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?

Making pizza with a 2Stone Pizza Grill (Moved from Blahg Tech)

A few years ago, a thread was started on PizzaMaking.com entitled "Reverse engineered coal fired brick oven".  The OP had created a pizza oven to fit on his Weber charcoal grill which mimicked the conditions and high temperatures found in a traditional coal fired brick oven.  The thread can be found here...
Reverse engineered coal fired brick oven 


I was really (and I mean REALLY) in to pizza at the time, so the oven intrigued me.  Before long I had placed my order and shortly thereafter received my 2Stone Pizza Grill.  The weather has been improving here in Chicago, so I decided to make some pizza for dinner last night.

To make a really great pizza you need to start at the bottom, the crust.  To stand up to the high temperatures a dough with a higher than usual hydration (water content) works best.  The dough formula I use for pizzas baked in my home oven (expressed in bakers percentages, I'll explain that later) is...

100% bread flour
60% to 62% cold water
2% salt
0.25% Instant Dry Yeast (IDY)

This is mixed in the Kitchenaid stand mixer, balled, rubbed down with oil and left to ferment in the refrigerator for 24-48 hours before use.  The dough I use for the 2Stone oven is this...

100% Caputo "00" pizzaria flour
70%-72% cold water
2% salt
0.25% -0.5% IDY
2% Extra Virgin Olive Oil

 The "00" flour I use is imported from Italy and is milled finer than American flours.  When I tried using American brands of flour such as King Arthur I had issues with the crusts sticking to the stone and burning, those problems have disappeared since I started using the Italian "00" flour.  It can be difficult to find a local supplier for this type of flour, but you can order it from Amazon 00 Pizza Flour Attimo Caputo or PennMac.com.  The method I use to make this dough it to make a sponge with the water, yeast and ~ 70% of the flour, which I cover and let ferment all day while I'm at work.  If I want to use it that night I use a higher percentage of yeast, but if I'm going to let the finished dough sit in the fridge until the next day (which does seem to improve flavor and texture) I will use the lower percentage of yeast.  When I get home from work I add the remaining flour and mix for ~ 2 minutes, then add the oil and continue mixing until the dough is smooth.  At that point the dough is dumped out on to a floured surface, rolled in to a ball (which can be tricky with a dough this loose!) and placed in a covered, oiled bowl to rise until needed.

The formulas posted above are in baker's percentages.  The weights of all ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the weight of the flour, which will always be 100%.  If more than one type of flour is used then the weights of the flours combined will equal 100%.  The reason that this method is preferred in commercial bakeries is that it makes it very easy to scale recipes up and down according to need.  The way to do this is simple.  First, you need to add all the percentages in a particular formula together.  For the dough formula above you add all the percentages (100% + 70% + 2% + 0.25% + 2% = 174.25%).  Convert that in to an integer and you get a conversion factor of 1.7425.  Now that you have that number, you can use to to find out the weight of flour required for any given weight of final dough.  Say you need 850 grams of pizza dough, just divide 850 by 1.7425 and you see that you'll need 487.8 grams of flour.  70% of 487.8 = 341.46 grams of water and so on.

Now that the dough was done and rising, it was time to set up the 2Stone.  I lit a chimney of charcoal and let it go until the coals on top started to turn white.  The chimney was dumped and I arranged the coals in even layer in the center of the grill, roughly 2" high and 13" square.  The 2Stone was then placed on the cooking grate over the coals and allowed to heat up with the grill cover placed on top.

I can usually get the oven up to 900-950 degrees, but I was hungry, I was impatient and I only had enough charcoal to fill the chimney 3/4 of the way.  Now it was time to stretch the dough, dress the pizza, cook and enjoy!

I was lazy on the sauce, it was just a store bought brand (Boboli) that I dressed up with oregano, basil, vinegar, sugar and oil.  There were some left over vegetables that I had grilled the night before (mushrooms, onions and peppers) that I diced up and added after saucing the dough, then topped with slices of whole milk mozzarella and finished with slices of Ezzo pepperoni I bought from Pennmac.com.  After baking I picked a few leaves of Basil off my AeroGrow and tore them over the top and drizzled the pie with some really good olive oil from Old Town Oil.  I have enough leftover dough in the fridge to do it again tonight if the weather cooperates!

The creator of this product has been making improvements and new models of this oven.  He sells them via his website, www.2Stonepg.com.

