bidsbakesbread

Treats. Yoga. Coffee.

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Good morning beautiful 😻

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Some cookie dough is worth eating before you go to the dentist

Tuesday is traditionally my least favorite day of the week, but some Tuesdays, like today, bring good news and are worth celebrating.  The best way to celebrate mid-week (or any day really)?  Cookies.  Or in this case you could say brookies.  

This recipe from Smitten Kitchen is quick enough to squeeze into a week night after dinner and before going to the dentist (as I had to do tonight to get my last two cavities filled, hooray!).  Mix the dough, chill for a little bit, then you’re good to go.  

Do they taste like little velvety chocolate puffs of heaven? Yes. Are they worth the side eye from your dentist if she found out you were eating them? Absolutely.

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Weekly Bread

This week has taken it out of me.  Thankfully, there’s freshly baked bread to help me reset.

I can never wait to cut into it before photos 😎

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Labor Day Weekend

While the top of my calendar now says “September”, the weather here in DC has made it VERY clear summer will be sticking around for a few more weeks (at least another month if we’re being honest, thanks climate change :| )  I initially planned to spend my first three day weekend of my full-time job life at home in the mountains with my parents, but after thinking about spending 3 hours in the car, both ways, with a very opinionated corgi as my co-pilot, I opted to stay at home.  Trading the long car ride for sleeping in, yoga, and plenty of baking time proved to be a great decision.  

Knowing there was no need to be up bright and early for work on Monday, my roommate and I set aside Sunday for baking, pizza, and wine.  After discovering a bakery that makes homemade Oreos on Instagram a while ago, finding the perfect recipe for an elevated, homemade Oreo has long been on my baking to-do list.  Thanks to Bon Appetit’s YouTube channel, I hard work of creating a recipe was taken care of.  Baking and assembling the cookies and filling was surprisingly easy.  The cookies are essentially a chocolate shortbread with a rich, complex chocolate flavor with a hint of salt, perfect to offset the sweetness of the filling.  If you have a good sous chef and a few hours to spare I definitely recommend giving them a try.

To continue our food marathon, we set our sights on pizza.  I baked bread earlier in the weekend and set aside some of the leftover starter for pizza dough.  I swear, once you’ve had dough made from a sourdough starter you’ll never want another type of crust again.  It’s pillowy, sweet, slightly tangy...basically everything you want a pizza to be.  Using 00 flour, I mixed the dough Saturday night, shaped it Sunday morning, and stuck it in the fridge to proof before setting out for yoga.  The result was two beautiful pizzas, one with potato, rosemary, and burrata (my new obsession), and one with pesto, mozzarella, and prosciutto (a classic).  Both were excellent with rosé. 

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This week...

I’d like to nominate this week for Worst Week of 2018. After getting a flat tire and my family having to put our lovable dog Brighty to sleep, I’m left feeling like all of these baby ducks.  My feathers have been ruffled and my legs have been swept right out from under me.  

In the midst of all of this and adjusting to typical 9-5 work week finding the time to bake has been very difficult, which has left me in a very sad, carb-less state.

Finally, between yoga and spontaneously bursting into tears on Saturday I found a way to start some bread, and woke up a little bit earlier to bake Sunday morning.  The smell of fresh bread wafting through my apartment is like a warm hug from the universe telling me everything will be okay. 

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Well this was an obvious success.

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Cure for a Monday

In the broad spectrum of breakfast pastries my absolute favorite is the cinnamon roll.  The combination of pillowy, buttery dough, cinnamon, and a slightly tangy cream cheese icing makes my heart sing and pairs very well with a cup of french press coffee.  

To fend off the sadness of Monday (and my last weekday shift at Anthro), I decided to make cinnamon rolls.  I’ve been using the same recipe for years and only recently discovered these should be baked for 30 minutes instead of the suggested 15-18.  While the tops of the rolls are slightly golden after 15 minutes, the inside of the rolls are still raw and SEVERELY underbaked, so the longer baking time is critical to having a completely baked roll.  While all of the mixing, kneading, rising, and baking can be done within a few hours, I always opt to prepare the rolls the night before, let them rise in the fridge overnight, and bake early the next morning.  

Since I prefer a slightly tangier icing I added more cream cheese and left out the maple extract.  In the flurry of enjoying my coffee and watching the World Cup I forgot to take a picture of the end result, but trust me, they were beautiful and tasted delicious :) 

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Bake All the Sourdough Things!!!

