The first book, “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day”, whose title is a bit misleading, has the great virtue of not requiring too much work to produce a loaf of bread. It eliminates kneading from recipes. More importantly, the book encourages you to make a batch of dough and then let it sit in the refrigerator until you are ready to bake it. This allows you to break up bread baking (say that three times) into two separate task: the preparation of the dough, which can be done ahead, and the shaping and baking of a loaf, which be done in an hour or so when you want to eat bread. I could prepare the dough on the weekend, and then let it sit in the refrigerator until a night when I wanted to bake bread for dinner. Otherwise, bread baking is an activity that requires you to be around all day.

This book has an appealingly “revolutionary” promise that it is changing the way you can bake bread. There is some sense that the authors have figured out which common practices are unnecessary such proofing yeast and kneading the dough. However, there’s still plenty of techniques to master and get good at. One challenge I had was, prior to baking, moving a loaf from a pizza peel to a hot baking stone in the oven. Corn meal is used on the pizza peel to make it easy to shake the loaf off on to the baking stone but I would nonetheless find that there was some sticky part of the loaf clinging to the peel. At this critical stage, you can disturb the shape of the loaf.

The “5 minutes a day” bread recipes were reliable and the loaves had good flavor. I did find the bread to be dense. Sometimes the loaves didn’t rise as much as I expected, resulting in a flattened, round loaf.

The second book I began using was “Essentials of Baking by Williams-Sonoma”. (The book just happened to be in our house, and had been mainly used for its cake recipes.) I got interested in the book’s sourdough recipe. I acquired a small batch of starter from a friend of a friend and started feeding it regularly. Then I was ready to try my first recipe, using the leaven instead of store-bought dry yeast.

The one technique I learned from this sourdough recipe was forming a loaf and letting it sit in a towel-lined basket for the final rise. This helps the loaf keeps its round shape. When the final rise was completed, I’d flip the loaf on to the pizza peel and then into the oven. I baked these loaves on a baking stone, as I did the previous loaves from the “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day” book.

The issue with using starter is that the process takes longer than a day to make bread. First, I need to start the sponge, adding flour and water to a portion of the starter and letting it sit overnight. Then I start the dough, adding the bulk of the flour to the sponge and kneading it for 5 minutes. Then I let it sit overnight (6-8 hours) for the first rise. (I could do it all on a Sunday, after making the sponge the night before, but I had to get up early to make it all work.) Then I form the loaf, putting it in the basket and letting it rise 2-4 hours. (If I wanted to do it in a single day, I used the shorter time.)

Baking the bread in our oven, I found I had to decrease the heat from 450 to 425 and shorten the duration from 50 minutes to 40 minutes. I really liked the recipe and the bread was always delicious. As sourdough, the loaf has more flavor. Again, maybe a little dense but a good crust and crumb. I used this recipe to make bread for our Christmas dinner, pictured below.

At Christmas, I self-gifted a present of a new bread book, “Tartine Bread,” which is a beautifully designed book with lots of photos. I’ve spent the last month trying to learn its techniques for making a sourdough country loaf. While the basic Tartine recipe differs from the Williams-Sonoma loaf, doing the other recipe was good preparation for learning this recipe, which is more complex and much more hands-on. Time-wise, it’s about the same to make, but I’ve found it easier to do in one day, as long as I start the sponge the night before.

The Tartine bread process is centered on developing the starter, not allowing it to get too sour. I learned a lot about the starter culture from this book, and I can’t help but be amazed by how a tablespoon of starter activates the flour and water overnight.

“When making bread with nothing more than flour, water and salt, aspiring bakers should apply their attention to learning how to control the process of fermentation.”

Another advantage of the Tartine book was its reliance on adding ingredients by weight. Once you get used to it, weighing ingredients seems smart and you can compare recipes more easily. I have a book on bread ovens, The Bread Builders by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott that introduced me to measurement by weight.

The dough produced by the Tartine bread recipe is wet, much wetter than the two other recipes. Wet means sticky. Sticky means it gets on your hands and doesn’t want to come off. However, I think I enjoyed making the Tartine bread because of the ways that you do use your hands to mix and work the dough, although the recipe is technically a no-knead method. The problem I faced with the first few loafs was shaping the dough into rounds. There are some techniques in doing it right and it’s a little hard to see it from the pictures. However, once the loaf comes together, with just enough flour to remove the tackiness, it’s a pretty sweet feeling all around — a light, puffy loaf that seems much different than the dough you’ve been working with.

In the Tartine recipe, the bread is baked in a dutch oven at 500 degrees (dropped down to 450). The main benefit is that the dutch oven holds moisture and steams the bread so that it rises nicely. After twenty minutes, the top of the dutch oven is removed and the bread bakes for another 25 minutes and develops its deeply colored crust.

