta.ca/pipermail/patho-l/1998-November/005656.html

Let me just say that forensic pathologists are gross…

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