After yesterday morning’s cat disaster, the girls were kind enough to drop their own projects and take over cleaning up.
While I was doing my rounds outside, the furry little monsters created another mess. One of the jade plant posts I’d managed to shield from their digging got knocked to the floor. *sigh* I was able to repot the plant. Not sure if it will survive. Once again, the girls took over the clean up so I could take care of other things. At least I wasn’t bread baking today!
The one down side of using my grandmother’s method to bake bread is, once I take the dough ball out of the flour and start it soaking overnight, it must be used the next day. There’s no way to postpone it if other things happen!
By the time we were doing cleaning up and putting things away, I started the bread baking much later than planned.
I did, however, cheat a bit. I wanted to mix up more dough, so I could take off more to set aside, for larger batches in the future. As it was, the overnight soak was not looking as active as I would have liked, so I did end up adding some yeast and a touch of sugar, and let that bubble up some more.
Then, since I have it, I used half all purpose flour, half durum wheat flour.
This is after it had about an hour to rise.
I notice a definite difference in the dough, when using the durum wheat flour. The dough feels smoother and more elastic. It was very noticeable when making the pasta, but even at half-and-half, for the bread, it is much nicer to knead.
My grandmother would have used whatever flour they had, so mixing it up like this is probably not all that different from how she did it.
After removing a portion to set aside for the next batch, I split the dough in half. The first half was left plain, though I did have some fun with it, anyhow.
I split the dough into 4 pieces (because there’s 4 of us), and made knots.
The resulting bread was a bit denser and chewier with the durum wheat flour in it. We all like our bread on the toothsome side, so we quite enjoyed it.
For the other half, I was going to do a cheese roll, but my daughter suggested rolling and folding it. With the extra gluten in the durum wheat flour, it could actually handle that, so I have it a try! This time, I made two loaves.
After rolling the dough out flat and as thin as I could, I used some of the herb butter my husband had made. I don’t know what all he included in there, other than a LOT of dill (the container slipped…), some caraway seeds, and a touch of lemon juice.
Then I added some shredded cheese. It’s a mix of sharp cheddar, mozzarella and Havarti.
Then I folded it in on itself.
It then got rolled out slightly and folded again, before final shaping. I had to use a touch of water to get the edges to stick closed.
Once in the pan, I flattened them out a bit more with my hands, before leaving them to rise.
Of course, some of the cheese did make its way through the dough as it baked, but my goodness, it looked and smelled wonderful!
It was quite flaky on the outside. On the inside, the dough absorbed much of the butter, leaving cheesy little pockets all over!
It was quite enjoyable! I don’t know that I would go so far as to do the folding method again (though it would be awesome to do that again with some sliced green onions, to make a version of green onion cakes!), but I definitely do it as a cheese roll in the future.
Until then, I am not going to have some with my lunch!
Today, we got to use our pasta machine for the first time, while making pasta for the first time. :-)
Granted, I have made pasta-like noodles before, before, but nothing quite like this.
Of course, I did some research first. I wanted something really basic for a recipe. This turned out to be just flour and eggs. Most places I found went with a ratio of 2 eggs per 1 cup of flour. I did find one that used a ratio of 2 eggs per 3/4 cup of flour. As for quantities, it was recommended 1 egg per person.
Based on that, we could have gone with 4 eggs and 2 cups of flour, but I went ahead and did 6 eggs with 3 cups of flour.
I worked the dough in a bowl until the dough was well formed, then turned it onto our kneading mat.
This turned out to be waaaayyy too dry! I would expect relative humidity would affect the dough, like it does with bread, and we are very dry right now. I simply could not knead in the rest of the flour.
The flour had bits of dough in it, though, and I wasn’t about to let that go to waste.
If you are a pasta aficionado, you may want to look away right now… ;-)
I remembered that one resource I found that used the 2 eggs: 3/4 cup flour ratio. It had a recipe calling for 7 eggs to 3 cups of flour.
I decided to add an egg.
Of course, I couldn’t just knead in an egg, so I beat it in a bowl first, then beat in the flour that I couldn’t work into the dough. I even broke off some pieces of the dough and mixed that in, to get it thicker.
I then opened up the dough so I could add the additional egg mixture into the middle, then fold the dough over it.
Kneading that in was pretty messy, anyhow!
Once it was thoroughly worked in, I only needed to add perhaps a tablespoon of flour onto the mat to clean up the stickiness, then I kneaded it for 10 minutes.
I’m sure I broke all sorts of rules or committed some terrible faux pas in doing this, but hey – it worked! The dough was wonderfully smooth and elastic, and just barely sticky.
At this point, I covered it with some plastic wrap and let it sit for 20 minutes.
While I was looking things up, there were a few points I kept seeing repeated. One was that the pasta cooked extremely quickly, so before I even started it, I made a use-watcha-got meat sauce. The other thing I kept seeing was to use extra salt in the water the pasta would be boiled in. Since they cook so quickly, they don’t have the chance to absorb salt from the water, if the usual amount was used.
