Category: Baking

Well, the Rhubarb Tartlettes only used up about half of the rhubarb jam. So, in keeping with the theme (of feeding my department), I decided to be a little unorthodox and mix up a sweet yeast bread … using our Sourdough starter. The starter needs to get a bit of a workout, as we’re traveling most of June, and it will be languishing in the fridge. Legend has it that it should be OK in the fridge for a month … but we may find that we have to start over, and that would be OK as well, considering that the process we used to get this one started only took about 3 days (pineapple juice: it’s the key to sourdough).

To my standard bread recipe I added 1/2 cup brown sugar and a couple tablespoons of olive oil (for moistness). Instead of letting it get a good, long fermentation going, I sped up the process by skipping a rise and prepping it with only a single yeast-backed rise (I usually supplement the sourdough with commercial yeast, because I’m lazy and live in a cold country where letting sourdough rise on its own can take days). I also left the dough quite moist. I flattened it out, filled it with rhubarb jam and orange marmalade (could have used a whole cup of rhubarb jam), rolled it up, tucked it into a springform pan, coated it with soy-milk, sprinkled it with sugar, and let it rise. After ‘slashing’ (I used scissors) I baked it on a lower than normal temperature, so that it’d have a chance to cook through while not developing too thick of a crust. After depanning, I sliced it into 16 wedges, and that was that! Quite a tender, moist, and flavorful loaf! It was really a bit more like a cake in texture, but it was thoroughly baked. It’s something I would repeat – perhaps with a sweeter jam than marmalade, and one with more character than rhubarb.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

It’s one of the easiest recipes you’ll come across. Cheesecake can be quick and light as well as rich and satisfying. Despite the imperfection of the cracked surface this weekend (and the fact that we discovered too late that our lemon juice contained sodium metabisulfate, aka preservative E223, which is very harmful to T, so we left it out) our tasty cheesecake has always been a hit.

Created after some experimentation with a regular cheesecake recipe, it was originally intended to avoid the cloying richness of cream, and make a bit more virtuous a dessert. Never a fan of cheesecake anyway, I was especially surprised by the lightness and clean flavor of this one, and make it every time the occasion calls for something that looks fancy but is relatively simple. Even dyed-in-the-wool NY cheesecake eaters have been surprised at how good it is, and our non-vegetarian friends haven’t even known the difference between regular cheesecake and the vegan variety — so this truly is a winner of a recipe.

Quick Lemon Cheesecake

• 1 14 oz pkg. firm silken tofu
• 1 8 oz. pkg “Cream Cheese” Tofutti, or, substitute regular creamed cheese if you’d like
• 2/3 c. sugar
• 1/4 c. lemon juice (Modification: 1 c. other unsweeetened fruit conserve. We tried 1/4 c. blood orange juice – looks lovely but acidity isn’t enough to affect flavor)
• 1/2 tsp. almond extract
• 2 tbsp cornstarch + ice water

Though a graham cracker crust is traditional — a more flavorful alternative is a gingersnap crust! You can make it in the same way — whiz up ten or fifteen dry gingersnaps in your food processor (or ginger nuts, as they’re called here; just don’t confuse them with actual nuts…) and add a tablespoon of butter or margarine to create a crumb the texture of damp sand, and then pack it with your fingertips into the bottom of a spring form pan. Pre-baking the crust is unnecessary.

~ Preheat Oven 350 ~

Place silken tofu, cream cheese in bowl, and, using an immersion blender or beater, blend until smooth. Add lemon flavoring, either in juice or compote form.

In a smaller separate bowl, combine 2 tbsp ice water, almond extract and cornstarch with a whisk. Pour mixture into tofu blend and beat fiuuntil VERY smooth. Pour lemon filling into gingersnap crust, and bake for 45 minutes. Allow to cool for two hours, or for very best firmness, REFRIGERATE OVERNIGHT. (Of course, it’s also firm enough and edible warm, if you’re unable to wait. It’s just good any old way, but let’s pretend you have the patience to wait until it cools, okay?) Can be served with a citrus sauce for drizzling, mint leaves for garnish or edible flowers and grated chocolate. Or, it’s just good with a fork out of the pan, but again, please: let’s use some restraint, okay?

Cheesecake cracks.

It’s one of those things that just happens, but it makes it no less annoying that it happens to everyone when it happens to you. A couple of things that you can do to prevent this is to use a regular pie plate instead of a spring form. I rarely get cracks when using a regular pie plate, reason being, perhaps because the thinner spring form sides cool faster, allowing the edges of the cheesecake to shrink and pull. If you run a knife around the edge of the cheesecake before it’s 100% cool, post-baking cracks might be prevented.

Some people also swear by baking only on the bottom rack, not beating the mixture for more than two minutes (but this contains no eggs, so I’m thinking that doesn’t apply here), but mainly I think a cheesecake will crack when it’s over-baked. Using a water bath and baking it for no more than 45 minutes — then turning the oven off no matter if the middle is still wobbly — is the very best thing. The ambient heat will bake the center and the cheesecake will be just fine still in the oven. Allowing it to cool covered can also help.

