Naansense

It's summer, which in Chicago means heat and humindity -- hardly bread baking weather. Still I do love bread and since we had soup for dinner tonight, I decided to look up a recipe for grilled bread. I found a promising looking one for naan and decided to give it a go.

The dough is fairly straightforward. There's no real fancy work or a pre-ferment so I was able to do it the day I decided to take it on, which is nice. It is a very soft (wet) dough though, so it might be a bit of a test of patience when kneading and shaping. I found that for the shaping into portions, I was much happier if I kept my fingertips oiled and kept the dough moving a lot.

After the first rise, you punch the dough down and knead in garlic until it's distributed. I used green garlic from the CSA, which had a pretty mild flavor. Next time I'll be more careful to get it evenly distributed: As it was, I ended up with some pieces having very little garlic and some having a lot.

The dough is then divided into golf ball sized pieces, shaped into balls, and risen again.
Once the grill is hot, you stretch the dough balls and place them right on the grill. The recipe doesn't specify how thin the dough should end up, and I started with some pretty thick pieces. With practice I found that the thinner you can stretch it, the better. If you can see the gluten, toss those suckers on the grill. The dough does not stick as it would to the side of an oven (where the bread is usually baked) so it does contract a bit in the cooking.
Once the first side is done (which only takes a few minutes, depending on the heat of the grill) you brush the naan with melted butter (ghee would probably be more traditional, but plain ole melted, unclarified butter worked great too) and flip them over. They puffed up a lot during the cooking on the first side, even when they had been stretched extremely thinly during the shaping. At this point, you brush the just cooked side with butter as well. Mmmmm...so much butter.
The recipe made quite a bit, but it was so good that volume was not a problem. The 'loaves' were not huge, and were amazingly delicious. Of the twelve pieces that came off the grill, seven were eaten within a few hours.
The resulting crumb for the bread was very nice. The puffed up parts had nice large holes, and the bread was pleasantly chewy throughout. The early loaves that I had not stretched as thinly were very slightly undercooked, but even those were excellent and not at all doughy. In reality, the dough seemed very forgiving of cooking time and temperature, and loaves ranging from very lightly colored to deeply browned were all wonderfully textured and endowed with great flavor. I had been concerned that the melted butter brushed on the done side of the bread might make it greasey, but it didn't.

Overall, this was an excellent recipe and one that we will certainly add to our normal rotation. Being able to cook the bread on the grill rather then baking it in the oven makes it a great summer option, and the quality of the resultant bread means you really aren't missing anything by going that route.

Update: Yesterday I read some of the comments on allrecipes for the original recipe, and it seemed like some folks had complained about the toughness of the bread. I realized that while I had measured out the full amount of flour, I used way less than it called for. This lead to a much softer dough, which probably explains the difference. It makes it a little harder to knead and shape, but I would certainly repeat this decision, based on the quality of the final bread.

CSA Week 1

It's CSA time again! After enjoying last year's biweekly shares despite not having a kitchen for a chunk of time there in the middle, we decided to take a chance on a full share this year. That means weekly veggie shares and a whole lot of not ordering in for us.

It also means I have to update here at least once a week, or I'll fall hopelessly behind. On to the veggies!

For a first delivery, we actually got quite a bit of variety this week.

Button Mushrooms are destined for salads and omelettes.

Two heads of lettuce (one red sails, one romaine) will keep us in salads for the week.

Spinach is going into our favorite spinach and kale pie.

Pear Butter may just get spread directly on our tongues. We've already had most of it on bread or toast, and it is so very delicious. Nice pear and apple flavors, with some caramel background. Super tasty.

Asparagus was born to be roasted.

Green Garlic is new to us, but we plan on using it as we would normal garlic. It'll probably make it's way into the mushroom omelettes.

Rhubarb is destined for an odd lentil soup recipe (yes, rhubarb and lentil soup) as well as the ever delicious crisp.

A small bundle of chives will likely get snipped onto anything we can think of.

Mint will be used to flavor ice tea, probably in the form of a syrup (which is also convenient because the sugar is pre-disolved.)

Radishes will be snacked on and eaten in salads.

The newsletter and emails this week have all commented on how hard hit the supplying farms are by the recent storms, so we're curious to see what the share looks like next week. Hopefully there aren't too many ruined crops, since that would stink all around.