So while the pasta was resting, I made a few final touches on the meat sauce, then prepped a pot of salted water. No one mentioned how much more salt to add, so I winged it. :-D
The next thing to do was set up the pasta machine.
What’s hilarious is that the first image has the pasta photoshopped onto the machine completely wrong. It shows cut pasta coming out of the flat rollers. :-D
The machine comes with a clamp to attach it to a table, but our table has a different design. It can expand to twice its size. The two halves of the table top slide one over the other when it’s closed, with a support piece running under them at each end. The whole thing is about 6 inches wide – way too much for the clamp to fit around.
It worked out though.
I was able to partially slide out the extension, and still have a stable surface to clamp on to.
When it was time to start rolling the dough, I started with only half of it. The first time I rolled it through the machine, though…
It just tore apart!
I spent some time going through the instruction manual to figure out why. I ended up using a rolling pin to thin it out more, first, and dusted more flour on each side. That seemed to do the trick.
Another thing I kept reading was to make sure to roll the dough thin enough to see through. I kept reading that the pasta will thicken as it cooks, so it’s better to roll it thinner.
In reading the instructions, it said to set the machine at 1, for the widest setting, rolling the dough through, folding it in half, rolling it again, about 5 or 6 times, then working it thinner and thinner until about 3.
There was one problem with that.
The numbers on the machine are backwards from the numbers in the instructions! The widest setting is 7, not 1. :-D Which doesn’t really matter, as long as it works, but I did find that funny.
It took a while to get the hang of it. One problem I encountered was that the crank handle kept falling off! The pasta also tended to go off to one side. After a while, a daughter was able to come give me a hand, too, which made things much easier to handle.
The pasta sheets kept getting longer and longer, and I ended up having to cut them in half. Then do it again! In this photo, we have the 4 sheets draped on the pasta drier, ready for us to put the cutter attachment on and start cutting them.
I have to add that I’m really glad I waited until we found Durum flour for this. We could really feel the difference in how well the pasta held out to all the stretching and handling.
The first ones we cut were still hilariously long, so we cut the remaining sheets in half again.
Their widths might have been consistent, but their lengths certainly weren’t! :-D
After finishing the first batch, they got to dry while the second half of the dough was prepped. This half went much faster, now that we knew what we were doing! Also, we split the second batch of dough in half, right from the start.
Once they were done, it was time to get the water boiling. After a while, I took the longest pasta pieces and broke them in half, to make them a more reasonable length!
Just before the water was boiling, I took them all off the drying rack, to make them easier to handle and carry and break any really long pieces that got missed..
Don’t they look pretty?
And yes. I did cook the whole lot!
Here, I have pretty much just added them to the water. It hasn’t even come back to a boil, yet, and already the pasta is half cooked!
I boiled them for 2 minutes, but that was probably at least half a minute too long! :-D
After draining them, I tossed them in some herbed butter my husband made earlier in the day.
There was have it! Fresh made pasta, with meat sauce.
So, how did it taste?
Many of the sites I found with recipes raved about how good they were, and how you’ll never want to eat store bought pasta again, and so on.
It was good, but I don’t know that I would say it was that good! At least, not when considering the amount of physical labor involved. The family did all really enjoy it, though.
I actually found the pasta a bit thin. I like a toothsome pasta. In rolling it out, I went to the recommended “3” on the knob, based on what I’d read (the instructions with the machine suggested going to 3, but with the numbers reversed on the knob, that actually meant 4). It was certainly thin enough to see through, but I think that, next time, I’ll just bring it down to 4 on the machine.
It does use a lot of eggs, though. We’ll have to buy more, before we can do this again! Or we could make it with just water. The instruction manual has a recipe, too.
We definitely can do some experimenting! :-D
All in all, I’d say this was a success, and I am quite glad we got the machine to make the job easier! Even with the handle falling off so often! :-D
Okay, so after accidentally killing off our ball of old dough “yeast”, I had to start over. Since I have no idea how my grandmother got her first ball of old dough, this is all a guessing game, anyhow!
This time, I went with another old technique: the sponge.
It’s just 2 cups warm water, 2 cups flour and 2 Tbsp of yeast, mixed together. This is the sort of thing one might put into the fridge overnight, to bake in the morning. Instead, I put it in the oven that was warmed up to its lowest setting, then turned off.
After about an hour or more, the resulting sponge was all soft and fluffy!
I added another half cup of warm water, which also made it easier to transfer it to my big mixing bowl, then added the salt and flour, as usual.
Once I’d kneaded in as much flour as I wanted (I have to catch myself and not add too much!), the dough was set aside to rise in a floured bowl. Once again, it went into a warm oven to rise.
