Sourdough Bread Round

I had to look at a couple different sites to make this because I didn't have all the tools mentioned in the recipe and didn't want to buy them in case I decided none of this was worth the effort.  The bread turned out fantastically.  It took forever and was worth the effort.  I used a good portion of the bread last night to make the best grilled cheese sandwiches I've ever had.
 

Here is the recipe I used.  All my mixing bowls are metal, which it sounds like can be problematic for sourdough (?), so just to be safe, the dough did its 12 hour rise in the large glass bowl I normally keep fruit in on the counter.  I covered it with plastic wrap and left it in the oven off overnight because it seems a bit less cold than the countertop in winter.  I don't have a proofing basket (I had never even heard of it before -- no wonder my last attempt at sourdough went so poorly -- all of this sounded new), so I lined my metal colander with a tea towel and dusted it with flour and let the dough do its final 4 hour rise in that.  I don't have a dutch oven, so I followed this website's top suggestion and preheated my oven for an hour with the baking stone as the intended cooking surface.  I put the bread on a piece of parchment paper, set it on the hot baking stone, sprayed some water into the walls of the oven to create steam and put two ice cubes next to the dough to create more steam, and then covered the dough and ice cubes with my largest metal mixing bowl turned upside down over it for 30 minutes.  Then remove the bowl and bake for another 15 minutes, then remove bread (I used my pizza peel, as shown in the photo) and let bread cool for a hour.

Herbed Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

This is a best-of-both-worlds pizza dough recipe.  It's basically Neal Barnard's whole wheat pizza dough recipe with herbs in it for flavor, kneaded and cooked thin like NY style pizza.

Ingredients
2 tsp agave nectar
2 1/4 tsp yeast
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup bread flour
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried basil
1 tsp salt
vegetable oil cooking spray
1/4 cup yellow cornmeal

Directions

1.  In a measuring cup, dissolve the agave nectar and yeast in 3/4 cup warm water (100 - 110 degrees F).  Let stand for 5 minutes.  Meanwhile, in a large bowl, combine flours, dried herbs, and salt.  Add wet ingredients to dry and stir until a soft dough forms.  Turn out dough onto a lightly floured surface.  Knead until smooth and elastic.  Dough should be slightly sticky.  If it's too dry, add tiny amounts of water; if it's too sticky, add tiny amounts of flour.  Pinch off a small piece of dough and work it into a thin sheet through which you can see light.  You'll know it's ready when you can do this without tearing a hole in it.

2.  Place dough in a large bowl coated with cooking spray, turning to coat the top.  Cover plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, about 40 minutes (or do it for a couple hours like me).  If making in advance, put the dough in a ziploc bag and refrigerate until a couple hours before you plan to use it.  If making farther in advance, freeze until the day before you plan to use it.

3. Place pizza stone in middle of the oven.  Preheat oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit an hour in advance so pizza stone can heat through.

4.  Punch down the dough and roll into a 10- or 11-inch circle (or divide the dough by however many people you're feeding and do small personal pizzas) on a lightly floured surface.  Sprinkle pizza peel thoroughly with corn meal to prevent sticking, place pizza dough on top of corn meal, and arrange sauce and toppings.  Sprinkle pizza stone thoroughly with corn meal, slide pizza from pizza peel onto pizza stone in the oven, and cook pizza for about 13 minutes.  

5. Allow pizza to cool for 5 minutes before serving.

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

This half-whole wheat pizza dough recipe has no oil and comes from Neal Barnard's The Get Healthy, Go Vegan Cookbook.  I made personal pizzas with it last week for my family, and they didn't seem to notice it was whole wheat OR no oil.  The pizza was all gone very quickly.  I made mine vegan, and it was still pretty good.  I ate the whole thing.

Ingredients
2 tsp agave nectar
2 1/4 tsp yeast (recipe calls for active dry, I use instant because it's what I keep on hand for my bread machine)
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup unbleached AP flour
1 tsp salt
vegetable oil cooking spray
2 tbs yellow cornmeal

Directions

1.  In a measuring cup, dissolve the agave nectar and yeast in 3/4 cup warm water (100 - 110 degrees F).  Let stand for 5 minutes.  Meanwhile, in a large bowl, combine flours and salt.  Add wet ingredients to dry and stir until a soft dough forms.  Turn out dough onto a lightly floured surface.  Knead until smooth and elastic, adding more flour if necessary to prevent sticking.  Dough will feel slightly sticky.