In 2006, the NY Times published Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread recipe, which I read at the time and tried. I recalled using the dutch oven before, but until I started writing this post, I had forgotten about it. The Lahey recipe shares many aspects of the above recipes.

I’ve really enjoyed the bread I’ve made with the Tartine recipe, and it is a much different bread to eat in terms of its texture and crust. I thought it took following the recipe about five times before I felt pretty comfortable with each of the steps. The photographs in the book are great but even they don’t provide all the information you need. I’ve served the bread at several meals and everyone is pretty surprised that it’s homemade.

One final reason to like the “Tartine Bread” book is that it conveys a love of bread baking and goes into a lot more detail explaining how and why its basic recipe work. You aren’t just following the directions; you are exploring and learning and maybe getting in over your head. Yes, it does take a full day to make this bread but the warm loaf at the end is the reward.

I’ve created a slideshow of the steps I followed, after having already made and added the starter:

It’s kind of a triple play for the kitchen — pickling, canning and baking.

Attached are some pictures and a fermentation chart of the Cabernet. The fermentation has been going well up until now. The most important thing is for the ferment to go until dryness. So, we’ll keep our fingers crossed.

Ryan does a great job monitoring everything. The fermentation chart shows the sugar levels decreasing, and the larger vat is a little behind the vat that’s half its size. The yeast are doing their job, though.

We’re one week from having picked and crushed the grapes.

I visited the Museum of Catalonia History today and saw example of a huge double-screw wine press that was used hundreds of years ago. I’ll post some pictures on dalepd.com.

Ryan organized our trip to his family vineyard in Kenwood. There were several partial rows of cabernet grapes, ones that ripened later than others that had been picked earlier. The grapes were going to be left on the vine because there wasn’t enough for commercial production. However, it was a perfect amount for a small batch.

Despite the heavy rains of the past few weeks, these grapes were in good shape. Ryan noted that cabernet grapes are small and form in loose clusters, which allows them to withstand the moisture and fight off fungus. These grapes looked like blueberries in size and color. Cabernet grapes are typically the last varietal to be picked.

Ryan, Katie and I went out to pick the grapes on a day when rain was threatening but held off while we were picking. Huck joined us, guarding over the grapes.

We picked 20 bins, which is under 600 to 800 pounds of grapes. Then we brought them back to the Pillow Road barn for the crush.

We rented a machine that’s called a “crusher-destemmer”. It separates the grapes from the stem clusters. There are small paddles on the inside that move back and forth to separate the grape from its stem. This video shows the crusher-destemmer in action with Katie at the hand-crank.

The day’s output consisted of two containers filled with grapes — skins, seeds and juice. One container was 44-gallons and the other was 22 gallons so we have about sixty gallons (roughly) to start with. We tasted some of the juice and it was delicious — surprisingly sweet.

Ryan added a sulfite mixture and later we’ll add yeast. After fermentation, we’ll press the wine to remove the skins and seeds. Our goal is to create a nice table wine.

We also transferred the eight gallons of cider to new carboys. We had a little taste along the way. One batch is made with an English Cider yeast and it seems to be the most interesting. The fermentation is mostly done after about three weeks. Now we’re letting it settle and develop. I’ve heard that letting it sit as long as possible improves the flavor.

So, now like the wine, most of the manual labor is done but we must wait patiently for the final product.

I made a French-style beef stew (daube), a vast amount of salsa, assorted rounds of goat cheese, an argula salad with cherry tomatoes and lemon cucumbers and pasta with a fresh sauce made from San Marzano tomatoes. In short, the goal was to use as many of the remaining tomatoes as possible. I tapped a keg of American Ale that I had brewed in the spring. Nancy made zucchini bread, congo bars and corn bread — however, we forgot to put the cornbread out.

John stopped by with his house-truck and gave us tours of his nice wooden house built on the bed of an Isuzu truck. He just left Oregon and he’s off for six months traveling around America with his four-wheel residence.

Sunday was a beautiful sunny day. We had lots of young kids around, enjoying themselves, the dogs and the pool. Lots of friends dropped by to share some food and conversation.

I was too busy to take photos. However, the last thing to be made was a pear tart by Chris and Kim Collett. They poached the pears in red-wine then covered it with a pastry crust and baked it. The tart wasn’t finished baking until everyone had left so Nancy and I enjoyed it after cleaning up. Incredible. I had to take a picture of it, although the photo doesn’t suggest how good it was.

This American Ale celebrated Glenda’s coming home from NYU at the end of her second year; Ben’s departure to Puerto Escondido for surfing adventures; Nancy’s birthday; Katie and Ryan’s visit from Davis and the weekend stay of Nancy’s stepmother, Sarie from Duxbury. Plus it was a day that promised a long summer. (Not to mention that Maker Faire is just weeks away.) So cheers to all.