But not before I took out a dough baby! My mother described my grandmother as taking dough out for the next batch after the second rising, when she was shaping the loaves. Since I’m using actual yeast in this, I did only one rising before shaping the loaves. I flattened the ball out this time, to see how that changes things as it sits buried in the flour.
As for the rising dough, it ended up taking about 2 hours, even with using commercial yeast!
This would have been a 2 loaf recipe, but I decided to play around a bit.
I made 4 plain mini loaves, first.
Yes, there are only 3 in the picture. My husband already ate one. :-D
After taking the picture, I ate one, too!
The other half was used to make surprise buns. During our city shop, I’d found a gouda-like cheese (I can’t remember what it was actually called) with truffle in it. There was still some left, so I cut it into small slices and wrapped them inside the dough.
I did try and seal the dough well, but as you can see in the photo, the cheese still made its way out, and started bubbling in the middle!
I can hardly wait to try it out!
With our new dough baby, I will have to make a point of using it every few days again. Since I didn’t start out with an “instant sourdough” yeast, it will take longer to develop that sour flavour. At least, that’s my assumption.
I will also keep taking the dough baby out for the next batch at the start, as the dough it being setting aside to rise. That way, I can do things later on, like knead baking soda in again, or knead in things like herbs or shredded cheese or anything else that catches my fancy.
Ah, I was afraid of this. I managed to kill the dough ball.
My mother describes how her mother would bake only once a week. So after working using the old dough after letting it sit in the flour few a few days, this time, I left it longer. Last night, I took it out and prepped it to soak overnight, as usual. Unfortunately, I did not have my camera with me.
The dough ball didn’t look any different on the outside from before. The extra time did mean the inside was drier, which I did expect. It was basically a hollow ball. Being drier, it was easier to break up into small pieces. I added 2 cups of water that had been boiled and allowed to cool to the right temperature (because of concerns with our well water), and it was set in a warm oven with the light on, overnight.
This is what it looked like this morning.
Yeah. That yeast is dead.
In stirring it up, the dough was completely dissolved, but no hint of yeast activity.
I can say with confidence that the extra time buried in flour did not kill the yeast. I could have dehydrated it completely, and it should have reconstituted and kept right on going.
One of the things I mention in there was that I “cheated” by using baking soda. If you’ve worked with sourdough recipes that called for baking soda before, you know what happens! There is a lovely chemical reaction that results in a light, fluffy dough or batter.
My mistake was, I didn’t take the dough ball out before I added the soda. That chemical reaction would have continued after I buried the dough ball in the flour, which is why it still developed a hollow center. However, as I thought might happen, the yeast was spent in the process. I didn’t remember to take the dough ball out until too late in the process, but I hoped that maybe it would still work. Alas, it did not.
Well, this IS and experiment!
So I am restarting the process. I don’t have the “instant sourdough yeast” I used before, so I am using regular yeast to make a sponge, which is currently in a warm oven to get all spongy. I’ll post the details later, but it is also a very old technique. It will slow down my bread baking plans for the day by quite a bit. Ah, well. That’s okay. It’s a learning process, and that’s the whole fun of it!
Last night, I prepared the dough ball from our previous baking. I was really curious about our bubble!
Seeing this reminded me of a story my mother told me, when I was a child, helping her bake bread.
There was a young couple and, while the husband was at work, the wife decided to bake bread. The only problem was, she’d never baked bread before!
She followed the recipe and set the dough aside to rise.
It wouldn’t rise.
After a very long time, the wife decided she had failed somehow and was feeling quite ashamed of her failure. Her husband would be coming home from work soon, so she decided to hide the evidence by burying the dough in the garden.
It was, however, a sunny and warm day. Some time later, her husband happened to glance out the window and saw what appeared to be a giant white mushroom growing in the garden!
The wife didn’t realize the house was too cold for the bread to rise properly, but once warmed by the sun, it rose quite enthusiastically!
Alas, the poor woman’s secret was out, and she had to explain to her husband why there was a giant bubble growing in their garden. :-D
I was talking to my mother on the phone just a little while ago, and told her about the bubble that emerged from the flour, asking if she knew what it made me think of when I saw it.
She knew exactly what that was!
We got a good laugh over it!
So what did this bubble look like when I dug the bread egg out?
Rather funny, I thought!
Like last time, it was light, with a dried, crisp outer shell, and lovely, bubbly dough inside.
I broke it up into pieces, putting it in a crock with 2 1/2 cups of warm water – the full amount I would be using in the dough – and set the crock into a warm oven with the light on, and left it overnight.
Here, you can see how it looked the next morning, after a good stir, and how the finished dough looked as it was set aside to rise.
Since I expected this to take a while, I decided to make a 2 loaf recipe of basic bread. In the time that took to rise, the old dough bread still needed more time!
With the plain bread, I took half of the dough, cut it into a dozen pieces, rolled each piece into long, flattened strip, which got wrapped around a hot dog wiener.