And, if all else fails, you were going to cover that bit with grated chocolate and a little Devonshire Cream anyway.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Oh, dear.

You didn’t really come here to see gooey chocolate recipes and things done up in pink paper and ribbons, did you?

Sorry. Wrong blog. Death By Chocolate is over at Pille’s. We’re the practical sort over here. We have trouble remembering each other’s birthdays, not to mention a made-up holiday that is meant to express love via Hallmark.

But enough of our sour grapes! We had some really, REALLY good sourdough today! There’s nothing like a sourdough starter in a city full of distilleries to make you happy any day of the month. Sadie’s one happy bunch of bacteria/yeast.

Anyway, even if you do like candy hearts that aren’t black, we still like you.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

The continuing saga of baking in the UK continues. This week’s episode includes trying once again to bake French-style loaves upon the pizza stone … with the result that the stone has been retired until such time as we have a better oven. Past experiments with the stone have included preheating the oven for an hour, to see if the stone would get hot enough. That didn’t work. This time I moved the stone up in the oven, and it still wouldn’t get hot enough to brown the bottom of the loaves. The next option would be to move the stone all the way up under the broiler, get it good and hot, and then somehow relocate the stone to a lower shelf.

We’re just going to have to learn to live without bread baked on a stone, because shifting a hot stone about just isn’t in the cards. My knuckles are already burned quite severely, just from trying to squeeze four loaves into such a tiny oven – I’m giving up the idea of moving that stone as a bad idea. (As to how severely, well, they blistered up & scabbed nicely, and I look like I’ve been brawling or something, which is enough to put me off the idea of getting them burned any further).

The loaves, as expected with a cool stone, didn’t have a crusty bottom, nor did they get much lift. So, we sliced them on the bias, and enjoyed them anyway … or, at least, we enjoyed a couple of them – one went to a fellow Bay Area native who’s also over here doing his Master’s degree, and another went to a professor.

As to what’s in them, they’re the standard bread recipe, basically, but with steamed whole oats, oat bran, flax seeds, a chopped onion, a couple tablespoons of capers (soaked to remove the salt), some yellow and brown mustard seeds, some cumin, and some sage. Because of adding the steamed oats you need to bump up the salt a little bit, but other than that it’s just a straightforward matter of “throwing stuff in.”

Once again, no problem at all with UK flour: if I can get bread to raise with an added 1/2 cup of oat bran in each loaf, plus all the other stuff, there’s certainly enough gluten in the flour!

Next up will be to finally get a sourdough starter going. I just read an article on the microbiology of yeast fermentation, talking specifically about getting wild yeasts going, and some of what was in there we’re going to try. The gist of this 17 page article was to the effect that the initial pH of the sourdough starter is not acid enough. They suggest adding 6 oz of pineapple juice to the starter on the first day, with that being enough of a jolt of acid to get the starter producing yeast on the first day. Otherwise you have to wait for some nasty bacteria to get going in there, and then to die, so that after three or four days you’ll have enough of an acid environment for the yeast to get going. The instructions can be found at Breadtopia, and the microbiologist’s name is Debra Wink – Breadtopia will send you the article if you’re interested.

Not having any pH strips handy we’re going to just wing it & see what happens. It may not take place immediately – we have to track down pineapple juice – but we’ll let you know when it does.

The other (less preferable) method would be to include apple juice for the first few days, which we could do … and we actually have the apple juice … but it’s nice, fresh-pressed Braeburn juice, and I like to drink the stuff. Sigh. The things we sacrifice for our art. Maybe. Just … maybe.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

OK, I’ve been absent a bit from the blog, what with all of the holidays & with essays to write & all manner of things. Don’t let that fool you into thinking that I haven’t been baking, though! As a matter of fact, I finally figured out what’s been going wrong with baking bread in the UK: YEAST! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s not about the flour or the water, but about the yeast. I finally finished off my Scotland-purchased yeast and broke into my stash of yeast shipped from California … and my bread turned out right!

I could tell, from smelling the yeast proofing, that it was going to be a good set of loaves. They were just plain old bread (well, OK, they had oat bran & flax seeds in them, but that’s “plain” for us), but they turned out marvelously! They went through multiple rises just fine, with the yeast having enough guts to actually go through a second rise, and they turned out bread that we oooh’d and aaaah’d over, immediately recognizing as “bread” rather than … well, something so not bread as to be something we’ll never do again. They kneaded well, they formed gluten fairly quickly, and they were … well, right.

Hear this, friends from the States: admission to this flat will henceforth be 1 industrial-sized ‘brick’ of Red Star Yeast. We don’t care if the customs people look at you like you’re crazy: tell them you’ve crazy friends on the other side.

Because it’s not about the flour or the water, but about having good yeast!

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.