We did a pretty simple American Ale. We used Cascade hops that I had dried and froze last summer. I hope to have this beer ready by Easter.

I also tasted some of our hard cider, which we made last October, and has been sitting under pressure in a keg. I really like it and we’ll have that on hand for Easter as well.

Choose American artisanal cheeses

Ms Gudrias passes on information from Cowgirl Creamery, in Point Reyes Station, California, offering one typical message on its website: “In buying farmstead cheese rather than industrially produced cheese, you will support the fine art of farmstead cheesemaking,…help to ensure jobs in rural areas, and contribute to protecting farmlands from development.”

“This is one of the observations Heather Paxson, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, intends to present in the book she is writing this year (tentatively titled “Cheese Cultures”). Paxson—an associate professor of anthropology at MIT and the author of a 2004 book on Greek women’s changing attitudes toward family planning—specializes in the anthropology of the everyday: how individuals connect themselves to a web of social norms through their actions, and how those actions, en masse, shape the norms.”

Watch for Ms Paxson’s book in the future and here is a link to the article highlighting the importance of our American cheese cultures.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/01/anthropology-of-american-artisanal-cheese

The acorn-shaped Hachiya is so astringent that it cannot be used until it is ripe and softened. I have not started using ours yet.

The Fuyu can be eaten directly from the tree. Dice a persimmon as a salad topping, which is especially nice when mixed with pomegranate seeds. However, like many fruit, you simply have too many of them, if you have your own supply.

Bara Brith: A Welsh Holiday Bread

I made a holiday bread substituting persimmons for candied fruit. I don’t like anything about candied fruit and I had fresh persimmons.

I modified a recipe for Bara Brith, a Welsh “speckled bread” that uses currants and golden raisins. It’s in the family of fruit cakes but I think it’s more like raisin bread. I found the basic recipe in Bernard Clayton’s “New Complete Book of Breads.” There are versions online that use self-rising flour and no yeast. Mine had yeast but it was slow to rise. In fact, I thought the recipe had failed.

In a mixing bowl, add a cup of flour, a teaspoon of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1/4 cup of sugar and one packet of dry yeast. In a pan, warm a half-cup of milk and 1-1/2 tablespoons of margerine. Then, after removing the pan from the heat, add two eggs to the liquid and stir. Add the liquid into the flour and begin beating with a mixer — I used the dough hooks. Add up to another cup and a half of flour and knead for ten minutes. The dough is a tan color and seemingly dense, a bit like taffy.

Set aside the dough in a greased bowl and cover it. Let the dough rise for at least an hour. I allowed two hours because I didn’t see much change. It was a cold and rainy day outside. In writing up this recipe, I found this account on the Food Glorious Food blog of a similar experience. Next time, I plan to try adding the yeast to the warm milk and letting it proof.

While the dough is rising, put a cup of diced persimmons and a half-cup of golden raisins in a bowl to soak in a half-cup of apple brandy (or sherry). Let them sit while the dough is rising.

Turn out the dough on a floured surface and knead for a few minutes. Now it’s time to mix in the fruit. (The Clayton recipe called for 1/2 cup of candied fruit but I omitted it.) The persimmons and raisins had been soaking in brandy for a couple hours. I drained off the remaining brandy and began working them into the dough, which is not easy. It really does seem as though there is too much fruit for the size of loaf. I wondered if the recipe underestimated the amount of dough to use.

I did not plan to use a loaf pan but instead hand-shaped the loaf. Now the loaf is set aside to rise again for about an hour. I had the same problem — that it didn’t seem to rise much. And I was nearing a deadline when I was having to leave the kitchen. Thinking the room was cold, I slid the loaf into the oven. Unfortunately, I went out for the evening and did not get back that evening in time to bake the loaf. So it sat overnight in the oven. When I removed it, the loaf had maybe tripled in size. Finally, it seemed to be alive, in the bread sense.

I reshaped the loaf and let it sit out while I pre-heated the oven to 350 degrees. I cut a slash down the top of the loaf before putting it in the oven. When I took it out a half-hour later, it looked and smelled wonderful. I could hardly wait to taste it — such that I didn’t get a good photograph of the untouched loaf.

My wife thought this bread was outstanding. I was amazed that Bara Brith had such a deep brown crust, almost as though I had glazed it. the bread was lighter than I thought it would be. The persimmons were a nice subsitute, adding an unusual color. I could taste both the sweet persimmon flavor and a bit of the brandy but none was overpowering.

For Christmas, I’m going to follow a James Beard recipe (from David Lebovitz’s site) for making persimmon bread from a puree of ripe Hachiya persimmons.

Next up: Drying Persimmons