More Bread

Despite the complete lack of update here, I've been pressng forward with my bread making over the weekends. We are both loving all the fresh baked bread, and I am definitely getting better at using my instincts on hydration and whatnot.

As a follow up to the french bread, I baked another batch of Ciabatta. I was more aggressive with the hydration this time. I still didn't quite get the crumb I was looking for, but at least it didn't look like a chicken. We managed to eat it all before I got a picture, so you'll just have to trust me on that.

I followed that up (last weekend) with Pain a[funny accent here] l'Ancienne, which Reinhart spends much of the 100 page intro to the book rhapsodising.

This bread uses deferred fermentation, which means that you retard rising overnight by using ice water in the dough and putting the bread in the fridge. This allows the secondary reactions that usually occur concurrently with rising to get a head start, leading to a very different flavor. While most of the breads using a pre-ferment have a sharper, more savory flavor, this one has a smoother, sweeter one.

My loaves came out a bit rustic (which is the polite way to say 'ugly') but they had a great, open crumb and wonderful flavor. I wanted to make baguettes, but because of the size of my baking stone had to keep them pretty short. I made six, fifteen inch long loaves and by the end of the first day half of them were gone. The taste and texture of this bread was just great, and we really enjoyed it. It did seem to lose freshness a little quicker than some of the other breads I've done from this book, but a quick visit to the toaster fixed that just fine.

This was a truely amazing bread, and was one of the easiest to make. No pre-ferment is needed, and because of the hydration level all the keading is done by machine. This guy took very little effort, and made a wonderful loaf.

So far in this bread frenzy, I have been using only all purpose and bread flour. Since over the past few years Mary and I have managed to accumulate quite a collection of flours, I was interested in making a recipe that would use something else as well.

This weekend, I found that in Pain de Champagne, which uses a small amount of wheat flour. This bread is back to the more standard method (pre-ferment mande the prior day and kept in the fridge overnight after rising) and according to Reinhart is the one most often used around France for creative shaping.

I chose to knead this one by hand rather than with the Kitchen Aid in order to get a better feel for the dough. I was very pleased with the hydration level and feel of the dough, so I'll probably continue this habit in the future. The hand kneading doesn't take that much longer, and once you get the hang of it and don't constantly have dough sticking to your hands is quite fun.

Mary had suggested that I make rolls so that we could have meatloaf sandwhiches, so most of the dough got shaped into small batards for that purpose. I did, however, save out a chunk in order to attempt the most absurd of bread shapes -- the Epi or sheaf of wheat. To shape bread in this way, you first shape a baguette and then perform a series of cuts and pulls to make the lobes of the wheat berries.

I was very pleased with my shaping this time around, and only had one real ugly duckling in the rolls. The baguette for the Epi came out so wonderfully that I considered just baking it in that form. Because I was going to bake it in a sheet pan rather than on the stone, it was long and slender and I had managed to shape it to a very even thickness. Still, the Epi was so silly that I just had to press forward. While you won't mistake mine for the picture in the book, I do think I did a good job of at least approximating the proper shape. Next time, I'll cut a little deeper and at a sharper angle, in order to allow the 'wheat berries' to be pulled a little further out from the loaf. After baking, I realized why this was such a great shaepe: The ratio of crust to crumb was way higher than with a regular baguette, so we ended up with a loaf full of end pieces. Could there be anything better?

Chickenbread

Since we have somewhat limited kitchen space and are not packrats by nature, I am always a little cautious about buying new cookbooks. I've been giving a library copy of The Bread Baker's Apprentice a test run to determine if I wanted to pick it up, and after making two breads from it I have pulled the trigger.

The book is all about artisanal breads, which tend to be more rustic and have more character. They are also a bit more involved than the breads I have made out of the Better Homes and Gardens book, but the flavor and texture (even when I mess that second bit up) are beyond compare. Most of the breads use a pre-ferment, where you make a sponge (basically a less-risen, unkneaded dough) the previous day and let it take a long, slow ferment in the fridge. You then incorporate that into the final dough and put it through the twelve (!!) stages of bread baking and end up with a delicious, salty, sharp-flavored loaf of wonderfulness that may or may not look like a chicken.

Last weekend, I was inspired by our Italy trip and took a stab at ciabatta. Ciabatta is a rustic italian bread with a soft crust and (in theory) a very open crumb (that means lots of big holes.)