2.  Place dough in a large bowl coated with cooking spray, turning to coat the top.  Cover with a towel (I use plastic wrap) and let rise in a draft-free place until doubled in size, about 40 minutes.

3.  Punch down the dough and roll into a 10- or 11-inch circle (or divide the dough by however many people you're feeding and do small personal pizzas like I did) on a lightly floured surface.  Place dough on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper and sprinkled with cornmeal (I put the dough on a pizza peel sprinkled with cornmeal and move it to the pizza stone in the over, also covered in cornmeal -- no baking sheet or parchment paper).  Crimp the edges to form a rim.  Lightly spray the surface of the dough with cooking spray.  (I don't do either of these things.  I stretch the dough as thin as possible without breaking it, leaving it just slightly thicker around crust.  No extra spray or "crimping.")  Add sauce and toppings as you see fit.  Bake at 500 degrees F for 8 to 12 minutes.

Sourdough Rye

In honor of the new year, I've been looking for some new healthy recipes to try.  One problem I regularly run into is finding a 100% whole grain bread that doesn't ruin every sandwich or meal it comes into contact with, or require some kind of butter to make it palatable and un-dry.  I found this recipe from Mark Bittman, whom I trust, on how to make a really time-consuming, no-knead, whole-grain sourdough.  I just finished assembling the sourdough starter and look forward to making it into bread sometime next week.  (It seems the trick to omitting sugar and honey from your bread is giving your yeast the better part of a week to feed off the flour and do its rising.)  I love both rye and sourdough, so I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

Ingredients

For the sourdough starter:

• 2 2/3 cups rye flour, Pinch instant yeast

For the dough:

• Sourdough starter
• 2 cups rye flour
• 2 cups whole-wheat or white flour
• 1 tablespoon kosher salt
• 1 1/2 cups cracked rye or rye flour

Directions

1. To make the starter: In a tall, narrow, nonmetal container (a tall, narrow bowl is fine), mix 2/3 cup rye flour with 1/2 cup water, along with the tiniest pinch of instant yeast — less than 1/16 teaspoon. Cover and let sit for about 24 hours, then add the same amount of both flour and water (no more yeast). Repeat twice more, at 24-hour intervals; 24 hours after the fourth addition, you have your starter. (From now on, keep it in the refrigerator; you don’t need to proceed with the recipe for a day or two if you don’t want to. Before making the dough, take a ladleful — 1/2 to 3/4 cup — of the starter and put it in a container; stir in 1/2 cup rye flour and a scant 1/2 cup water, mix well, cover and refrigerate for future use. This starter will keep for a couple of weeks. If you don’t use it during that time and you wish to keep it alive, add 1/2 cup each flour and water every week or so and stir; you can discard a portion of it if it becomes too voluminous.)  

2.  To make the dough: Combine the remaining starter in a big bowl with the rye flour, the whole-wheat or white flour and 2 1/4 cups water.  

3.  Mix well, cover with plastic wrap and let sit overnight, up to 12 hours.  

4.  The next morning, the dough should be bubbly and lovely. Add the salt, the cracked rye and 1 cup water — it will be more of a thick batter than a dough and should be pretty much pourable.  

5.  Pour and scrape it into two 8-by-4-inch nonstick loaf pans. The batter should come to within an inch of the top, no higher.  

6.  Cover (an improvised dome is better than plastic wrap; the dough will stick to whatever it touches) and let rest until it reaches the rim of the pans, about 2 to 3 hours, usually. Preheat the oven to 325 and bake until a skewer comes out almost clean; the internal temperature will measure between 190 and 200. This will take about 1 1/2 hours or a little longer.  

7.  Remove loaves from the pans and cool on a rack. Wrap in plastic and let sit for a day before slicing, if you can manage that; the texture is definitely better the next day.

100% Whole Wheat Buns

This is my first attempt at baking anything with 100% whole wheat flour.  I found this recipe on Food.com that has positive reviews, so I'm using it.  I'm also being fancy and making an egg substitute to try to cut out as much of the unhealthy stuff in this bread as possible (by Caldwell Esselstyn standards, this essentially means no oil, salt, or animal products).  I'm not daring enough to take it further than that and leave out, say, the canola oil just yet, and I'm not sure the salt can go at all.

