bread and pickle lunch

beautiful foccacia ryan made.  i made the pickled zucchini (via heidi at 101 cookbooks), guess i can have credit for that, i highly suggest you make it too, tasty:  http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/quick-pickled-zucchini-recipe.html. 

just about the perfect lunch, in my opinion.

eat the bread!

finally an article that addresses all my concerns and worries about why people think they can't have bread. sad.

http://www.wholeliving.com/183942/our-daily-bread

sourdough bagels

we have been trying to use our sourdough in pretty much all we can. I was really curious how sourdough bagels would come out. bagels are great to have around the house and they came out great.

I am really in love with recipes that dont need yeast and just some good ol fashioned sourdough. here is what went in these:

1.05 oz starter

5.3 oz water

10.5 oz flour

.25 oz salt

.35 oz malt extract

.18 oz olive oil

add the water and starter in your mixer bowl. with a whisk break up the starter in the water till it foams. add the rest of the ingredients and mix till smooth. about 5-7 mins. let dough rest about a half hour. divide into four chunks and form into balls. let rest under a towel till doubled in size. press your finger through the center of the ball and spin around your fingers till its the size you want. i like the hole in the center to be a little bigger than a quarter. place on a oiled plate, wrap with plastic wrap and place in the fridge 4-6 hours or over night.  

pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees with the stone in it in the morning. bring a pot of water with about a tbl. baking soda in it to a boil. once at a rolling boil add bagels one by one. they should sink to the bottom and after 30 sec or so float up. if they dont, use whatever long spoon you might have to get them off the bottom of the pot. once floating let float for 30 sec then turn and let float for another 30 sec. take straight from the water to the pre-heated stone and bake for 15-20 mins. or until that goldeny brown crust is how you like it.

from this base really any favorite kind of bagel is possible. blueberry, seeded, onion, everything, chocolate chip, what ever suites your fancy.

They turned out just like bagels should. and went especially well with a little cream cheese and heidi's pomegranate jam.

power pumpkin bread

we created a sourdough starter from scratch about 2 months ago now. we have mixed a few basic sourdoughs trying to figure out the oven. mainly just trying to get the crust right. still have a little more to figure out but getting so close i feel its time to share. we only use six main ingredients as a base you could say in all our bread. starter. flour. water. sea salt. wheat germ. malt extract. old world traditions.

this is a combination of two breads i created for a restaurant. a power loaf, made up of a 7 whole grain cereal blend, 3 seeds, honey, and molasses. and a pumpkin sourdough, made of pumpkin puree, honey and molasses. we decided to go the fresh route and roast a fresh pumpkin. it was a bit longer process for the roasting and cooling of the pumpkin but came out quite nice.

for that perfectly thick artisan style crust there are two musts. A good quality stone. stones can be found at most kitchen stores. anything from the cheap ones to expensive will work. but don't be afraid to spend a little money for quality if you want a good crust.

and steam. for steam, we place a small cast iron in the oven when it is preheating then add water when we first place the loaves in.