The Savorist

These came out significantly better than I thought they would, so I’m newly emboldened to make pastry. The real killer for making these things is the time spent waiting for the dough to chill between roll-outs. I found a recipe that keeps it to the bare minimum, though I imagine some flakiness is sacrificed.

Ingredients:

1 pound all-purpose flour
4 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1/2 ounce fresh yeast (or 1 Tbsp dry)
1-1/4 cups milk
12 ounces unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 egg, lightly beaten, for egg wash

Instructions:

Using the dough hook of an electric mixer, combine flour, sugar, and salt in the bowl.

Dissolve the yeast in 1 cup lukewarm milk. Add to the flour mixture, together with the remaining milk, and mix until dough forms a ball.

Remove dough hook. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and allow dough to rest for 1 or 1-1/2 hours, until double in bulk. Punch down the dough and refrigerate it, covered, for 30 minutes.

Mold the butter into a block. Remove the dough from the refrigerator. Cut a deep cross in the dough. Spread out the sections of dough so that the center is the thickest part. Roll it in opposite directions to form a four-leaf clover, keeping the center thicker. Place the block of butter diagonally in the center of the cloverleaf and bring the edges of the dough to the center, enclosing the butter completely. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap and chill for 1 hour.

To make the turns, place the chilled dough on a lightly floured surface. Pound lightly and evenly with your rolling pin to make the dough malleable. Roll out into a rectangle approximately 9 by 16 inches. With the 9-inch side in front of you, fold into thirds, starting with the bottom third and folding over the top third. You have now completed the first turn. Turn the dough so that the narrow end faces you, keeping the seam on your right (a quarter turn). Again, roll out the dough into a rectangle approximately 9 by 16 inches, and again fold into thirds. You have now completed two turns. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Pound the dough evenly and again roll out into a 9-by-16-inch rectangle. Complete two more turns to make four turns. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 50 to 60 minutes.

Preheat oven to 400°F (205°C) .

Roll out dough into two rectangles 1/6 inch thick. Cut into triangles and shape into crescents. Put them on a baking sheet and allow to rise for 20 minutes.

Brush each croissant with egg wash and bake for 15 minutes, or until golden brown.

Yield: Makes 24 croissants

It’s probably not worth speculating on why exactly collard greens are not widely eaten outside of the American south. Growing up in the southwest and migrating to the northeast and then to Philadelphia, I hadn’t eaten them until well into my twenties. But as vegetables go, they’re almost perfect. They taste great cooked in a little bacon grease, accompanied by onions, garlic, tomatoes, or almost anything you want to add to them. I recently tried a variation on the technique described in the video below that was totally vegetarian, substituting butter for bacon grease. The nutritional benefits are stunning, bacon fat notwithstanding:

Collard leaves are rich in calcium (226 mg per cup, cooked), vitamins B1, B2, B9, and C (which may be leached by cooking, however), as well as beta-carotene (pro-vitamin A). Each 100 g of leaves provides 46 calories (190 kilojoules) of food energy and contains 4 g of protein, 0.5 grams of fat, 7 g of carbohydrates.

Widely considered to be healthful foods, they are high in vitamin C and soluble fiber and contain multiple nutrients with potent anti-cancer properties: diindolylmethane, sulforaphane and selenium.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have recently discovered that 3,3′-Diindolylmethane in Brassica vegetables such as collard greens is a potent modulator of the innate immune response system with potent anti-viral, anti-bacterial and anti-cancer activity.

Another remarkable thing about them, unlike many other greens, is that they can be frozen almost indefinitely before being reheated. And don’t even get me–or that nut Zell Miller–started on the virtues of potlikker. (Hell, it rates its own blog). Anyway, here’s how I make my Philadelphia Collard Greens:

Sure it is!

www.thesavorist.com

And she’s right about brussels sprouts.