It’s been a long time since I made these!
That worked out quite well!
The other half of the dough, meanwhile, also got split into a dozen pieces, which got made into buns.
I baked those in a cast iron pan, to make pull-apart buns.
My Babcia’s Bread experiment still wasn’t rising, so while the buns and wieners were rising, then waiting their turns for the oven, I made another batch of bread.
This bread was my usual oatmeal flax bread, with the addition of chia seeds and hemp hearts. I made a 2 loaf recipe, but divided them into 4 smaller loaves.
By now, my Babcia’s Bread was still not risen a much as I would have liked, but with the oven in use, there wasn’t anywhere I could keep it warm. Besides, it did rise at least some.
I decided not to do three risings this time.
Plus, I cheated.
The bread egg is the same principle as a sourdough, without the moisture levels. Which means the developing yeasts would become increasingly acidic.
I decided to take advantage of that and employ a bit of chemistry.
What happens when you mix baking soda and vinegar?
Lots of bubbles, of course!
What happens when you add baking soda to an acidic bread mixture?
More bubbles!
I sprinkled some baking soda onto my kneading surface and worked it in quite thoroughly. The dough turned out to have risen more than it appeared to have, so it was already pretty light and fluffy. As I kneaded in the baking soda, I could actually feel the dough becoming even lighter and puffier in my hands!
After kneading it enough to ensure the baking soda, along with a little more flour to keep it from getting too sticky – and remembering to take off a ball of dough for the next baking! – I divided it into 4 small loaves and set them aside to rise some more more.
While my Babcia’s Bread dough was still rising, I had time to make yet another batch of bread. Surprise bread!
This time, I made a plain 2 loaf recipe, then added parsley, garlic granules, paprika and dill. After letting it rise, I made a dozen buns, each stuffed with 1 cube of mozzarella and 1 cube of old cheddar cheeses.
It turned out pretty awesome, if I do say so myself!
Here is my bread baking for the day – minus the hot dogs, which were already eaten! Top left is 2 loaves of Babcia’s Bread. In the middle is the pull-apart buns that were baked in a cast iron frying pan, and on the right are a couple of surprise bread buns. In the foreground is one of the oatmeal flax loaves.
Our first batch of bread using old dough, in the manner my Babcia used to do, is now done. I did mess up a bit, which I will talk about below.
Here is how the dough looked after the first rise. I had left it for about 1 1/2 – 2 hours, give or take.
That is just beautiful.
My mother described my Babcia as “punching down” the dough. I know exactly what she was talking about, since this is what she did with her bread baking. My mother used a huge, enameled bowl with a lid, which we still have, for one big batch of bread. She would get it ready for its first rise before going out to milk the cows in the morning. By the time those chores were done, the dough was overflowing the giant bowl, knocking the lid askew. She would put the dough back in, scraping dough off the lid and adding it in, too, then literally punch it down with her fist. She would then put the lid back and leave it for a second rising, which would also overflow. She would gather it up again and punch it down before continuing on to form loaves and buns.
For such a small batch, I just took it out and gave it a light kneading.
The dough felt beautiful! Soft, light, fluffy and elastic. I probably could have skipped a rising, but I really want to recreate what my Babcia did as much as possible, so back into the bowl it went.
Both times, I set the bowl into a warm oven with the heat off and the light on.
This is possibly where I made my first mistake. The dough did not rise as much the second time. Usually, dough rises faster during a second rising, but after an hour, it really hadn’t risen as much as I would have expected. I probably should have left it for another half hour, at least.
I didn’t do that.
With this batch being rather small, I formed just one loaf out of it (after removing a portion for the next batch), then giving it another light knead.
In my starter batch, the two round loaves I shaped had puffed upwards quite a lot, so this time I pressed the loaf flat, then set it aside, covered with a tea towel, to rise while the oven preheated to 425F.
Which may have been my second mistake. I probably should have let it rise for a while, before preheating the oven. Not only am I too used to how quickly yeast bread rises, but our new oven preheats faster than the old one!
Meanwhile, I used the piece of dough I’d set aside to pick up the bits of dough stuck to the bowl and table top, as my mother described my grandmother doing, kneaded it enough to incorporate it all, then buried it in our canister of flour. I took out slightly more dough this time, as in the next batch, I intend to increase the quantities of flour and water.
When the oven was ready, I scored the loaf and put it in, checking it after half an hour, then adding more time.
I’m certainly glad I flattened the loaf as much as I did! It still became very much a ball!
This was taken out at about 40 minutes.
Which was most definitely a mistake.
Though I made sure to do the “thump” test to check if it was done, when I finally cut it open, the centre seemed slightly underdone. I probably should have left it in the oven for at least 5 or 10 more minutes. I am really bad for taking bread out too early, as I am constantly thinking they are going to burn! :-(
What to do?
Toast it!
Sort of.
