Moonshine Breadhaus

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A few days ago I mixed the leaven and poolish for a batch of almond croissants. The recipe is found in the pages of the first Tartine book, and included in those pages are many helpful photos detailing the process of mixing the dough, laminating it with sheets of butter, shaping and all. There are even several color photos of the finished product, in all it’s buttery, flaky goodness.

What follows is meant in no way to replace this valuable resource. As a baker, this is a book you should own. Instead I’ll simply be documenting my own attempts, and how those attempts deviate from the ones proscribed in this book.

The recipe calls for mixing a poolish and a leaven ahead of time. This was the second recipe for croissants I’ve attempted, and the first to include a sourdough leaven. For the poolish, you mix 200g both all-purpose flour and warm water with 3g of active dry yeast. The leaven is somewhat different, 220g each flour and water, and a tablespoon of recently-fed sourdough culture. Allow these to ferment at room temperature until a small drop of each floats in water.

To mix the dough, you combine 300g leaven and 400g poolish with 450g room-temperature whole milk. To this you mix in, slowly, 1000g bread flour, 85g suar, 25g salt, and 10g active-dry yeast. Allow this dough to rest for about 30 minutes before giving it a series of turns once ever half hour, for 1 and a half hours. Transfer the dough to a large ziploc bag and chillin the fridge for 2 hours.

My first attempt found my dough inflating near to the point of exploding out of the gallon-sized freezer bag I was using. If you can, use a larger bag, but keep an eye on your dough anyways. I had to regularly deflate mine over the two hours it was in the fridge.

This second attempt deviates from these instructions in a number of ways. As my leaven was mixed a few days ahead of time, and left out on the counter to ferment, it had overextended itself, and was more sour and alcoholic that I’d like to to be. To remedy this, I spooned a tablespoon of this leaven into a deli cup, mixed it with 150g warm water, and then added 150g bread flour.

My ability to estimate the amount of flour left in a 5lb sack of King Arthur is abysmal. In mixing this dough I found I only had 600g or so of bread flour, so I made up the difference with 400g all-purpose flour. As my potential for developing gluten is hindered with this change, I french folded my dough for ten minutes after the autolyse, before beginning the series of folds. I will be doing this once ever 10 minutes during the first turn, in hopes to develop an adequate amount of gluten by the time this hour and a half elapses.

With the second series of french folds, the dough is getting smooth and like satin. I will allow the dough to rest for another ten minutes before doing a final set of folds. Since I will

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Chilaquiles

Oven’s hot from the bread I just pulled out of the oven. Sweating all kinds of fierce, and yet my thoughts (and my belly) turned to the chorizo I had in the fridge, a remnant of the piperade that nursed me back from what turned out to be the worst hangover I’ve experienced in my life, a few weeks ago. If I’m too broke to grill anything this Labor Day, then dammit, I’ll sweat my ass off just to spite myself.

This recipe is loosely adapted from Hilah’s, who first introduced me to this lovely dish through her videos. She’s dope. Check her out if you don’t already know that,

1 T bacon grease

2 T butter, divided

1/2 lb chorizo, crumbled

1/2 small onion, small dice

1 flour tortilla, cut into strips

3 eggs

For the crema

sour cream

lime juice

salt

pepper

For the salsa

1 T butter

3 heirloom tomatoes, stemmed and cut into wedges

1 onion, brunoised

1 T cumin, freshly toasted and ground

8 or so arbol chilis, or an adequate amount of whatever chili you have on hand or prefer

So, the salsa. Cut tomatoes into wedges, toss with olive oil and salt, and roast at 400 until charred. While the tomatoes are roasting, toast cumin and the chilis on another pan for 10-15 minutes. Chop these up in a spice grinder, or mortar and pestle if you want to get fancy. Set aside.

Saute your onions in butter until translucent but not brown. Add spice mixture and cook for 3 minutes. Add garlic in the last 30 seconds. Remove from heat.