Sous vide at home

The literal translation of "sous vide" is "under vacuum".  The cooking techinque, which has been around since the mid-70's, involves sealing food items in vacuum bags and cooking them by immersion in a water bath (or other liquid) held at a precise temperature.  The technique can produce interesting and tasty changes in texture and flavor when used properly.  First, since the items being cooked are sealed in a vacuum bag there is no loss of moisture, flavors or nutrients.  Second, since the temperature is precisely controlled there is no chance of overcooking the food.  Finally, the texture of the food items can change noticeably due to the vacuum sealing.  This depends on a lot of factors such as original density, temperature of the bath and cooking time.

When I was in culinary school we did discuss sous vide cooking, for about 10 minutes.  The equipment to do it properly is expensive and the school wasn't willing to make the investment.  The closest thing we did was poaching salmon in 120-130 degree olive oil.  Lately I've become more interested in trying this technique so I started looking for the equipment.

The basic equipment for cooking sous vide includes a vacuum sealer (which I already had), a container to hold the bath and a way to maintain a constant temperature.  One way would be to use a good thermometer to monitor a pot of water on the stove and manually maintain the temperature.  This isn't very appealing if you plan on cooking items that require very long exposure times like short ribs.  On the other end are all-in-one sous vide systems like the SousVide Supreme , but it is a little more money than I wanted to spend.  What I chose to do is look in to immersion circulators.  These are also expensive, but I found instructions on a DIY immersion circulator by The Seattle Food Geek.  While browsing through Ebay for the parts, I noticed that there were a lot of older models being offered and I bid on an old Fisher Scientific 7300 immersion circulator...and lost.  But a few days later, I received a second chance offer from the seller who said he had another one available.  I snapped it up and another few days later it arrived.

The box arrived on a day I had taken off work, so I was able to play around with it immediately.  When I set it up in a pot of water and turned it on, it was VERY loud.  It was also causing the GFCI in the kitchen to flip off.  After disassembling the unit and giving it a thorough cleaning the noise problem was solved, but it still has an issue with GFCI.  No problem, as long as it isn't plugged in to a kitchen or bathroom outlet everything works fine!  The next day I started my first vacation in over a year, but since I was going to visit family I just brought along my new toy so I could continue to play.  I found an old 48 quart Igloo cooler in my parents basement that served well as the water bath.

My first foray in to sous vide was pork back ribs.  I made a rub using whatever appropriate spices I could find, applied it to the ribs and sealed them up in vacuum bags.  The ribs were placed in a 150 degree water bath and allowed to stay there for about 14 hours before being removed and placed in the refrigerator to cool.  That was a nervous night, I had never run the circulator for so long and didn't know if it could take the abuse and the cooler I was using for the bath had a drain on the bottom that I was afraid would pop open due to the temperature and flood the room.  I read somewhere that chilling the ribs in the pouches after cooking allows the meat to firm up, no idea if this step is actually needed or not.  I had always been told that collagen breaks down to gelatin at a little below boiling temperature, but the huge amounts of gelatin present when the bags were opened the next day proved that is wrong.  The ribs were dried off and heated up on a hot grill to produce a nice crust.  The meat was still pinkish, which some members of the family didn't like, but it was extremely tender and moist.

The next thing I tried was filet mignon.  They were seasoned with garlic salt and a product called Dale's Seasoning Sauce, which is mostly soy sauce and spices.  We sealed them in the vacuum bags and let them sit 24 hours in the refrigerator.  The next day, I set the immersion circulator to 135 degrees and let the steaks cook for 2 hours.  They were allowed to cool a little bit before being removed from the bags and seared on the grill for about 45 seconds per side.  They were incredible...fork tender and cooked to a perfect medium rare all the way through.

When I returned home, the first thing was to get another cooler, preferrably one without a drain.  I found another Igloo cooler for $20 that is a perfect fit for the circulator's mounting bracket.  It is also 48 quart so there is enough room for just about anything I want to cook and has no drain at the bottom.  More difficult to empty, but I'll be able to sleep better when it the circulator is running.  My first dish cooked at home was sous vide salmon.  First i put a tablespoon of olive oil in the bag and put it in the freezer until the oil had solidified.  The salmon was seasoned simply with Lawry's Seasoned Pepper, lemon juice and fresh dill.  The bath was set to 122 degrees and the cooking time was 40 minutes.  The fish was removed from the bag and the skin side was seared briefly in olive oil to crisp it up a bit.  The texture and flavor were amazing!  I served it with some sauteed spinach for a very tasty and healthy meal.  Next up?  I'm thinking of cooking some potatoes sous vide for a Memorial Day potato salad.