A sourd dough bread made from a spontaneous starter

After 7 days of feeding my sour dough starter “took off” and was ready for baking. Even with a water bath set to 28 °C it took longer than expected. I started off with 100% hydration as this is convenient when you have to feed your starter frequently. Using only whole grain rye flour and water, I fed my starter every 12 hours (I’ve included details of the “feeding schedule” at the end of this post). This time interval is based on the growth cycle of yeast, where the yeast after an exponential growth phase reaches a plateau after 8-12 hours. This is the best time for feeding the starter.

There seems to be a consensus that a wet starter (more…)

For TGRWT #18 hosted by Aidan Brooks I decided to use puff pastry dough and laminate some Norwegian blue cheese, “Norzola” (made to mimic Gorgonzola) between two layers and roll them out. To accompany this I made a plum reduction with my two favorite spices, star anis and ginger. I should also mention that I tried the very simplest combination of plum and gorgonzola as well: a simple slice of bread with some Gorgonzola and a thick slice of a blue plum. This was very delicious – and takes absolutely no time to prepare.
(more…)

As I mentioned in the post about the exciting color chemistry of nocino I picked some unripe walnuts last year in August when visiting family in Germany. These walnuts were in fact a little to ripe to make nocino from. Preferably the walnuts should be picked end of June when you can still push a knitting pin through the center. Mine were stone hard, but I decided to give it a try anyway, and it shure was worth the bottle of vodka! I checked a couple of recipes and found that many use cinnamon and cloves together with lemon (with peel). I figured I also wanted to try star anise and proceeded with two batches.
(more…)

As I mentioned in the previous post I put the leftover rose froam from TGRWT #16 in the freezer and was surprised by the result. Inspired by this I thought I would extend this and substitute apple juice for water for TGRWT #17. As apple juice is quite sweet I started off with 20 g sugar, but once frozen it lacked sweetness and even was a litte icy, so I upped the amount to 40 g. The picture above may suggest that the foam could be served for dessert, but read the verdict before you make huge amounts of the foam.

(more…)

For this month’s “They go really well together” event (TGRWT #16) hosted by Supernova Condensate I decided to leave the chicken untouched and focus on the rose component. I had long wanted to try Chad’s Lemon whip (which I’ve included in Texture) where lemon juice is thickened with xanthan and then whipped to a thick foam after addition of methyl cellulose. I started with water, a little sugar and about 10 g of rose water. Having added xanthan and methyl cellulose I tasted it and decided to double the amount of rose water, add some more sugar and add a little lemon juice for acidity. I can imagine that rose water comes in differents strengths so it’s advisable not to add all from the start.
(more…)

The next TGRWT challenge has been announced: chicken and rose! Head over to astrophysics blog Supernova Condensate and read more on how to participate in round 16. And do check out the excellent summary of the dark chocolate and smoked salmon contributions from TGRWT #15 over at Mex Mix.

The TGRWT #15 challenge was to pair smoked salmon with dark chocolate. I decided to encase a piece of hot-smoked salmon in a cocoa gel and serve it with sugared slices of lime. But as you can see from the pictures quite a lot went wrong… But it tasted quite nice!
(more…)

This month’s round of “They go really well together” (TGRWT #15) is hosted by Mexmix and foods to pair this time are dark chocolate and smoked salmon. As usual you can find instructions on how to participate in the announcement post. Don’t forget to check out Rob’s summary of the malt and soy sauce round.

As malt was one of the foods to pair for this month’s TGRWT I decided to do something with beer. I first considered making a beer gel since the Alinea book has a nice recipe (with potassium citrate and kappa carrageenan – I included the recipe in the hydrocolloid recipe collection), but since I didn’t have carrageenan at hand I decided to try a sorbet. A quick search gave me 4 recipes (links in the table below) and in order to compare these I decided to calculate sugar/beer and sugar/liquid ratios as these are quite crucial in order to obtain the desired consistency of a sorbet. The results are shown in the table below. (more…)

I thought I’d do a twist on some chocolate cookies my Mom always makes for Christmas for TGRWT #13. I tried two versions with added caraway (and a litte bitter orange peel) – one where I omitted all the spices except cocoa and one where they were added together with all the spices in the original recipes.

Chocolate cookies with caraway (more…)