Ingredients

1 cup water
2 tablespoons canola oil
1 egg (I'll be substituting 1 tbs flax seed meal whisked with 3 tbs water -- just allow the mixture to sit for 5 minutes before using it.)
3 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
1/4 cup vital wheat gluten
1/4 cup honey
1 teaspoon salt 

1 tablespoon active dry yeast

Directions

1. Place all ingredients in your bread machine in the order dictated by the user manual.

2. Set to "dough" cycle.

3. Turn out dough onto a lightly floured surface.  Divide into 8-10 pieces and shape into hamburger or hot dog buns.

4. Place on greased cookie sheets, cover, and let rise for 30-40 minutes.

5. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

6. Bake buns in oven for 12-15 minutes or until golden brown.

7. Allow to cool on wire racks.

[Edited 2/27/13: These turned out great.  I made 8 hamburger buns, cooked them for 12 minutes, and did not grease the baking sheet (in my experience, this just tends to make breads brown too quickly on the bottom, and they don't stick to the sheet anyway).  The flax seed meal egg substitute worked perfectly.  I will definitely be making these again, and I will definitely try using flax seed meal and water instead of beaten eggs in breads again -- particularly anything wheaty or like a muffin or quick bread.]

Cheese Herb Rolls

This is my favorite fresh bread.  The original recipe is from AllRecipes.com, but I've made adjustments on my version below to make it into rolls instead of a loaf of bread.

Ingredients
1 1/4 cups warm water (110 degrees F / 45 degrees C)
3 cups bread flour
2 tbs dry milk powder
2 tbs white sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 tbs butter, softened
3 tbs grated Parmesan cheese
1 1/2 tsp dried marjoram
1 1/2 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp dried basil
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tbs active dry yeast

Directions

1. Put ingredients in bread machine in order dictated by machine (for mine this means wet ingredients, with dry on top of that, with dry yeast in a little concave on top of that).  Set to "dough."  [If you aren't using a bread machine, put yeast, warm water, and sugar together to "bloom" for about 10 minutes.  Mix the remaining ingredients in a bowl.  Then mix these wet ingredients with the remaining ingredients and knead for about 5 minutes.  Cover and leave dough in a warm place to rise for about 45 minutes.] 

2. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface.  Punch down dough and knead a few more times, roll dough into 8-12 balls, put them on a baking sheet, cover them, and let them rise another 30-45 minutes, until doubled (or close to it).

3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Bake rolls in oven for 15-20 minutes, until just starting to turn golden brown.  Make sure to eat at least one while they're still hot (they're amazingly good hot with butter melting on them).  Serve with butter.

White Rolls

I never buy hot dog or hamburger buns.  They're too underwhelming for how expensive they are, and they never come in the right number.  I always use this recipe instead to make my own.  The number produced is equally weird, but they taste so wonderful that Sameer and I end up eating the rest of them as dinner rolls, sometimes warm with butter, sometimes plain.  The entire batch is inevitably gone inside 48 hours.  Set aside plenty of time to make these since the dough has to rise more than once.  If dinner depends on these rolls, I typically make them a day in advance and keep them in a ziploc bag.  I'm being adventurous today and only making them 4 hours before dinner.  I plan to make veggie burgers tonight and have some more of the rolls tomorrow night with chik'n piccata and green bean casserole.

Ingredients
3 cups bread flour
3 tbs sugar
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup dry milk powder
1 cup warm water (110 degrees F / 45 degrees C -- I know it's the right temperature when it feels warm on my hand, but just barely.  If you've heated milk for homemade yogurt, it's like that.)
2 tbs butter, softened
1 (.25 oz) package active dry yeast (also known as 1.5 tsp, if you bake enough you buy the big jar like I do)
1 egg white
2 tbs water

Directions

1. Place the bread flour, sugar, salt, milk powder, water, butter, and yeast in the pan of the bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer. Set on Dough cycle; press Start.
2. Remove risen dough from the machine, deflate, and turn out onto a lightly floured surface. Divide the dough into twelve equal pieces (or eight if you want them big enough for burgers), and form into rounds. Place the rounds on lightly greased baking sheets. Cover the rolls with a damp cloth, and let rise until doubled in volume, about 40 minutes (longer is fine too -- I often abandon my dough for well over an hour when tending to Simran). Meanwhile, preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
3. In a small bowl, mix together the egg white and 2 tablespoons water; brush lightly onto the rolls. Bake in the preheated oven for 15 minutes, or until the rolls are golden brown.  (If you skip or forget the egg wash, it's fine.  The only difference is they won't be quite as golden brown or crusty on the outside.  They taste just as good.)