By now the tomatoes should be good, so pull them from the oven and process in a food processor. Add to your onion mixture with 2 cups of simmering vegetable stock. Water works too, but why add water when you keep 8 pints of both veg and chicken stock in the freezer at all times? You do that, right?

Anyways boil this down to your desired consistency. Yields slightly less than a pint.

The crema is simple. Take an amount of sour cream. Add enough lime juice so that it’s pourable. Season with salt and pepper.

The chilaquiles themselves are the fried strips of tortilla. They’re incredibly versatile, and while I prefer to eat them with eggs for breakfast, really you can do anything with em. Lately I’ve been adding chorizo and onions to mine, but that’s only because I’ve had an amount of chorizo on hand since that last hangover, and it’s delicious.

Saute the chorizo in bacon fat until it releases it’s own fat. Add the onion, season and cook till the onions are translucent and the chorizo is crispy. Strain, and add fat back to pan. Add a tablespoon of butter. Once melted and hot, add the strips of tortilla. Season liberally. Keep the tortillas movin over high heat until crispy, puffy and brown. Just before they are done, clean the center of the pan and pour in your salsa. Stir briskly until warm, and remove pan from heat.

In a smaller pan, fry three eggs. I use a special 6” nonstick pan that I bought exclusively for eggs. Melt a tablespoon of butter, and once add, add your eggs at once. Cover immediately and drop the heat. Once the whites have set on top, carefully flip your eggs, season with salt and pepper, and count to ten. Yolks should be runny, with firm whites. This is how I like my eggs fried. If you like em differently, go for it. I tried this recipe with scrambled eggs earlier this week and it just wasn’t the same.

Now we plate. Arrange the chilaquiles on the plate, and top with half of your salsa. Slide the eggs directly on top, and add the rest of the salsa. Dribble the crema all over in some sort of attractive fashion. Ideally you would garnish with chopped cilantro and a squirt of lime juice, but since I’m too broke to keep fresh herbs on hand at all times, and too dumb to maintain an herb garden, so you won’t see much of those on this blog just yet.

There are at least 4 different types of fats in this recipe, not including the fat from the eggs and crema. If that’s your thing, you’re reading the wrong blog. It’s damn delicious and will probably kill you.

[moonshinebreadhaus-blog]

Over two and a half years ago, an attempt at a blog was made. It didn't go so well. At the time I was unemployed, broke and couldn't cook for shit. For all the drunken rambling, I hadn't accrued a moment of professional kitchen experience. Reading back on those entries is thoroughly embarrassing, but I've decided to keep them, as a reminder of how far I've come, and how far I have yet to go.

For the past year and a half I've been a prep cook at various establishments in and around the city of Philadelphia. After 4 months at my current spot, a somewhat fancy restaurant attached to a chain of luxury hotels, I begin training for the line next week.

To count the number of things I've learned, or the things that remain to be learned, is an exercise in futility. Each day I handle new ingredients, many of which I never even realized existed. I push myself harder every shift. The satisfaction I receive from this line of work vastly exceeds my ability to describe it. This is the life I have chosen. The kitchen is my home.

For now I'm just a prep cook, but my area of personal expertise is to bake. Right now I am baking my way through a copy of Tartine. In the dead heat of summer, I preheat my home oven to 500 degrees at least once a week. Since June 5th I've been maintaining a sourdough culture I christened Tank Man, and every Sunday I find myself doing something new with every feeding.

A lot of it has been simple sourdough boules. As my techniques refine, I find myself becoming more comfortable with higher hydration doughs. I've made bagels, from simple sourdough onion bagels to some abortion of an attempt at pumpernickel. I've even marbled rye and milled freshly-toasted groats for some of the more experimental things I've tried. There's even a bag of whole-grain spelt, awaiting the same treatment in my cupboard.

