What do your meals look like (show me pictures)....

mjbnj0001

acpgee wrote: »

Food at mom’s nursing home is usually decent but tonight it was gross excepting the green salad starter. Poorer quality kitchen staff on the weekends?

words fail.

mjbnj0001

My Saturday (yesterday) jobs included another bread experiment. That's why I wanted something fast and easy such as the chickpea dish I posted last evening.

I've been trying, as you've seen this year, varying types of "hybrid sourdough" approaches, that is, mixing commercial yeast with the microbes in yogurt. This emulates a mixture such as might be obtained via conventional sourdough culture via exposure to air to capture wild bugs. The other factors in true sourdough (and yes, some people call what I'm trying to be "sourfaux" bread) are length of fermentation of the dough batch and deveopment of the sourdough starter culture over time. I'm trying this hybrid approach because I have historically been terrible at keeping a sourdough culture alive for more than a couple of weeks. Yes, it's pretty pitiful when you can't keep bacteria alive, LOL. I hope that by mastering this approach I can reap the benefits of sourdough at home (I've been baking 80% or so of our bread products - loaves, rolls, etc. - for a number of years now, just using yeast).

So, for this cook batch, I am trying Kefir rather than yogurt in an all-bread flour dough with my old brand of yeast (what we call "bread flour" is usually called "strong flour" in the UK; what I use is unbleached and unfortified), and a new brand of yeast in a 70/30 bread flour/whole wheat flour mix using my old standby yogurt. I call this 70/30 mix "Lite Whole Wheat," sort of like some commercial brands of bread. The yogurt delivers 6 strains of microbes, and the kefir 12. The plan was my typical higher-hydration no-knead recipe, with 8 hours of room temp (countertop) first proof, 30 minute 2nd proof, usual 400F for 40 minutes bake. Results as below.

The two doughs starting their 1st proofing period. 1 loaf for the kefir experiment, 2 in the WW/yogurt batch as per my recent efforts.




After 1st proof, 8 hours. kefir/bread flour on left, ww/yogurt on right.




Hot out of the oven. I did get a more pronounced "sourdough" smell during the bake this time. They'll cool overnight (it's nearly midnight in this picture). As you can see, I got a pronounced "oven rise" on the WW loaves; I'm thinking this yeast is more robust than my previous. Since they were from the same dough ball cut in half, why one got so much more expansive than the other is something to research.




And, this morning, 2 of the loaves cut to display their internal crumb. My main interest, the kefir loaf, didn't have much of a sourdough tang until I lightly toasted it, but was delicious in both cases. I cut into the more expansive ww loaf to see what's going on there.




The two WW loaves are headed into the freezer, and we'll be eating the kefir loaf first. With this much bread, it'll be a couple of weeks before I make another batch ... although I'm thinking I should make some burger rolls using the new approach for our weekday grilling. I have a lot of the kefir available. We'll see. My next loaf bread experiments will be the 70/30 WW mix, new yeast and kefir, and perhaps a 12 hour 1st proof. Yes, good science implies changing one variable at a time, but I'm not that patient, LOL.

acpgee

Food at mom’s nursing home was back to the usual standard today. They gave me a huge portion of dessert.

acpgee

@mjbnj0001
Clever that you do your bread dough in those tupperware containers to presumably to avoid the use of disposable plastic wraps. As I don't own large food boxes, I have been doing my super hydrated doughs in casserole pots that have a tight fitting lid for the same purpose.

acpgee

Dinner at mom’s nursing home. In celebration of Canada day, beaver tails (=flat cinnamon doughnuts) and maple ice cream were on offer for dessert.

mjbnj0001

acpgee wrote: »

@mjbnj0001
Clever that you do your bread dough in those tupperware containers to presumably to avoid the use of disposable plastic wraps. As I don't own large food boxes, I have been doing my super hydrated doughs in casserole pots that have a tight fitting lid for the same purpose.

Thanks, yes. I have been doing longer-term room-temp countertop proofing this year, so they work well. I affix one of the 4 latches to keep the lid on against possible misadventure, but leave the other 3 loose so any excess co2 pressure can escape.

When I first starting baking bread some years ago, I used a method that forced the first proof into 90 minutes through a slightly warmed environment. Slightly preheating the oven then letting the retained residual heat worked out OK. For this, I used stainless mixing bowls and Al foil to cover. I got 5 or more uses out of the foil before the repeated crinkle got to be to much and it broke down. It depended on how gentle I was with it.

When we downsized into this retirement home in 2022, the new oven came with a proofing feature. IMHO it's too warm, so I don't use it ... often. I still tinker with recipes, LOL, and revert to metal proofing containers when I go this route. We've talked about getting a dedicated warm proofing box, but really don't want to clutter up the countertop with a new resident appliance. I have a mill I want to colonize the countertop with anyway, lol.

mjbnj0001

acpgee wrote: »

Dinner at mom’s nursing home. In celebration of Canada day, beaver tails (=flat cinnamon doughnuts) and maple ice cream were on offer for dessert.

