I was hoping to do some cooking last weekend, but the weather didn’t cooperate.  I’m almost embarrassed to admit that, but the one type of weather I don’t like to cook during is rain, especially freezing rain!  We got about 5" of snow yesterday, with rain following.  As it turned out, I probably could have gotten away with it, but I just baked instead.

I wanted to try my new sourdough starter, and my wife wanted pumpernickel bread, so I decided to do a sourdough pumpernickel.  The recipe was from King Arthur Flour; I wanted to do one from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, but I didn’t realize that just about all the recipes there require time the night before.  Even with sourdoughs, I think the recipes call for some work, letting the starter/poolish rest for a few hours, then refrigerating it.  I didn’t start until after 9:00 PM, so that was out.

The recipe was different than I expected; instead of just flour, yeast and water, it also called for a touch of vegetable oil and a cup of coffee, along with a quarter cup of molasses.

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Day 7 of my sourdough started brought a lot of bubbles!  I think it’s on its way now.  I can detect a slight acidic/sour smell, but not a bad smell at all.  When I mixed in more water and flour, the starter was kind of pillowy, definitely not just a bowl of flour and water.

In my opinion, it’s a real starter now!!!

Now the question is…  When will it be ready to use?

Frankie is an Italian who puts Italian cooking with American barbecue/grilling skills.  He was kind enough to share his recipe and log of making his version of smoked pork shoulder.  His site, Barbecue for All, is worth visiting, and he’s added an English section to it for those of us that can’t read Italian.  He even writes with a bit of an accent!  I like to think I go all out to make some things, but wait until you see this!

This one is a long entry, but well worth it!

Hello everybody.
I’m so far from here. I’m Italian but I have a big ambition.  Melt American BBQ skills and Italian cooking style.  In Italy, BBQ as you know (low, slow and smoky) doesn’t exist.  In Italy we (THEY!) are used to cook meat over direct fire, without smoking and without marinades, rubs, sauces and so on.  First time I saw true BBQ was on a local food channel that was showing a [Steven] Raichlen series.  I was thunderstruck from this method!  Really!  I started finding wood chips in Italy but nobody sold smoking wood (I still spend a LOT of money on buying wood from a friends of mine in Salt Lake City) and trying all of recipes as I could.  I realize that smoky flavour makes me absolutely crazy!  Maybe a lot of people in Italy are waiting for somebody that help them on BBQ, so I started my own website.  This is http://www.bbq4all.it.  We speak Italian and English (spaghetti), and we are looking for some new friends. I’m visiting a lot of american websites in order to raise my experience.  Now I would wish your opinion over one of my own recipes that attempts to join Americans and Italians.

A whole smoked pork shoulder, marinated with green apple juice and prosecco served with salsa renetta

This is a whole pork leg. Shoulder, shinbone and feet.

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Hopefully, I’m not boring you all with my sourdough starter attempt.  It’s a simple way to try to make a starter, and, after having read more about starters in books like The Baker’s Apprentice, I probably would do it differently if I hadn’t already begun.

However, you should be able to see the bubbles starting to form in the starter.  There were a couple on day 4, more on day 5 and even more on day 6!  I think it’s working, though it may be a while before it’s a stable starter.  I’m going to keep going until I think it’s either failed or is ready to try out.

What makes a starter like this different than adding yeast is the type of yeast.  At some point I will get into the differences in the yeasts and the addition of beneficial bacteria.  I’ll get into more detail once this works, but my goal is to not use yeast anymore, but to substitute my own sourdough instead.  This should impart my own unique flavor to each loaf I make.  I just hope that’s a good flavor!

On a side note, I wanted to thank Joe at Joebob Graphics for letting me use one of his fonts; he has some of the best handwritten fonts available; Joe Hand 2 is the font currently being used on the photos.

I’m keeping up with my starter, but not doing as well keeping up with my posting, so I’ll try to catch up tonight with days 5 and 6.  Here is a photo of day 4’s starter.  It’s getting there, keeping a better texture and starting to seem to have a bit of a sour smell, in a good way.

There’s more progress as of the last couple of days, so it’s getting there.

T
his past weekend, as I mentioned in my beef stew post, I made some European hearth bread.  The recipe was a bit different from what I’ve used for baguettes; it used less yeast and allowed more time to rise.  The poolish used only 1/8 teaspoon of yeast, in fact.

I was busy last weekend, so I not only had a slow rise on the bread, I refrigerated it to retard the rise even more.  And it does make it take a lot longer!  I want to try more breads with slow rise, as I think the flavor reflected that.

I used King Arthur Flour’s European artisan style flour, and that probably added to the flavor, too.  The baking hotline at King Arthur Flour was helpful, as the dough was too dry, so I called them about how to add more water without over doing it, and they gave me good answers that allowed me to keep going.

This bread is baked at a higher temp; it calls for 425, and I baked at 415 convection/bake.  I slashed the bread diagonally, and I wish I’d slashed it even deeper, as the slashes created great crust!  The higher temps resulted in the crunchiest crust I’ve done so far.  I sprayed the oven and the loaves with water before baking, and I had a pan of water under the baking stone.  Next time, not only will I slash more, but I’ll do full convection at 415.  As it was, it only took 25 minutes to reach an internal temp of 200, instead of the 30-35 the recipe called for at the bake setting.

