Bake to the cutting board..Breadpaloozza 2020!

 After a long hiatus I am trying to get back to the occasional cooking blog; going to try for once or twice a month and see if I can make it happen.

The last three years had a lot of things going on, mostly good some not so good. In 2017 I took some classes in hat making(millinery). In 2018 I started a small millinery business called Cloche Call Designs, not as a full time job but just to create fun hats for myself and on a part time basis. It has done well and I have had some really fun times creating hats for friends and strangers I even was a vendor n two years in a row at a convention for fans of the Australian TV show Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.

I also made plans to travel to the UK for London Hat week in the spring of 2020 and then to go to Paris for few days after. I was going to take a bunch of courses for hat making and was really excited about my first international trip in over 20 years. Then two things happen to throw those plans out the window. Just before Thanksgiving I lost my job due to a restructuring and my boss's retirement. Ugh; well I got severance package and had already paid for much of the trip so I just started to look for a new job and continued to plan for the trip..well I think most you know what happened next: Covid-19.  The entire event was cancelled and much of the world went into some form of lockdown which we are still in on varied levels. I'm not going to go into more details, we all have our covid stories; I've managed to not get sick thankfully and now am just waiting for my turn to get the vaccine.

Fourteen months now, still no job thanks to the tanked economy but I am taking it day by day. One thing that has happened was lots of baking and cooking. So going to try and go over some the things I revisited as well as new things I did during the crazy covid cooking experiments of 2020-21.

I made mac n'cheese from scratch a lot, I'd already been doing that for a few years but comfort food during a pandemic was certainly a thing for many of us. I also started making bread from scratch.

I used to have bread machine and had fun using it but got rid of it a couple or 3 years ago to clear out room in my smallish kitchen. So when there were supply chain issues and a lot of folks started to bake more I started going through my America's Test Kitchen cookbook and found a few recipes to try. 

The first was a ciabatta that just didn't work very well and really wasn't what I wanted. Then I found the "Almost no knead bread' recipe that was a yeast and beer recipe that had a long sit but only one brief knead near the end. I did not have the lager they suggested in the recipe as I cannot drink beer. (I have an odd reaction to beers that make them all taste really sour/bitter so I just stick to ciders or other hard beverages.) However due to someone leaving beers behind from a party pre-covid there was a bottle of chocolate stout in my cabinet that I decided to use instead.

The result was spectacular and for the rest of 2020 that became one of two recipes I used for my bread. It made a fool proof loaf that always had a good crumb and deep taste due to the stout. My partner and I also realized it was incredible with cheese fondue. I can't post this recipe from the ATK site as it's behind a paywall but if you have any of their giant multi season cookbooks it in there. (It's a season 9 recipe.) I kept the rest of the recipe the same just did stout(like Guinness) instead of the lager.

The other bread I learned how to make was sourdough first I got a starter from a friend and promptly named it Audrey III because feed me Seymour!! My first attempt was meh I used the Poilane book given to me as a gift and it just did not give a good result..it was flat and a little dense. Didn't taste too bad but not very sour. then I found King Arthur Flour's Extra Tangy Sourdough recipe:

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/extra-tangy-sourdough-bread-recipe

This recipe takes a while to do and has a lot of kneading but it produces a really nice bread I did it unaltered the first time or two then started doing it with 40% whole wheat and 60% all purpose flour. I really liked this mix gives it an even richer flavor.

Anyway that's all for today's blog, stay safe!

Cybele