Inspired by the success of growing my sourdough starter, in place of my weekly 40% whole wheat loaf of bread I opted to make a levain bread following this Pain de Campagne recipe from Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast.  Stressed out by the idea of wasting even the slightest bit of the culture I had carefully grown, I also decided to attempt a levain pizza dough.    

This entire process started at 5am when I fed my starter before I headed off for my last 6am shift ever at Anthro (that’s right, I FINALLY GOT A FULL-TIME JOB), which also resulted in me being 10 minutes late, but sometimes you need to make sacrifices for bread.  After work and teaching yoga, I got to work autolysing and mixing my doughs.  

As I only have one large plastic tub for baking, I had to get creative and repurposed a random assortment of containers to house all of my doughs.  Once the doughs were mixed and left to rise the process was relatively similar to other loaves of bread I’ve baked.  The dough is folded multiple times, allowed to rise, then eventually shaped and placed in the fridge to proof overnight.  

One of the most noticeable differences was the smell.  Rather than being slightly sweet and nutty, the dough smelled buttery and slightly like feet.  The dough was light and spongy in texture, with more bounce and stretch (due to the higher hydration and all purpose flour) than I’m used to.    

After shaping the dough and proofing it overnight in the fridge, I woke up Friday morning to this beautiful loaf ready to be baked.  

I baked it for my normal 50 minutes which resulted in a crust darker than I expected, although still delicious and caramely (is that even a word? spell check says no, I say yes). 

The inside crumb is a soft white with a light, spongy texture, peppered with small holes of varying sizes.  And the taste...holy shit this bread is good.  Slightly salty with something I can only describe as a light sharpness.  I suspect this would make a bomb-ass grilled cheese or breakfast sandwich.  

  Don’t mind me, I’ll just be eating bread for the rest of the day.  

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Starter - Days 4 and 5

I may have dropped the ball on posting about my starter while I was away at my parent’s house for the weekend, but that’s what happens when you’re having  a great time with your family and eating treats for an entire weekend.  I’m happy to report my starter actually turned out well!  Day 4 and Day 5 were fairly similar.  Volume-wise, the culture did not expand as much as it did the first two days, however, it has developed a nice, slightly tangy sour smell, and there is a complex web of bubbles throughout the mix.  

After successfully transporting my starter back home I transferred a small bit to the fridge to use later in the week.  

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Starter - Day 3

Remember when I said creating a starter is like having a pet?  I didn’t lie.  Since I decided to head out of town for the weekend my starter came with me.  After removing a portion of the culture and supplying it with fresh water and flour, I  packed it up with some wine and avocados, buckled it safely into my backseat, and hit the road.  

The culture has slightly less volume than this time yesterday but a stronger sour smell, so I think I’m still moving in the right direction.  

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Starter - Day 2

It lives!  Despite my concerns yesterday about killing my growing culture I woke up this morning to find a starter that had slightly increased in volume with some bubbles on the surface.  I removed 3/4 of the culture, mixed in the fresh flour and water and left the culture to sit uncovered before I left for yoga.

Following class I returned home to find the mix had nearly doubled in volume and had significantly more bubbles than it did a few hours earlier.  Looking at it now before I go to sleep the mixture looks almost triple the volume it was this morning, and it smells yeasty and slightly sour.  This is the only time in my life I’m actually happy to experience this combination of smells.  

Again, I have no pictures because it’s still a boring container of water and flour soup, but hopefully after tomorrow there will be exciting bubbles to share.  

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Starter - Day 1

One of the biggest hurdles holding me back from delving deeper into bread baking is creating my own sourdough starter.  Deciding to make your own starter is, in my mind, the same as deciding to adopt a pet or raise a child.  There are strict feeding schedules and slight variations can result in disastrous consequences.  However, if you’re successful, setting aside the time to feed a growing culture is something you only have to do once in your life as it can be kept alive for an entire lifetime. 

 Creating a starter is, in its simplest form, fermenting flour and water with naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria in the environment.  The microorganisms consume the starch in the flour, producing carbon dioxide, ethanol, and various organic acids.  Each day part of the culture is removed and replaced with a new supply of water and flour, providing a new food source for the growing microorganisms and preventing an excess of fermentation byproducts which can actually kill your culture.  

Faced with an ENTIRE week off with little to do (other than yoga and chilling the fuck out) I went for it.  Here’s my riveting play-by-play of how I started out (no pun intended). 

Day 1:  Mixed water and flour together.  Let sit uncovered on counter for 2 hours.  Let sit undisturbed for 24 hours.  

