A really good whole wheat sandwich bread.

Last month I was visiting family in Kentucky and made a trip to Midway to visit Weisenberger MIll and pick up some bread flour.  Their flours are excellent, if you're in the area and like baking you should make the trip.  You can also order off their website but the shipping makes that a little expensive.  I asked for 10 pounds of their bread flour and 5 pounds of a blend flour I had seen on the website.  The blend is a mix of whole wheat and bread flours, and since I'm trying to eat a little healthier I wanted to try it out.  My first attempt over the weekend actually turned out really good, so I thought I'd post the recipe and procedure...

This is the formula.

500 grams (100%)  whole wheat blend flour
300 grams (60%)    cool water (I use filtered water)
10 grams   (2%)      honey (also purchased at the mill)
5 grams     (1%)      Instant Dry Yeast (IDY)
20 grams   (4%)      softened butter
10 grams   (2%)      salt
10 grams                 Melted butter for top (optional)

First I mixed the water with the honey, yeast and 200 grams of the flour.  The pats of softened butter were placed on top of that, followed by the rest of the flour and the salt.  The flour was leveled off and the bowl set aside for about 20 minutes.  The resting allows the yeast to start working and allows gluten to start forming in the flour/water mix at the bottom of the bowl.  I then kneaded the dough on the Kitchenaid until it was smooth.  The dough was wet, but easy to handle.  It was rounded, placed back in the bowl and covered with plastic wrap for the first ferment.  Rising was going pretty quick, so I punched the dough down a few times before shaping and putting in a large (9" x 5") loaf pan to rise (covered with plastic wrap).  When the rise was done, I made a slash on the top with a Baker's Blade and poured 10 grams of melted butter in the slash and over the top.  The loaf was baked in a 375 degree oven for about 20 minutes.  The temperature of the loaf when it was done was around 200 degrees.  I depanned the bread immediately as it came out of the oven and allowed it to cool completely on a wire rack.  Once cool, the loaf was put in a plastic bag.

This bread was sturdy enough to stand up to whatever you want to put on it, had a great flavor and made excellent toast.  Try it out!

Hamburgers sous vide

Welcome back to my continuing series "Making Simple Things Complicated"! In out last episode, we tackled potato salad, the potatoes were excellent but there was room for improvement in the dressing. Today, we look at the hamburger. My original interest in this was to see if I could use sous vide to make a juicy, flavorful hamburger out of low fat meat. But while I was at the supermarket I saw this.

My focus changed to seeing what could be done with the cheapest of meats using the sous vide method.  The hamburger patties pictured to the left cost $2.68.  But since they were almost out of date the price was 50% off, or about $0.46 per 1/3rd pound patty.  This hamburger was 80% lean and 20% fat, a ratio I prefer to use when cooking the traditional method since it doesn't dry out like lower fat meat does.



To prep the burgers, I first seasoned both sides with pepper and granulated garlic.  No salt at this time.  I had searched for pages on cooking hamburgers using the sous vide method, freezing the patties prior to vacuum sealing was recommended for several reasons.  First, frozen patties don't lose their shape when being sealed in the vacuum bags.  Trying to do this with unfrozen burgers results in the edges getting squashed.  Second, several posts indicated that starting from a frozen state resulted in firmer texture in the finished product.  Burgers cook from an unfrozen state tended to fall apart on the grill/griddle and stick.

The patties were allowed to freeze for a couple of hours, then I salted both sides (the salt had to be pressed in to keep it from falling off), the patties were sealed in vacuum bags and placed back in the freezer until the water bath was ready.  I filled up my 48 quart cooler with cold tap water, moved it to the floor of the living room and mounted the immersion circulator.  I set the temperature for 56 degrees celcius (132.8 farenheit) and waited for the bath to warm to temp.  The large cooler is great for doing big things, but I really need to find a smaller one for these experiments.  It takes a long time to heat up that much water!  Anyway, once the water was at the set temperature, I took the vacuum packed frozen patty out of the freezer and put it directly in the bath.  Cooking time was about an hour, then the hamburger was removed and allowed to cool for a few minutes before being depouched.  Not real attractive, huh?  Paper towels were used to pat off the accumulated juices while the griddle was heated up as hot as I could get it.  A little butter was put on the griddle and used to toast a bun, then the hamburger was put on the griddle to sear on both sides.  It had been about 15 minutes since removal from the water bath, so the patty had a chance to cool down a bit.  At the same time I griddled a slice of vidalia onion.  After a minute on the first side, the burger was flipped and I put on a slice of medium cheddar cheese to melt.  Another minute and it was time to assemble the burger.

The final burger consisted of a nicely toasted bun, two slices of medium cheddar cheese, a slice of nice, ripe tomato, the griddled vidalia onion, leaf lettuce, mayo and dijon mustard. 









The burger itself was perfectly rare/medium-rare throughout, juicy and flavorful.  Probably one of the best burgers I've had in a long time, all for a total ingredient cost of $1.35 per burger (and everything besides the beef was good quality!).  Since the patties were preformed there wasn't actually much prep work either and cooking from frozen means I can have a supply of burgers frozen and ready to go at a moments notice.  This experiment in sous vide is a resounding success!  I'm anxious to see if it can produce similarly excellent results with low-fat hamburger!

Potato salad sous vide

I was sitting around last week, wondering what simple recipe I could unnecessarily complicate while at the same time making use of my new (old) immersion circulator.  Then it hit me!  And after I woke up and was unable to find out who had thrown the brick I decided to make potato salad sous vide!

My normal potato salad recipe (or potatoe salad if you are an ex-vice president) involves boiling the potatoes, draining them and dressing the still hot spuds with a mixture of mustard and pickle juice.  The potatoes are cooled and mixed with a mayonnaise based dressing.  For the sous vide version, I made a similar vinaigrette with the mustard and pickle juice and added some salt, pepper, dill and garlic.  The red potatoes were diced, tossed with the vinaigrette and sealed in a vacuum bag.  I did this a few days before Memorial Day, so the sealed potatoes were put in the fridge until the next day.

On cooking day, the cooler was filled with water and the immersion circulator was set to 83.9 degrees Celsius (183 degrees Fahrenheit).  This is there I ran in to a problem, the surface area of the water pool is so large that the evaporative cooling was preventing the bath from reaching the set temperature.  To remedy this I just took some aluminum foil and covered the cooler as well as possible.  For the next time, I'm cutting some Styrofoam cooler lids to fit the top of the Igloo cooler with the circulator in place.  Once the desired temperature was reached the bag of potatoes was added and the foil replaced.  Three hours later, the potatoes were removed and put in the refrigerator to cool until the next day.

A few hours before dinner, I mixed mayonnaise, sambal, diced onion, diced celery, diced gherkins, dill, salt, pepper and a little pickle juice for the dressing.  The sous vide potatoes were added and everything mixed together.  The final results were OK, the texture and flavor of the potatoes were excellent but because no moisture was lost from the potatoes during the cooking process the dressing ended up a little on the loose side.  The next time I try this I'm going to remove the potatoes from the bag as soon as they come out of the bath and spread them out on a sheet pan to allow some of the water to evaporate.  We also had filet mignon steaks (cooked at 57.2 degrees celcius/135 degrees Fahrenheit) for 90 minutes and seared in a cast iron skillet for a few minutes a side for a crust (it was storming outside, so no grill), roasted beets, a bleu cheese with caramelized onion facaccia and a peach and blueberry cobbler for dessert.  All in all, a successful holiday dinner.  Now what to do for July 4th?