I cut it into pieces, laid it back on the baking stone, and put it back in a 350F oven. After about 15 minutes, I flipped them and put them back for another 10 minutes.
Here is the end result!
It looks really great, at least! It still felt a bit heavy and dense, though.
The first taste test was with a plain piece.
The flavour is a bit milder than the starter batch. This makes sense, since that one used a commercial sourdough yeast. The sourdough yeast included rye, which I could taste in that starter batch, but I am not getting any rye flavour with this batch. There is, however, a very slight sourdough flavour. I expect this flavour to develop with every batch we bake. Overall, though, the flavour was very neutral.
The texture was slightly dense and chewy, but not under-cooked and doughy, as I feared it would be.
The one thing I had an issue with, was the crust. It had a thick, crunchy crust that crossed over to that “watch you don’t cut your mouth up” level. This may have been exacerbated by “toasting” the bread pieces again, but from what I saw when I was cutting it, I could see it was already going to be an issue.
The second taste test was with butter and, of course, that one tasted better. Fat is flavour, after all!
I found myself thinking this would be a very good bread to dip in an herb infused olive oil! The neutral base flavour would make a great carrier for other, more strongly flavored things. That neutrality will likely disappear over time, as each batch should develop a more distinct “sourdough” flavour.
So this first batch of bread using old dough was both a success and a not-quite-success.
The use of the old dough in place of yeast or sourdough started worked very well. There was plenty of yeast activity in there. Even without the use of sugar in the bread, the yeast did its job – when I gave it the time to do so!
The other success was reducing the amount of flour. It did mean making one loaf instead of two, but the dough itself turned out much better for it.
The not-quite-success part of it had more to do with my not giving it the time it needed, I think. I’ve made sourdough bread were I’ve left the dough to proof for an entire day, so it’s not like I don’t have the patience for that sort of thing. But I did see the signs and simply chose to go ahead, anyway. The end result was probably not as could as it could have been, because of it.
Plus, of course, I need to be concerned less about over-baked bread, and more about underdone bread, and leave it in the oven for longer! I should probably increase the oven temperature to 450F. That’s the temperature my daughter bakes her French bread in, and her much larger loaves bake up wonderfully.
I will leave the “bread egg” in the flour for a couple of days, then make another batch, tweaking things with what I’ve learned with this attempt.
When setting the old dough to reconstitute and ferment overnight, I had some concerns about temperature. The crock was sitting on our dining table, and that room gets pretty chilly. I did warm up the rice bag we have been using to warm our fermenting hard apple cider (which is probably ready to be bottled, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet) and set it under the crock, to help keep it at least a little bit warm.
While investigating some cat noises in the wee hours of the morning, I checked it and found it was looking pretty much the same as when I’d left it. So I warmed the oven up a bit, then put the crock in, shut the oven off and left the light on.
This is how it looked about 3 hours later.
Warming it up, did the trick! I’ll have to keep that in mind, as we continue experimenting.
I warmed the oven up a bit again, then put the crock back for another 3 hours or so, before I was able to start making the dough.
That’s looking nice and puffy!
I find it interesting that the pieces are still distinctly separate. When I stirred it, before adding it to some flour and salt in a bowl, I found the pieces separated and stretched, before starting to mix together. The water under the old dough pieces was pretty much clear until I mixed it, too.
I added this to a bowl with 3 cups of flour and 2 tsp of Kosher salt and mixed it together. I kneaded another 4 – 4 1/2 cups of flour in before turning it onto my table and kneading it for another 5 – 10 minutes.
Normally, I would oil the bowl the dough will be rising in, but my grandmother would not have done that, so I used flour, instead.
With this batch, I’ve got the same amount of water as the first batch the old dough came from, but I’m using less flour. That first batch was too dense. With only a little more than 4 cups of flour in here, after I remove some dough for the next batch, I think I’ll just make one large round loaf this time, instead of two.
Next time, I think I’ll up the water and flour quantities a little bit, and make a bigger batch. I don’t think I’ll adjust the amount of salt, though. Not unless I end up doubling the recipe or something.
The dough is now covered and set aside for its first rising. I’ll give it at least an hour, probably two, before punching it down and leaving it for a second rising.
I will post again, later today, with the final results! :-)
Okay, here it is! My very first attempt at slowly recreating my grandmother’s bread, with her use of “old dough” yeast that she kept stored in flour in between baking day. (Part 1: the story)
The first goal is to create the bread dough yeast starter, and for that, I need to make a yeast bread.
Here are the ingredients.
Water, yeast, salt and flour.
That’s it!
I used Kosher salt, as I figured that was more like what my grandmother had available to her.
For a 2 loaf recipe, I used 2 cups water, 2 tsp salt, about 2 tsp yeast, and between 5 and 6 cups of flour.