Seriously, that’s it.  I don’t even have any pictures to share because there’s nothing exciting about wet flour in a plastic container.  Some yellowish liquid has pooled in the container which makes the irrational part of my brain believe I might have already killed my culture before it had a chance to grow, while the rational part assures me it is simply alcohol that has been produced by my new wild yeast friends.  

Only time will tell.  

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Cure for a Rainy Sunday

Is there really anything better than freshly baked chocolate chip cookies on a rainy Sunday?  

...

Yeah, that’s what I thought.  

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compost cookies

In retrospect (even though it’s only been what, three weeks?) my name, bidsbakesbread, suggests I will only be sharing my bread here, which turns out is slightly misleading.  My description does read “Treats.  Yoga.  Coffee”, so I guess it’s not too much of a surprise that you’re getting something sweet.  Rather than bore you with a slightly different picture of the same bread as last time,  I decided to share my baking adventure this week: homemade compost cookies, thought up by the brilliant Christina Tosi of Milk Bar.  

I had been craving something salty AND sweet, and these cookies ticked all of the boxes.  The addition of ground coffee also turned out to be a great way to keep me from eating all of the dough, as coffee beans are easy to confuse with chocolate chips, and I took a spoonful of what was supposed to be delicious cookie dough and chocolate only to find several coffee beans.  Lesson learned.  

I chilled the dough for a few hours in the bowl, then scooped (using 1/4 cup rather than 1/3 cup because cookies the size of my face seemed very overwhelming) and baked them after yoga.  I cut the baking time down to 15 minutes to account for the smaller cookie size, and when all was said and done I ended up with a perfect two dozen cookies.  

Pairs well with a bottle of Serbian rosé and your choice of Harry Potter film.  

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weekly 40% whole wheat bread.

Let’s kick things off with the first recipe I’ve mastered, the 40% whole wheat bread using the recipe in Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish.  This is my go-to everyday bread and goes well with eggs, avocados, peanut butter, regular butter...basically anything you want to put on it.  One loaf will last me an entire week.  

I mix the dough the afternoon before, allow it to rise, make the folds, then shape the loaf just before I go to bed, letting it proof in the fridge overnight.  Sure, I feel a bit ridiculous setting my alarm an hour earlier in the mornings on my days off to pre-heat the oven, but there are few things as wonderful as welcoming the day with a cup of french press coffee and the smell of freshly baked bread.  Pure.  Bliss.    

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Hey friends!

Let me introduce myself.  I’m in my late 20′s (god, saying late 20′s was terrible) and have a master’s that so far is proving itself to be useless.  I live in a fantastic East Coast city full of type A people who drive me NUTS half the time, and I’m going through the excruciating process that is finding a career job while working two jobs.  Don’t go to grad school kids.  Higher education in the U.S. will ruin your life.  That part of my story really isn’t that unique, getting back to important things here.

Outside of wanting to be able to pay my own rent and student loans every month, I can truly say I’m passionate about three things :

1.  Skiing (the love of my life...my dad would also be mad if he finds out that isn’t listed first)

2.  Yoga.  One of my previously mentioned two jobs is teaching yoga, which I absolutely love.  I began my yoga journey 10 years ago and through all of my ups and downs, within the four corners of my mat I feel like my truest self and that I can conquer anything.

And last, but certainly not least...

3.  Baking.  Specifically baking bread.  I know, how basic of me to love baking, but it’s true.  After baking my way through the stresses of high school and college, spending hours in the kitchen over Christmas with my mom to carry on family cookie and bread recipes from the old country (somewhere in Eastern Europe.  My sister’s Ancestry.com results were rather ambiguous), and briefly considering a career as a pastry chef, I recently took on the challenge of baking bread.  

When I say baking bread I do not mean throwing a mix into a bread machine and pressing “Start”.  I mean measuring, mixing, autolysing, taking notes,  folding, patiently waiting for dough to rise, shaping, proofing, and baking in a dutch oven type of bread baking.  Nearly 9 months into my journey I have a few basic recipes memorized and perfected, and I can proudly say I haven’t bought a loaf of bread in months.  But I’m ready for more.  I’m ready to take on the challenge of cultivating and maintaining a starter, creating the perfect baguette, and delve into the complex world of pastry.  

I’ve created this blog for myself so I can chronicle my journey, including all of the hilarious mishaps that I KNOW will be coming.  I might never share it with the world, but that is okay.  This is for me.  

Sincerely, 

Bids

P.S.  My photography skills are terrible.  You were warned.  Hopefully this will help me improve those too.