The starter is very moist (think pancake batter) and the final dough should be quite hydrated as well. Now after reading the hundred page introduction telling me that the baker should trust his instincts and bake by feel and texture, did I listen? Or did I just slavishly follow the recipe and hope that the pretty clearly underhydrated dough got moister later? You guess. It wasn't until after trying to shape the first loaf using the instructions in the book (which lead to the lovely loaf on the left) that I realized I was being dumb and just used pushing and prodding to get the second loaf into shape.

Ultimately though the final bread lacked the open crumb that it should have had and looked like we were about to shove stale bread in it's cavity, it still tasted great. There are several recipes for ciabatta in the book with various savory ingredients added, so I think I'll try one of those soon and aim for redemption.

This weekend, I decided to attempt french bread. The starter and dough are much firmer, and this time I was more sensitive to the feel of the dough early on. I started out with a little extra water after the troubles the prior weekend, only to end up keeping it under the dough hook for an extra ten minutes trying to get enough flour in to reduce the hydration. Still, the dough ended up closer to the firmness it should have had, so it was worth it.

Since one is supposed to handle the dough minimally to prevent degassing, I decided to try a batard (wider, shorter loaf) rather than full baggettes. In reality, I think I fell somewhere inbetween, since the batard should have been a little shorter and fatter. Still, no chickens this time, so...that's a win.

The bread tasted great and had a fairly good texture, though I still felt that it should have had a looser crumb. It had a great crunchy crust, with a slightly chewy and tangy interior.

Overall, I'd say that both breads were winners. I can't wait to try these again, as well as some of the other recipes in the book. Of particular interest is the foccacia, where you bake the bread covered in a half cup of herb infused olive oil. That's a lot of oil, but wow it sounds good.

Italy Roundup

We've been back from Italy for a week now, and have finally winnowed down the 550 or so pictures to a mere 480. I picked out about 40 that I felt represented the trip fairly well, and here they are.


Our first night in Rome, we started by taking a nightwalk from the Rick Steve's tourbook. The first stop was here at Campo d'Fiori. It's a square that has a market during the day, and hosts drunk twenty-somethings at night. These flower stalls where still set up that night, and I thought they made a pretty neat picture.


We were rather startled when we landed to see palm trees. It's our first time in a mediteranian country, and while we didn't have a lot of preconceived notions going in, we certainly didn't expect it to seem so tropical. There were also orange trees at several locations, and this never stopped seeming novel to us.

Rome was blue skies and sixty degree weather the three full days we were there, which was a nice break from the Chicago weather. The day we took the train to Venice it rained a bit, but we didn't let that dampen our spirits. I am so getting hate mail for that one.


Mary in front of the Triton Fountain. This fountain is the one that the Tallises have a copy of in Atonement, so we had to get a shot of the real thing. It has some neat details, including some bees which were a motif that we would see several more times while in Italy.


Piazza Navona was another large square, with a (unfortunately under construction) huge fountain in the center. It attracts vendors both during the day and the night, including several folks selling a range of quality of art. We picked up a picture for ourselves and one as a gift. We love us some street art.


Several of the ancient sites had cats running wild at them. This particular site (which you can barely see in the picture) was discovered when they were digging for a new road, and has become a historic site and cat refuge. This little fellow reminded me of Pip, so I had to grab a shot.


Rome has lots of statues. Besides a ton of busts and greek inspired ones, there were quite a few with odder subjects. I resisted the desire to post every dog, anteater, and peacock statue here, but trust me -- there are a lot.

This particular pair was at an outside area at one of the Roma Museo Nationale sites. It's actually what we refer to as 'the wrong museum', since we had been looking for a different site of the Roma Museo Nationale, but had not realized that there were multiple sites. While we didn't like this site as much as the 'right' museum, it was still pretty neat and these pairs of statues (there were four pairs in total) were a highlight.


As we could tell when looking at our pictures, I love mosaics. This one was from the 'right museum', where they have a lot of mosaics, frescoes, and of course busts. In my defence, the mosaics were really amazing. Many of them had tiles the size of a pinhead. A pinhead!

There were also quite a few neat statues, and having gone to the wrong museum first, we appreciated the anatomical detail (veins standing out on flexed muscles, hair detail) that these more modern (relatively speaking) statues had.