Last night I wrote about my attempts with pastries. I'll be mixing the dough for another batch as soon as I get up and clean the goddamn kitchen. I only work three twelve hour shifts right now, but when I begin working the line I'll get another two shifts. I'm chronically broke and forever lacking the motivation to do much about the kitchen. Living with two other people and having to clean up after them every time I want to do anything serious in that kitchen is getting tired. Maybe maintaining a blog should help with that.

I should get off my ass and clean something. See you around.

[moonshinebreadhaus-blog]

even the ghetto eats pastries

 It’s 3 am and I’m trying again. About a week ago, I made some croissants. It was my second attempt overall, after an underwhelming first try last year I found in the book Make The Bread, Buy The Butter, that I read on my kindle. After finally picking up a copy of Tartine, I am ready to try again.

Last week’s croissants came outside great. A little browner than I wanted, yet beautiful. I ate as many as I could, but lacked the people to share them with. I wasn’t scheduled at work for another two days, so an entire half of the 20 I made went stale before anyone could see them.

This is actually the first photo I managed to take off them, 5 days later. A total of three people, myself included, have seen these croissants. The others were the vegan girlfriend, and our roommate.

Our roommate is the type of person who is content to eat an entire Domino’s pizza on the floor of his bedroom, leave the box right where it is, and it’s still fucking there after over a week. Later on I was making pizza sauce and could not find any dried oregano or chili flake. They’re both in a pile, with the Domino’s box.

Anyways he ate one. Counting these nine stale croissants piled right in front of me, that means I ate 9 croissants over the course of three days. And yet I’m making more. Perhaps something is wrong with me.

These ones will be almond, or frangipane croissants if I you went to pastry school. I sure didn’t, so they’re almond croissants to me and every barista I’ve ever asked for one.

Last week I found myself wrapping up lamination at around 4am. In spite of the book, I neglected to freeze my block of laminated dough for two hours before retiring for the night.

When I woke at 11, the dough had popped through its plastic wrap, and the exposed bits developed that dry dough skin. I rolled it out and portioned the croissants immediately, and they came out great anyways. Regardless, I must attempt a more reasonable laminating schedule, that doesn’t begin at 1am and rob me of precious sleep or proper treatment of the dough.

The poolish had risen, while I am being swarmed by cats, and that means I am done rambling for the night. See you when the dough turns. Goodnight.

[tinylentils-blog]

So I met this girl. She gave me the giant rotting pumpkin she kept in her car, and suddenly all my cookies have apples in em. It’s the darnedest thing. This is our food blog.

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When I started this blog, I wrote a long-winded post detailing my attempts at conjuring up a sourdough starter. It produced a single batch of pizza dough before I neglected it to death. It was a traumatic experience, mostly because I tend to grow quite attached to things I go through the trouble of naming.

Flash forward a few months. After obtaining a 25-pound sack of bread flour, I felt it was time to begin anew. And so I did. This new starter I've christened Ygramul, the Many. If you never had a childhood, you might want to google that. He only reached an appropriate vitality a few days ago, but I have high hopes for him.

Here's a terrible photo of his first offspring. It's my first attempt at a batard, or oval loaf, and like most things these hands create, it's rather misshapen. Motherfucker had the gall to get stuck to the "peel" (read: inverted cookie sheet) as I was loading it into the oven. Note to self: invest in cornmeal.

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Another loaf I produced a few weeks ago. I don't have any photos, but lately I've also produced some onion bagels (as per Reinhart's Baking Artisan Bread) and some nonsensical braided thing I really can't explain.

Henceforth I'll keep it fresh, promise. None of this weeks-ago shit.

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It's been a while. Here are some baguettes for your troubles. Made em last week. Stay tuned.

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My new favorite rapper.

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Don't forget to vote!

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For the next 19 hours or so, you can get $100 (1/3) off your order for a year's subscription to Rouxbe, the online cooking school. Thousands of high quality videos, lessons and quizzes. An excellent Valentine's gift for the aspiring gastronome in your life.