This is the best bread I’ve baked.  My wife and I had a whole loaf before we knew it.  One thing I learned from reading my new book, the Bread Baker’s Apprentice, is that the crust gets its flavor from the Maillard reaction, the same thing that creates all the flavor on a seared steak…  I’m finding that bread and grilling are closer than I realized!  I’m assuming that toasting bread makes it taste so good from the same reaction.

I’m learning to play with the dough a bit, getting to know the feel of the dough a little bit better, though I have a LONG way to go still.  It’s going to be fun learning more, too!

This past weekend was cool and rainy in Ohio.  It was actually very warm, considering that it was the 2nd weekend of January, and temps were in the 50’s, but it rained and rained and rained.  In fact, it rained enough I didn’t really want to be outside cooking, so I decided to make some beef stew, which I hadn’t done in some time. 

I fix what I would call a more rustic stew.  I thought about the word "rustic", which basically means "rural" or "of the country", that sort of thing.  As it relates to food, rustic, to me, implies food done with less fuss, though there may well be a lot of care into the preparation.  The food should appear to be simple but well done.  Cuts of ingredients would be larger than a more sophisticated version of the same dish, and herbs not diced as finely.  Pepper would be coarsely ground.  For stew, it means to me that that the ingredients are maybe left larger than what one would take in a single bite.

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I got lazy yesterday and didn’t make time to post my photos from day 2 of making my sourdough starter.  This one will be a quick and easy entry.

To be honest, when I looked at the starter from day 1, I thought it was ruined.  It looked dried up and greenish brown.  I added another 2 tablespoons of both whole wheat flour and water, though, and it mixed pretty easily.

After day 2, the starter is looking better.  It’s wetter and ddn’t take much to get it mixed up with more flour and water.  I’m guessing that it will take a few more days before I see much change.

When adding the flour and water for day 3, I wanted to see what type of odor was being produced, as it will be a bit sour when it’s where it should be.  It smelled pretty much like flour and water to me, though, at this point.

Now that I’ve been trying my hand at bread baking for a few months, I’ve been reading more and more on sourdough.  Everyone knows about the famous San Francisco sourdough bread, and many think, because of that, sourdough means sour tasting (pleasantly) bread.

Actually, sourdough is a way to bake bread without using commercial yeast.  The starter is made from very basic ingredients (flour and water).  The combination  is allowed to attract wild yeasts and bacteria (good bacteria) from the air until the starter starts to bubble and becomes stable.  Once the sourdough is stable, it can be fed and maintained fairly easily.

There are plenty of sourdough recipes, but sourdough can also be substituted in recipes that call for yeast by using 1 cup of starter for 1 ounce of yeast cake or about 2/3 ounce of dry yeast.  Using less is just fine, as one of the things I want to try is to allow my bread to rise much longer than I have.
I’ve been doing 2 hour rises, but less yeast may take up to a day to rise as the yeast has to have time to do its thing.

So why make my own starter?  Sourdough attracts the local wild yeasts.  I could buy a San Francisco sourdough starter, and the first few loaves would taste like it, but, eventually, the wild yeasts in my starter would be the ones in my kitchen, and I’d no longer get the original flavor.  This isn’t a bad thing; it means that every loaf of bread will have the taste of my kitchen in it and nowhere else!

So, on top of anything else I talk about over the next few days, I’m going to be posting the progress of my sourdough starter!

I just noticed that today is the 1 year anniversary of me blogging!  I remember starting out thinking I’d do an entry each day.  It didn’t take long to determine that there was NO WAY I was going to keep up with that pace.  I also thought I was going to talk about nothing but barbecue, but soon found out I wanted to talk about more than that.

What I did NOT realize a year ago is how many people out there are blogging about food!  I’ve "met" some really nice people and gotten involved more than I thought I would.  I found that taking a moment to leave a comment on another blog or to answer one left here can go a long way.  I’ve tried to respond to about every comment, and, if I missed any that a reader left, I apologize. 

The next year should bring more focused entries (though I’m not going to promise more focus!).  I’m playing with new looks, too, and I’m going to push myself to do more bread baking, in a semi-collaboration with Adam (Men In Aprons) and Dave (Fumbling Foodie) called Breaducation.  With barbecue, I’m going to work on some fundamentals and relay those here, as well as to keep chronicling our competitions.  We’ve been asked to do more cooking classes, and I’ll post info about that, too.  The next will be sometime in May, and the topic will be more grilling oriented than smoking.  I also hope to do more product reviews, so, if you’re a vendor that has a kitchen/barbecue/grilling related product, send ‘em my way!

Thanks to all of my readers for sticking around.  It’s always good to hear from you in comments or emails.  I’m always open to suggestions, so if you’re looking into something, let me know, and, if I can help, I will.  This year should be good; we have a lot going on, and I’ll be sure to talk about it along the way.