One of the highlights of Rome was definitely the Colleseum. It is beautiful and humbling -- an enourmous feat of engineering still mostly standing over a thousand years later. A nice thing about the finish layers being gone (at one point it would have been skinned with marble) was that it exposed a lot of the supports and arches that hid underneath. We're both the right kind of nerd, because we found this fascinating to see.

This was one of the few sites that really seemed busy while we were there. There was a long line to get in, and pretty big groups of folks on the inside. We had luckily read about a way to get past the long lines (thanks, Rick Steve!) so it didn't have too much effect on us.


As you may tell from the weather in this shot, it's placed a bit out of order with respect to when it was taken. I'm placing it here because we did all of ancient Rome (or as much as we did, anyway) on the same day. This is the forum, which was a plaza with the senate house and many temples during ancient times. From this view (taken from the Capitoline Museum on the morning of the day we went to Venice) you can get a sense of the original layout and how amazing it must have looked. Seeing how much had been reduced to fancy rubble made us appreciate the relative intact-ness of the colleseum even more.


Most statues have subtext, which is often beyond me given a lack of cultural background. On the other hand, sometimes it's not so subtle.


As much as I love mosaics, my wife loves plunder. A lot of the statues and obelisks in Rome are in fact plundered from elsewhere, which for some reason Mary loved. We joked that this small statue's base, with it's patchwork of styles, had been plundered from all over.


Trevi fountain is a really big thing in a really small setting. This was the only other place in Rome that we found to be consistently crowded. It seemed to be between our hotel and just about everything, so we hit it at all hours of the day and night and there was never a time it was not full of people. It's quite an impressive sight, even with the crowds.


Another quite striking site was St. Peter's Basillica in the Vatican. The church itself has amazing statues and carvings, all ornate and elaborate and in various colors of marble. The ceilings are all mosaics, and the entire thing is quite breathtaking. We agreed that it was the most extravagant building we'd ever be in.


A neat option here is that you can take an elevator up to the base of the rotunda. This allowsa neat view down into the church, a close up view of the mosaics, and access to an even more fascinating site: the cupola.


The cupola is the small round tower on the very top of the dome. To get there, you go up a set of 300 or so steps which lead up between the inside and outside skins of the dome itself. Since this follows the curve of the dome, the stairs get quite interesting on the walk up. I'm standing as straight up as the staircase will allow; the odd angle is the way the walls run.



The views of Rome from the cupola of St. Peter's are pretty amazing. In the first you can see the piazza in front of the basilica and in the second a skyline of Rome proper.


Clown or cop? You decide. The swiss guard have very interesting outfits, though Dan Brown insists that they are badass, so who are we to judge?


The Vatican Museum is full of subtle, understated art. Consider this ceiling of the Map Room, which runs for a quarter mile.

The Sistine Chapel is part of this museum as well, but it was another of those rare crowded places and they did not allow photographs. After having seen so many frescoed ceilings and walls in the museum proper, by the time we hit the Sistine we were tired and sick of crowds which left us pretty underwhelmed. We still looked at the ceiling and picked out interesting bits (and played 'name that saint',) but it probably would have had a bigger impact had we seen it first (or empty.)


We also visited Castel San Angelo, which has been a bunch of different things over the ages, including a place for the Pope to escape to. It afforded some more intimate views of the city.


When in the Capitoline museum, we saw several busts where they had used different colors and patterns of marble to add texture and the look of fabric. After so many white marble ones, these were quite striking and from the next room looked very much like actual fabric.

Overall, we had a great time in Rome and have already begun talking about a return. We saw a lot of neat sights, ate a lot of great food, and had gorgeous weather. I think it's likely that when we return to Italy to visit Tuscany (someday) that we will spend a day or two in Rome again. We've just got to revisit the good Gelato place. And the fixed priced five course menu place. And the place with the really good mashed potatoes and soups.


As you'll note from the heavier clothing here, Venice was not in the 60s. The weather there was much colder, mostly in the 30s and low 40s. Still, it was an amazing visit.

The city itself is simply indescribable. A carless maze of alleys and squares, criss-crossed randomly with canals in all sizes. The entire city appears to have been carved from pure madness. That said it's a quite striking madness and we were very glad to have gone.