Just visit the link below to place your order.

http://rouxbe.com/gift_card_orders 

[moonshinebreadhaus-blog]

Since I last wrote, I've been trying a lot of new things lately. In reading Heat, I became inspired to make my own fresh pasta, which I promptly set out to do. Given my lack of a legit rolling pin (or most of your average kitchen pretty much), I was left to my own devices. The devices I found were a couple of cans of tomatoes. Oh yeah. Stunting like a poor kid. Stunting like myself.

Given my primitive methods, things could have definitely turned out better. I made a butter and sage sauce for my pasta (also learned while reading Heat), which I definitely intend to write a post about, because it was so bomb-as-hell. I didn't get any photos, although, frankly, it didn't look as good as it tasted, so it's no big loss.

I made tagliatelle (or was it linguine? Fettuccine? Fuck if I know) and ravioli (tortelli?). Eventually I'd like to try other shapes. Orecchiette, some kind of shell pasta made with a butter knife (seen being produced in the video below) seemed like an interesting place to pick up. Tortellini, eventually, as well.

Reading Heat also left me with a desire to learn Italian, so naturally I copped a copy of Rosetta Stone right quick. Currently I can count to six, or describe your family and some colors and stuff. Given my desire to eventually work in a kitchen, I should probably be learning Spanish instead. I don't see why I can't do both.

I also put my sourdough starter to work for the first time. Since I didn't have any bread flour on hand, I couldn't get balls deep in boules of sourdough bread right away, so instead I made pizza dough, which was quickly turned into a pizza. Nothing special, boring-ass plain cheese pizza. I used to make pseudo-Hawaiian pizza (sup bacon) all the time, but in those days I'd just buy already made pizza dough. For shame, right? No more. 

Finally, I made brownies. This was my fourth time making these brownies in four or five months, so they turned out great. I'll definitely be writing them up eventually. I was so proud of them, I promised some friends I'd bring them some before we went to a show last Friday. Unfortunately, my self-control didn't agree with these plans. Or the plans about taking a photo before they were all devoured. Sorry guys :(

So that's what I've been up too, cooking-wise. I've finished Heat, then moved on to Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. I finished that in a day or so, so I jumped right into his followup, Medium Raw, which is what I'm currently reading. Next I'll probably be getting into something from Michael Pollan. Probably the Omnivore's Dilemma. And I also need to make some progress with McGee, and I'm still trying to get my hands on a copy of Marco Pierre White's Devil in the Kitchen.

Oh yeah. I've started a Twitter for this blog. You can follow me at @BSFoodBlahgger. That's all for now.

[moonshinebreadhaus-blog]

Hey, you. Shut your butt and use this website/app. Except ignore the butt stuff 'cause that's weird. I mean if you're into it, hey, whatever, that's cool man, but I think we've gotten totally off subject. I forget what I was talking about, but I'm pretty sure it was hella neat.

[moonshinebreadhaus-blog]

In procuring a copy of Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything, I may have googled him. I found this.

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A sour start

After my complete failure the other day, I immediately set out to learn what went wrong. Turns out, everything. Read some blogs. Asked around. Watched the relevant Good Eats episode. I realize I should have probably done all this before attempting to bake my first loaf of bread ever, but hey. It is what it is. Upon supplementary reading, I found Alton repeating oft-uttered culinary myths regarding breadmaking. Specifically, sourdough starters. Motherfucker says leaving a bowl of flour and water out uncovered attracts wild yeasts from the air. Turns out, that's bullshit. The proportions of his starter were way off, it seems, as well. Pretty much made a thin slurry. The advice I've received in these past few days suggests a MUCH thicker starter. No longer relying on a single source for information, and recognizing false information when it surfaces, gives me confidence that I've learned much since I embarked upon this journey. And yet there always remains more to learn.