Once again, I’ve been a bit disappointed by my sourdough efforts, but there’s progress to report as well. Here was the first loaf I raised:

I think it did actually double in volume during the second rise, but I probably should have let it go longer. The crumb is too tight and dense and there are parts of the interior of the loaf that saw no rise at all. The crust is another disappointment, and part of the problem is clearly that I have not created a moist enough environment for the bake. James Beard’s sourdough recipe calls for a pan of water on the lower rack (though it also calls for the use of commercial yeast, which I understand arouses a scoff from the purist). I may try that next–the water, not the yeast (yet). Other recipes demand that you spray water into the oven periodically. I’ll try variations on those techniques presently. Here was the second loaf. This one used the non-PYNK starter:

This was evidently a wetter dough, since it ‘rose’ horizontally rather than in a dome. Its rise *was* more robust, however, and the crumb had a little more air in it. I’m not ready just yet for a brotform, but I think that may be on the horizon. The crust was just as disappointing, however. The biggest failure of both breads was their flavor. They just aren’t sour enough! Neither loaf has the distinctive tang of sourdough despite the overpoweringly sour aroma of the starter. I’m going to try addressing that problem by allowing the sponge to proof longer in a warmer environment. More reports soon!

I decided to start a loaf last night, so I took turned my starter into a sponge by adding the total volume of my PYNK starter to a bowl with one cup each of flour and warm water. When that had ‘proofed’–it took about an hour and a half to get frothy and bubbly–I took two cups of it and added a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, two teaspoons of sugar, and a teaspoon of salt, plus as much flour as it could absorb. It worked out to about 2.5 cups. Here’s what it looked like before kneading:

After kneading the dough for about 10 minutes and adding flour in as I went, I put the dough back in this bowl (after cleaning it out) covered it with a towel and set it back in the oven with the light on. I saw almost no rise in it for the next couple of hours, so I decided to let it go overnight. By morning, it had doubled in volume, but the dough had also developed a ’skin’, so when I punched it down and kneaded it a little more, there were a bunch of shards of dough-skin shifting around in the dough. We’ll see what happens to them during baking. Here’s what the dough looked like after the second kneading. I formed it into a loaf and placed it on a pizza stone sprinkled with corn meal and then cut the top.

The dough then went back in a warm oven to complete the second rise. Here’s what it looked like afterwards:

I’m not sure it’s quite doubled in volume, and it’s not going to look pretty, but it might just be a decent loaf! We’ll see in 30-45 minutes…

Okay, I think this may be the liveliest starter I’ve produced yet. This is the one I “sweetened” with Yards PYNK.
I may try and turn this into a loaf today and tomorrow.

The idea for this cupcake, which I took to Thanksgiving dinner, was to try and replicate something of the flavor of a caramel apple. I made a fairly conventional cupcake batter but replaced some of the liquid with apple cider and grated a couple of Stayman-Winesaps in as well. The cake had a convincing apple flavor, but the icing was a failure. I don’t think I allowed the sugar to caramelize deeply enough. Plus, I think to truly replicate the caramel apple experience, I might have been better served with a glaze rather than an icing. My food photography needs work.

Not a lot of liveliness to my Sourdough starter these days. There was a brief period when the starter puffed up and seemed to be doing its starter-y thing, but those days are gone, and now it bubbles with a malicious sloth. I’ve now split it into two colonies of yeast. The original ambient yeast from the flour, my skin, the air, wherever, theoretically populates the original starter:

But I’ve seeded an additional starter using a little leftover Yards Brewing Company Pynk:

PYNK is a beautiful, light, effervescent ale brewed with belgian Lambic yeast and loads of fresh raspberries. The raspberries give this beer a deep pink color while the Lambic yeast makes this beer’s flavor tart and complex. Slipping some Pynk onto your tongue is like gliding into that old poodle skirt that you know you love. We don’t make this very often so if you see it, try it!! Available occasionally (on special years) - Draught Only. Alcohol by Volume varies by batch but is generally around 6%.

No idea what’ll happen with that one (or either of them, with my track record), but that’s why this is an experimental food blog. Anyway, the new location for Yards Brewing Company is under construction. It used to be a skate park. Check the photos here.

I am not a lab scientist. Sourdough is lab science. I failed at dozens of attempts to raise a sourdough starter last summer, and I’ve overcome that early frustration just in time to launch my new starter into the teeth of winter. Since most sourdough starter recipes seem to require a consistently warm temperature (about 85 degrees), this is not ideal. My previous failures were with this recipe, so this time around I’m going to give this one a shot. Technically though, this effort is merely inspired by that recipe, since contra his suggestions I’m using plain bleached white flour. Instead of using a ceramic or glass crock as suggested, I’m using Tupperware. And I’m solving the temperature problem with my oven light. Not sure where that leaves this project’s carbon footprint.