Behind me is the Grand Canal, which bisects the city and is crossed by only three bridges. Did I mention the madness?


Because of the lack of cars and the fact that it's built on canals, there are a lot of things that are just very Venice. Consider this raised walkway, put in place to deal with the routine flooding.


The main sights in Venice are mostly placed around St. Mark's square, the only official piazza there (the others are all campos; Venice really likes it's own vocab.)

Seen here is the Doge's Palace (Palazzo Ducale) where the ruler of the Venetian empire lived. We took a 'secrets tour' of the place and then wandered through the public areas, which made it a very enjoyable trip. We first saw one of the largest and oldest suspended ceilings from above, then got to see it from below where the paintings were visible. We also crossed the Bridge of Sighs and checked out the prisons.



Also on St. Mark's square was St. Mark's Basilica. The differences between St. Peter's in the Vatican and St. Mark's were quite striking. Where St. Peter's had been austere and gleaming, St. Mark's was more populist. There were still mosaics all around (here depicting old testament scenes) but the whole thing felt somehow...scrappier. The floors were covered in tiles layed in wild byzantine patterns, and the outter walls were adorned with a wide variety of different friezes, mosaics, and reliefs.


Where Rome had really been about seeing specific sites, Venice was much more about getting lost and discovering this odd city. Through ever alley you'd find odd squares and random little side canals.


We didn't take a gondola trip, in part due to the weather and in part due to the cost. Should we find ourselves back in Venice in more temperate times, I think we'll splurge for the ride. Sadly, it was cold enough that the gondoleers had coats on, so we couldn't see their trademark striped shirts. At least some wore stripped scarves to make up for it.


Another fascinating site was the Naval Museum. It's a lesser museum (they charged 1.55 entrance fee, since apparently they didn't think they were quite worth 1.60) but we had to go once we read that they had a display on World War Two era manned torpedoes. Yes, manned torpedoes. Two sub mariners would ride one of these suckers to the enemy ship, plant charges, and then ride this back to safety.

They also had a lot of neat models of ships from Venice's (and the world's) naval history, as well as an interesting display on the gondola. Turns out that they are far more complex than they look, with a center of boyancy and gravity adjusted for where the gondoleer stands and the fact that he rows only on one side.


Since there are no cars, pretty much anything will pass for a road. Here is an example of one of the many, many streets that allow one to touch both sides at the same time, as well as me looking like a big dork.


In the part of the city our hotel was in, there were some wider streets and an open square where most of the produce and fish was sold in open markets. In other parts of the city, where there were smaller roads, one had to get creative. This was the only shop we saw that was in a storefront and on a boat parked across the sidewalk.


Until our last day, the weather was consistantly grey and cold, but dry. If you do visit Venice, bring good walking shoes. Here is a shot of Mary taken during a four hour walk that brought us through five of the six neighborhoods in Venice.


Here is a picture of our hotel, taken from across the grand canal. It was a converted palazzo, and had some silly but neat touches (murano glass chandelier, mosaic floors.) It was a good location; close enough to landmarks that if we got truely lost we could head for those and make our way home.

Though neither of us is clamoring to go back, we both enjoyed Venice. It really is a unique place that simply must be visited to have any chance of understanding. It's a world so very foreign from Chicago, and I'm really glad we got to visit it.


And now we enter the section that causes Mary's eyes to roll, in which I show all the pictures I took of things that made me laugh or smile. To start off, seeing a dog in a collar in a piazza in Rome really amused me. Given the large number of dogs it was all but inevitable we would, and yet it seemed like such an oddly mundane sight to see surounded by some much history and beauty.


On our way to see the church that housed the chains that St. Peter was martyred in, I had to stop to snap a shot of this poster for the italian version of the Ice Capades. America so does not have the camp market cornered.


Even in America, I like a good warning sign. Somehow the ones in Italy were even more entertaining to me, including this one warning people not to disco in the stairwell.


So you built a city without any roads and on top of a series of rivers and canals and you need to dig with a crane, where do you put it? Why, on a barge, of course.


On that four hour walk I alluded to earlier, we passed a newstand with the mirror version of the book we had started using to learn Italian. This gave us some heart that somewhere in Chicago, there was an Italian couple walking quietly, and pointing out to each other excitedly every time they recognized a word from the seven chapters they made it through.