So, what is a starter, you ask? A sourdough starter is basically a simple dough (I imagine when I get to the bread chapter of McGee's On Food and Cooking, I'll be able to speak more accurately than this without consulting Wikipedia first. I'm only on eggs. Gimme a break, I'll get to it), fermented with Lactobacillus bacteria, which results in naturally occurring yeast. It is one of two major forms of leavening, the other being cultivated yeast, which wasn't possible until Louis Pasteur confirmed germ theory in the 1860s. So basically sourdough has had a 3,300 year head start. Talk about arcane knowledge, amiright?

I started my starter simply enough, on a Saturday evening. 1/2 cup white flour combined with 1/4 cup water. I used white flour because it's all that I had, but I am aware that a whole grain flour contains many more wild yeast cultures, and it seems most bakers have the best success with these types of flours. Nevertheless, this being my first attempt, I'll make due. I've made a note to pick up bread and rye flours for future bread baking endeavors.

I left my proto-starter to sit overnight, for twelve hours. The next day, I came back to find very little evidence of activity. It had risen somewhat, but it hadn't doubled and no bubbles had broken the surface (not that I expected any at this point. Right now, it's very thick). I allowed it another 12 hours to finish rising. I imagine with a whole grain flour this second rest would have been unnecessary.

24 hours into this endeavor, I am ready to feed my starter for the first time. At this point, I've begun to grow attached to the little guy. I consider him my new pet. One that I get to continually cannibalize for the foreseeable future. I'll think back to him when I'm frying up my first pig's deliciously bacony nether regions. I've named him D'artagnan. He's begun to take on a not-quite-fishy odor, foreboding of things to come.

I feed D'artagnan flour and water in equal proportions to what I originally created him with. First I stir another 1/4 cup water, followed, slowly, by a half cup of flour. He seems to like it. He's doubled in both size and olfactory pungency. The first culling swiftly approaches.

Twelve hours goes buy, and D'artagnan hasn't yet doubled in size again, so I give him another six. In my ignorance I hedge the bet that irregular feeding hours won't threaten my starter's vitality significantly. I have thirty days to get the hang of this before it's time to chill him. I cull half D'artagnan's mass. I've been told the amount of starter will rapidly increase exponentially if left unculled, so regular culling is necessary for the next week or so. Still, I didn't want to waste a perfectly good starter, so I put D'artagnan Jr. in a separate bowl. The Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book recommends weekly feedings, although their recipe calls for a package of instant yeast, (which totally misses the point, in my humble opinion) so I'll maintain both a daily and weekly feeding schedule. This will be the last culling I'll be keeping.

It is now Monday morning, and D'artagnan smells right foul. This is to be expected. The various bacteria cultures are currently warring it out in there, but Lactobacillus will ultimately reign supreme. I expect him to get marginally stinkier, but by Thursday even out to a nice, sourdoughy smell. When I get a pH probe I'll be able to further understand what's going on inside there. By next Saturday he should be ready for baking. I'll need to continue feeding him, twice daily, for a full month before I can safely store him in the fridge. To do so any earlier threatens his vitality and longevity. Throughout the next month, I'll attempt to bake at least once a week, but ideally even more than that. Boules, bagels, baguettes, what-have-you. Sourdough pancakes anyone? I eagerly look forward to this experience.

I've acquired two cook books since I last wrote, which I'll be discussing here in the near future. Unfortunately neither has a decent reputation in the circles I follow, but I have to start somewhere, right? I've found plenty of online resources to supplement my temporary dearth of decent tomes. Mike over at Sourdough Home has managed to preempt most questions I've had so far, and the denizens of r/cooking, r/baking and r/AskCulinary remain eternally helpful and encouraging.

I've also begun reading my first chef's memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef . Flew through it in two or so days, should be finished tomorrow. After that I'll be reading Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. My goal is to read one book a week, minimum, covering the spectrum of food writing. Memoirs, cookbooks, food science nonsense, etc etc. All the while I march slowly onward through McGee's Food, Cooking in the background. I'll try to keep track of this on my bookshelf, which will become a priority in the development of this site as I wait for my starter to mature.

And so goes my latest adventure in culinary self-education. Until next time.