Beavertails! I know you're in Toronto area for family, but if you ever wind your way to Ottawa, in the Byward Market area, there's a beavertail vendor with a good assortment of options. They do serious damage to my dietary intentions, LOL.

Adventurista

Yum! Still looking to trying focaccia. Will look back re yogurt.

Question @acpgee @mjbnj0001 Re stainless casserole tight fitted lid or foil? Should a lid be lifted to off gas when proving? Decades ago, did some bread in large glass bowl covered with linen kitchen towel which would be more porous than foil, more porous at edge than tight fitted lid... thoughts?


Torn rotisserie chicken in sauce, grated parm, over noodles, green beans

SafariGalNYC

mjbnj0001 wrote: »

Hot out of the oven. I did get a more pronounced "sourdough" smell during the bake this time. They'll cool overnight (it's nearly midnight in this picture). As you can see, I got a pronounced "oven rise" on the WW loaves; I'm thinking this yeast is more robust than my previous. Since they were from the same dough ball cut in half, why one got so much more expansive than the other is something to research.




And, this morning, 2 of the loaves cut to display their internal crumb. My main interest, the kefir loaf, didn't have much of a sourdough tang until I lightly toasted it, but was delicious in both cases. I cut into the more expansive ww loaf to see what's going on there.

Delish!!

SafariGalNYC

🍴 Roast sardines for dinner.

Brunch take away for 2 from my fave Hamptons (NY) beach restaurant. 🏖️
—
🍴 Fluke, beets,eggplant, peach, tomato.
🍴 Roast chicken, sweet potato, broccoli rabe, asparagus, radish.

mjbnj0001

Adventurista wrote: »

Yum! Still looking to trying focaccia. Will look back re yogurt.

Question @acpgee @mjbnj0001 Re stainless casserole tight fitted lid or foil? Should a lid be lifted to off gas when proving? Decades ago, did some bread in large glass bowl covered with linen kitchen towel which would be more porous than foil, more porous at edge than tight fitted lid... thoughts?


Torn rotisserie chicken in sauce, grated parm, over noodles, green beans

It's not as if there's so much pressure buildup as perhaps evident in a bottle of naturally-sparkling water that it'll pop if you take a tight cover off; I just think that the gas needs some opportunity to expand to allow bubbles freedom to blossom. Long, long ago, in a body far, far away, I was an avid scuba diver, and I visualize bubble formation and expansion in relation to ambient pressure whenever I think about this aspect of baking.

The main reason for covering is to retain moisture during the proof stage. Classically, this is why a basket with a towel over it suffices for proofing. And, I suppose, to keep flying insects off it, lol. The foil crimped around the bowl lip is hardly airtight. Dutch oven baking demonstrates that a closed environment can make a great loaf. I sometimes employ a shallow water-filled pan in the oven to generate steam; for the loaves seen above, I did an alternate approach, actually brushing them with water before placing them into the oven to help generate a nice crust (in fact, I wonder if the one loaf had too much water, resulting in the excessive oven spring before the crust hardened). I've heard the shallow pan method called, "the French baker's secret."

This is probably why I tinker the recipes all the time. There are so many subtle variables, each loaf is an individual creation, but the good news is that the results are almost always edible. I have a birthday coming up, a big round-number one, and I joked with my wife this evening that maybe a trip to bread-baking school for a week (one of the flour companies does this) would be a good present.

mjbnj0001

Adventurista wrote: »

Torn rotisserie chicken in sauce, grated parm, over noodles, green beans

Last night's (Sunday) dinner ... Italian-style baked chicken with pasta; the pasta sauce is leftover from the chickpea dish from Saturday (see the "Spanish-style chickpea and egg" posting previous above), repurposed into an "ad hoc pasta e ceci" dish. I'd call the chicken breast "baked chicken parm" but the cheese is actually a 3-cheese blend I used for taco topping earlier in the week, and it toasted up nicely here. "Waste not, want not" as much as I can, lol. The pasta is a bit of an experiment too - a non-wheat (mostly quinoa) item we tried as a lark; I don't think it'll get a repeat performance.

mjbnj0001

SafariGalNYC wrote: »

🍴 Roast sardines for dinner.

Brunch take away for 2 from my fave Hamptons (NY) beach restaurant. 🏖️
—
🍴 Fluke, beets,eggplant, peach, tomato.
🍴 Roast chicken, sweet potato, broccoli rabe, asparagus, radish.

We were just talking about the area out there earlier this evening - the local Channel 12 news had a travel blurb about eastern Suffolk. We used to head out to Montauk and nearby areas in the 70s fairly often from Bergen County NJ. Mostly off season or the shoulder seasons. Likely it's changed. Had some good times out there. Raised our kids near Sandy Hook, now we're further down the NJ Shore, and getting out there now would be definitely a trek.