The yeast is my “cheat”. Back in the spring, when everyone started panic buying, yeast was among those things that became hard to find. One of our local grocery stores now not only stocks lots of the usual big name brand or two, but a wide variety of brands and types of yeast. When I spotted a “sourdough” yeast, I grabbed a packet, just to try it.
Since some of the dough from this batch will become the “mother” of future batched, I thought it was appropriate to use it.
The ingredients list is interesting. Both wheat and rye is used.
“Sorbitan monostearate (abbreviation SMS), or Span 60, is an emulsifier esterified from sorbitol and stearic acid with the European food additive number E491. This ingredient is mostly used in baking yeast by improving the activity of instant dry yeast when the yeast is rehydrated before use. “
Speaking of rehydrating…
For the 2 cups of water, I boiled it first, because I have doubts about our well water. We really need to get the water tested, but a full test is really expensive, so… boiling it is.
I measured out half a cup of water into another measuring cup to rehydrate the yeast. I could have done it in the full 2 cups, but the half cup cooled down to a safer temperature for the yeast faster.
The inclusion of rye in this really changes the colour!
I let it proof for 5 minutes. I don’t know if I should have proofed it longer – I have recipes that call for anything from 5 to 15 minutes. It’s bubbled up, though, so I decided to go ahead.
While it was proofing, I mixed the salt into about 2-3 cups of flour. Without a wood bread bowl, I decided not to use a plastic one, and tried “dump your liquids into a well in the flour” method.
That looks…
Unpleasant.
The next while was spent with very messy, sticky hands, incorporating the rest of the flour and water in.
Thankfully, my daughter came down to give me a hand, adding the flour and water as I kneaded it in.
Once it was all mixed in, I kneaded the dough for about 15 minutes.
I may have used too much flour. I’ll have to keep that in mind for next time.
I did notice a difference in texture from my usual bread. Although I kneaded the dough until it felt smooth and satiny, it never looked smooth.
In fact, the longer I kneaded, the rougher it began to appear!
So I went by feel rather than appearances when it came time to set it aside for a first rising.
It went into an oiled plastic bowl, turning to coat all sides with oil. After covering the bowl with a tea towel, it went into a warm oven to rise.
Earlier in the day, I had prepped a baking stone and was curing it with oil in the oven. The oven was off but still warm; prefect for proofing the dough.
Once it was in the oven and rising, I set a timer to check it in an hour while my daughter started a batch of French bread. Checking it at an hour, I decided it needed more time, by my daughter’s bread was rising by the, too. So I took the bowl out and put my daughter’s dough in the warm warm oven, and set my timer for another hour.
This is the dough, after 2 hours.
After turning the dough out to prepare the loaves, I had to make sure to do that most important part.
Collect a dough egg! :-D
This humble little lump of dough is what it’s all about.
Into our flour canister it went!
I almost forget to get a picture before burying it!
My other daughter labeled the container for me.
She is a hoot! :-D
The ball of dough will now dry out until the next time we bake this bread.
After dividing the dough, I decided to form it into round loaves.
By this time, my daughter’s loaves were in the oven.
Where she forgot to take out my curing baking stone.
So they got to have their second rise on a normal baking pa, instead.
In kneading and shaping the dough, once again, the dough got rougher rather than smoother! You can really tell in the one of the left.
I then left them to rise, checking them after about half an hour.
My daughter’s French bread was done well before my second rising was done!
The ended up needing another hour of rising time.
The baking stone had cooled down quite a bit by then, but was warm enough that I transferred the loaves over, and I think that residual warmth helped them rise even more. The above photo was taken just before they went into a 400F oven.
All done!
I am not sure how long they took to back. I set my timer for half and hour, then kept peaking and resetting the time for another 5 minutes, over and over. I think it took about an hour to bake.
I was quite impressed with how much the loaves rose in the process!
The next part was the hardest.
Waiting for the loaves to cool down!
For all that the loaves rose so much in the oven, they still felt surprisingly dense. I was also a bit surprised by how fine a crumb there was.
I taste tested one piece plain, one with ordinary butter, and one with a garlic herb butter.
I’m having a hard time describing the flavour. It was certainly tastey, but I think I was picking up the rye flavour in the “sourdough” yeast. It did have a “sourdough” tang, but one that is quite different from any sourdough we’ve made ourselves.
The sponge was soft, yet toothsome. The crust was crusty enough to be a good chew, but not so crusty as to cut up the mouth (something I have issues with, when it comes to most “crusty” breads).
The plain slice was tasty, but the buttered slices definitely were better. With no fat in the bread itself, the butter really brought out the flavours that were more muted in the unbuttered slice.
All in all, this very plain, very basic bread was a success.
It is, however, just the first step in the process. It’s purpose was to provide us with some dough to reserve for the next batch. Every batch of bread we make using the bread egg now sitting in the flour canister will be another step closer to recreating my Babcia’s bread.
While my grandmother did her bread baking once a week, we will probably make our first batch using the bread egg in 3 or 4 days.