 

Pie Crust

This Alton Brown recipe is what I've used for years any time I want to make a pot pie or most other sorts of pies or tarts.  I've also used it to make cheese and onion pasties (which are essentially hot pockets).  It's flaky and delicious and surprisingly easy to make (read: I cut a lot of corners with this recipe and it still turns out great).  I replace the lard in his recipe with vegetable shortening.

Ingredients

• 3 ounces (6 tablespoons) butter, chilled (use vegan butter such as Earth Balance to make it vegan)
  
• 1 ounce (2 tablespoons) vegetable shortening, chilled
• 6 ounces (approximately 1 cup) all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling dough
• 1/2 teaspoon table salt
• 1/4 cup cold water
• Approximately 32 ounces of dried beans, for blind baking

Directions

1. Place butter and shortening in freezer for 15 minutes. When ready to use, remove and cut both into small pieces.

2. In the bowl of a food processor, combine flour and salt by pulsing 3 to 4 times. Add butter and pulse 5 to 6 times until texture looks mealy. Add shortening and pulse another 3 to 4 times.

3. Remove lid of food processor and add a small amount of water. Replace lid and pulse 5 times. Keep adding small amounts of water slowly and pulsing until mixture forms into a large ball of dough.

4. Place ball of dough in large zip-top bag, and then press into a rounded disk and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

5. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.

6. Put pie pans in refrigerator to chill.  (I always skip this step and everything is still fine.)

7. Remove dough from refrigerator. Cut along 2 sides of the plastic bag, open bag to expose dough, and sprinkle both sides with flour. Cover again with plastic and roll out with a rolling pin to a 10 to 11-inch circle. Open plastic again and sprinkle top of dough with flour. Remove pie pans from refrigerator and set first pan on top of dough. Turn everything upside down and peel plastic from bottom of dough. Place second pan upside down on top of dough and flip again. (I don't do all this; I just use the rolling pin to move the dough into the pie pan. The main idea is just not to stretch the dough.) Remove first pan from atop dough. Trim edges if necessary, leaving an edge for meringue to adhere to. Poke holes in dough with a fork and place in refrigerator for 15 minutes.

8. Place a large piece of parchment paper on top of dough and fill with dry beans. Press beans into edges of dough and bake in the oven for 10 minutes. Remove parchment and beans and continue baking until golden in color, approximately 10 minutes longer. Remove from oven and place on cooling rack. Let cool completely before filling.

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

I found this recipe on AllRecipes.com.

Ingredients
1 teaspoon white sugar
1 1/2 cups warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
1 tablespoon active dry yeast
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

Directions

1. Put all ingredients in a bread machine according to machine instructions and set to "dough."  Alternately, if you don't have a bread machine:

In a large bowl, dissolve sugar in warm water. Sprinkle yeast over the top, and let stand for about 10 minutes, until foamy.
Stir the olive oil and salt into the yeast mixture, then mix in the whole wheat flour and 1 cup of the all-purpose flour until dough starts to come together. Tip dough out onto a surface floured with the remaining all-purpose flour, and knead until all of the flour has been absorbed, and the ball of dough becomes smooth, about 10 minutes.

2.  Place dough in an oiled bowl, and turn to coat the surface. Cover loosely with a towel, and let stand in a warm place until doubled in size, about 1 hour.

3.  When the dough is doubled, tip the dough out onto a lightly floured surface, and divide into 2 pieces for 2 thin crust, or leave whole to make one thick crust. Form into a tight ball. Let rise for about 45 minutes, until doubled.

4.  Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C). Roll a ball of dough with a rolling pin until it will not stretch any further. Then, drape it over both of your fists, and gently pull the edges outward, while rotating the crust. When the circle has reached the desired size, place on a well oiled pizza pan. Top pizza with your favorite toppings, such as sauce, cheese, meats, or vegetables.

5.  Bake for 16 to 20 minutes (depending on thickness) in the preheated oven, until the crust is crisp and golden at the edges, and cheese is melted on the top.  (I prefer to divide the dough in half to make two thin crust pizzas.  Put one of the balls of dough in a ziploc bag and throw it in the freezer for up to 6 weeks or so.)