I am really curious to see how it will look when we fish it out of the flour, and how the overnight soak will turn out! For a first time use, I don’t expect the flavour will be much different, but who knows? I’ve never done this before! :-D
I may have mentioned in past posts, about my mother’s memories of bread baking in pre-WWII Poland. I was fascinated by what she could tell me. With no commercial yeast available, I had thought my Babcia (grandmother) had used a sort of sourdough. I know my father remembers this; a portion of the bread dough would be set aside to continue to ferment, and be used in the next batch of bread.
My grandmother did something different. She allowed her old dough to dry.
We lost our own sourdough starter, the Sourceror this past summer. It almost made it to 2 years, but we had a real problem with fruit flies this year. Somehow, they managed to get into the container and contaminated it.
Having a big bubbling bowl on the counter has been a bit of a problem for other reasons, so the more I heard about how my Babcia saved her dough, the more I wanted to try it.
My mother’s memories go back to the late 1930’s, early 1940’s. Then WWII happened and they eventually ended up in Canada, where commercial yeast was available. After questioning her about it, this is what I’ve been able to piece together.
Babcia would bake bread once a week. She would set aside some of the dough, adding in the scrapings from the wooden dough bowl, form it into a ball, then burying the ball in the flour. The night before she would be baking bread again, she would take out the dried ball of dough, break it up into pieces, and soak it in water overnight. In would get all bubbly, and that would be her yeast for her bread baking, with the cycle continuing each time.
My basic bread recipe includes things like oil, sugar, eggs, milk… all things that I just couldn’t see handling sitting in a bag of flour for a week without going off. On questioning my mother, I learned Babcia used none of these things. It simply wasn’t available. Her bread was flour, water, a bit of salt, and the reconstituted old dough. That’s it.
The flour would have been flour they milled themselves (at least they did until the Nazi’s caught them using an illicit hand mill and destroyed it), using grain they grew themselves. My mother says corn flour was also sometimes used, which they also would have grown themselves. The ingredients may have been few, but my mother remembers it as being the best bread; especially when corn flour was added. She remembers it was light and fluffy, too.
My mother was too young at the time to remember a lot of details, though, so I did some research. I know that bread can be as basic as flour and water, but if salt is used, would that be a problem? I know that sugar feeds yeast, while salt retards it. How would having salt in the dough affect the old dough yeast cake? Also, how much dough was set aside? My mother remembers a “ball”, but as young as she was, her sense of how large that was would be distorted.
In my research, I found quite a bit about “old dough” bread baking. This gave me a lot of the information I was looking for. For some types of old dough baking, dough is set aside before the salt was added, while others were taken out after. Both work. As for how much was taken out, I eventually found a general “about the size of an egg” description.
What I didn’t find was anyone who used old dough that was stored in flour. Nor did I find any that stored the dough for weekly baking. Most described setting the old dough aside in the fridge for 2 or 3 days, at most. In some forums I found, people described using it in their daily baking. Not a single person described using their old dough the way my mother remembers her mother did it. They all used wet dough. None used reconstituted dry dough.
I have decided, instead of getting a sourdough going again (for now), I will try and recreate my Babcia’s bread.
Of course, some things I will simply not be able to recreate; at least not now. We’ll be using plain old AP flour. I won’t be adding corn flour right away. I don’t have a big wooden dough bowl like my Babcia would have had (with a wooden dough bowl, yeast would have gotten into the wood itself, adding its own layer of flavours). I also don’t have a wood burning masonry stove (something similar to this, with a sleeping area on top) like my grandmother would have been baking in.
I found some proportions for ingredients for 2 loaves that I will start with, and I will probably experiment with making some a couple of times a week before I start adjusting quantities for larger batches.
One of the main differences in this experimental process is that I don’t have a yeast “mother.” My mother has no memory of where her mother got hers from. It was always just there. She may well have gotten her first old dough from the family members she was living with (my great grandparents having already gone to Canada to start a homestead, only to not be able to send for their children as they had planned, because of WWI). However, as they saw the warning signs leading to WWII, they abandoned their farm in Eastern Poland, taking nothing but the clothes on their backs and a goat they could milk for food, to settle in Western Poland. At that point, my grandmother likely got another old dough ball from one of their new neighbours.
It’s amazing how much history is intertwined in something so ordinary as how my grandmother leavened her bread!
So this is what I will be doing in my experiment that will possibly span years.
Today, I have started a first batch of plain bread; it’s rising as I write this, and I will post about it separately when it’s done.
I will be using a commercial “sourdough” yeast I happened to find, in this first batch.
After the dough is risen and before I shape it into loaves, I will break off some of the dough and store it in a container of flour, then bake the rest of the dough as usual.
In a few days, I’ll reconstitute what should be a mostly dried ball of dough overnight, make another 2 loaf batch, then continue repeating the process.
What should happen: the flavour of the bread should change and develop over time, just as with a sourdough.
What might happen: I’ll have sucky bread that doesn’t rise properly? The dough ball will start molding? The yeast will die off and I’ll have to start over? I have no idea.
For the first few months, at least, I will stick to the same basic mix of flour, water, salt and the old dough for yeast. Eventually, I will try adding corn flour. If I do decide to modify the recipe in other ways, it will be by doing things like kneading in herbs or shredded cheese or whatever, after the dough ball has been removed. I won’t be adding things to the base recipe, like sugar, milk, oil or eggs.
After I’ve done a few batches, and assuming this works, I plan to give some to my mother to taste. Hopefully, she will remember enough to be able to tell me if I’ve succeeded or not! :-D
Today, I bring to you a variation of the traditional Polish dish called haluski. You can go here for a traditional recipe with some common variations. The link will open in a new tab, so you won’t lose your place. :-)
Oddly, though my parents were both born in Poland, and I grew up with a lot of traditional Polish foods, haluski was not one of them. Mind you, when I was a kid, I hated cabbage and probably wouldn’t have eaten it if my mother did make some! Even so, my parents also took us to Polish celebrations and events in the city, and I have no memory of this dish. I did not discover it existed until within the past year or so, while looking up things to do with cabbage!
Of the recipes I found, the most basic is onion, cabbage, noodles, and a lot of butter. Some include bacon, kielbasa or a variety of cured meats, like pancetta. I tried making it with bacon, and we liked it enough that it has since become a fairly regular dish in our household. My husband is not too keen on cabbage, though. ;-)
This time, I decided to experiment with the recipe, and I am very happy with the result. The plain egg noodles were replaced with mushroom egg noodles and, because I still had some left, I included dried mushrooms as well.
The dried mushrooms are a mix of white button mushrooms, crimini and shiitake mushrooms.
The next time we dry mushrooms, we need to do a whole lot more! :-D
The noodles I used are a brand that is easily found in our area, usually in its own little display. They are made with 2% porcini mushroom granules.
While preparing the noodles according to package instructions, I chopped the cabbage and onions, cut the bacon into small pieces, and set the dried mushrooms to reconstitute in boiling water. If I were using fresh mushrooms, I would have just sliced them.
Not pictured is the butter and seasonings. The seasonings can be just salt and pepper. As I still have some left, I used mushroom salt, as well as freshly ground pepper, garlic granules and paprika. Fresh garlic can be used instead of the granules, adding them in just before the cabbage.
The bacon pieces were added to a large pot and fried until they started getting crispy. The bacon fat is used in place of butter at this point.
Then the onions were added and, after they had softened a bit, the reconstituted mushrooms were added. The liquid was included, too, which helped deglaze the pot. The seasonings were also added at this point.
Where I using fresh mushrooms, I would have added them to the bacon before the onions.
Next, the cabbage was added, along with a dollop of butter, and cooked until soft.
By the time the cabbage was ready, the noodles were cooked and drained.
The cooked noodles were then mixed in, along with another dollop of butter.
Here is the end result, sprinkled with dehydrated parsley from our garden.
The mushrooms and mushroom noodles were a very tasty modification to this traditional dish. The flavour they add is not overpowering, but there is a whole new layer of umami in the dish that works very well! I think it would have done nicely with a dollop of sour cream on top, too.
Here is the recipe! If you give it a try, I hope you come back to let me know how you like it. :-)
The Re-Farmer
Mushroom, Bacon Haluski serves 4, generously
Ingredients:
1 medium cabbage 1 medium yellow cooking onion 1 package bacon slices, 500g 1 package mushroom egg noodles, 350g 1/3 cup dried mushrooms of choice seasonings to taste (mushroom salt, pepper, paprika and garlic granules were used for this recipe) butter, as needed
Directions:
remove outer leaves from cabbage, core and chop into pieces about the same size as the noodles
chop onion and slice bacon into roughly half-inch pieces
line a small bowl with a coffee filter. Add the dried mushrooms, breaking up any larger pieces, and cover with boiling water
cook noodles according to package directions
while the noodles are being prepared, place the bacon pieces into a large pot. Cook on medium high heat until desired crispness, stirring frequently
add chopped onion and cook until the onion begins to turn translucent, stirring frequently
add the reconstituted mushrooms (the coffee filter makes it easier to pick them up out of the liquid). Cook briefly, then add the liquid the mushrooms were soaking in. Stir to deglaze the bottom of the pot.
add seasonings. Continue cooking, stirring often, until onions are soft and the liquid is cooked down until almost gone
add the chopped cabbage, along with about 1/4 cup butter (adjust quantities of butter as needed). Combine well and continue cooking, stirring often, until cabbage is at desired tenderness
add cooked and drained noodles to the cabbage mixture, adding more butter as desired
combine well. Cook until the noodles are heated through.
The Re-Farmer 