Hey man, what you growing?

Here are my hops. Thank you honey for taking the pictures. The vine clippings that I planted are not doing anything, which is good. If this works, I think I use our light bench and grown some more rhizomes over the winter. Next year I'll construct some larger poles since even in most of the hop gardening that I have read, the poles are about 15ft.

Also, after poking around Amazon, there's a book I saw, that I'll probably buy, all about home brew gardening. That should be fun for next year. This year, we're sticking with tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, parsley and chives.

After a bit

I think I sense two seasons approaching and how I will treat this blog. I think it's quite obvious that baking in the Summer time is just, well...dumb. Why would you want to turn on the oven anyway? So, in the Summer a young-old man's fancy turns to brewing (and gardening.)

I am tending to my hops in the back, pictures to come either tomorrow or Thursday. They are turning out wonderfully. They have grown tall and I've started to trim them back so that they will grow more bushy. There's already little buds on them.

Andi turned to me today and indicated that she was ready to give up on the Silverlace. That would be the piss poor excuse for a vine on the West side of our house. The vine is all on one side of the trellis, and the leaves are small and not pretty. To my glee she "told" me to order some hops. After all, they get really big leaves, grow bushy and do smell nice when blooming.

To my horror, I've discovered a world wide hop shortage. Not sure on what the deal with that is, so I think some more research is necessary. I then though to myself, "can I reclaim the rhizomes I have now?" I started to do some research and found little. But then, I did call my favorite gardener (Nana-M) and asked her what I could do? As I found the answer, she told me to try and root it from a cutting.

I had just trimmed a bunch of vines, so I cleared off the leaves, and buried the vine in a nice pot of fresh potting soil. If we're lucky I'll have a duplicate of my Hallertauer. This also brings up a bit of a problem for me. I have three types of hops, but I only know one of them, since the label disintegrated. I know which is the Hallertauer, but the Kent Golding and the Cascade are kind of a mystery. I found a website that has pictures of the cones, and it looks like there is a difference in the kinds that once ripe, I should be able to tell. Go to the bottem http://www.brewjobs.net/beer/hops-gardening.html

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, I got a kit and brewed it up on Monday. This is amber from Northern Brewer, in fact a Phat Tyre Amber. I'm going to come up with a name for myself, so we'll see.

Batch Bread - A Tale of Trial and Error

The Batch Bread, from 100 Great Bread Recipes, looked simple enough. And with only a couple of ingredients it should have been. Oh how I was wrong. I followed the recipe and the bread at first try looked like it was going to turn out great.

I thought like most bread I was supposed to slash the top so that the bread would expand properly when baked. As it turns out, I was not supposed to. As soon as I made the first cut, I realized I made an error. The bread immediately deflated to about half the height.

Upon further reading instructions, no where in the recipe does it state to slash it. It baked up fine with a decent color and the flavor was excellent. It was light, but not fluffy, which I attribute to the whole cutting thing. Ok, back to the bread again two days later.
Second batch, pretty much turned out the same way, but this time I didn't slash it before putting it in the oven. This time I decided to prepare an egg wash. If you recall in previous posts, the egg wash used for the roles made them turn out pretty and shiny and perfect.

Now if you remember from the paragraphs above this bread is supposed to light and fluffy. It's sweet, light and makes a great sandwich bread. What does that tell you? The bread being light and one loaf, being huge, is very heavy. This egg wash acted just like the slashing and just added to the weight.

The wash started collapsing the bread. What the hell?! Why can't I just freaking follow directions? Another two days later, I followed the directions to the tee (except for the extra water.) This one turned out absolutely perfect. The dough rested for an hour and came out like this.


After two hours of rising, you can see just how large this bread got. It's freaking huge. As previously stated I took this opportunity to follow directions. I didn't have any egg wash, and I didn't slash it. After baking, it turned out so good. It was freaking great. It baked up high and the crust turned out perfect. It was my most perfect bread.

Ye Old Bread Shope

The first breads I attempted to create from 100 Great Breads was a Crusty Cob. This bread, which date back to medieval times, was known as one of the oven bottom, as this was invariable where it was baked. Baked to a deep color, it's a great British loaf.

Sweet. I played Dungeons and Dragons. I could just picture myself speaking some kind of thick Cockney accent that no one but Ozzy can understand, all covered in flour shoveling loaves into a gigantic hearth. More close to reality, I'm not British and don't have a hearth. The bread turned out ok, the first batch being tossed.

I added more water to this one, about 1/4 cup more. I don't think I kneaded it as well as I should have, since it did turn out to be somewhat dense. Not very dense, just a little. I only kneaded it for 5 minutes per directions. However, I now know how and what these directions really mean. The color and taste turned out ok. It was a little salty, but this recipe did call for 1 tbs of salt. Compared to the loaf I'm making tonight which was only 1.5tsp and 1/2 cup of sugar.

By the way, I really love making the round loaves, free form style. Something about bread pans (traditional) that bother me.

A new year, and new books

This year for Christmas my lovely wife and boys bought some great books to enhance my bread baking skills. Actually it was to bring them up to snuff.

The first book I got was The Bread Baker's Apprentice. This cook book is right up my alley. Not only is it a great recipe book, but much like 50 Great Curries of India, this book contains a gigantic section on history, theory, science, technique and philosophy.

It's a highly rated bread making book and almost exclusive used by us armatures on Thefreshloaf.com. I have only read a couple of pages so far and it reads like more of a story of bread making discovery as the author recants his tale of bread bakings highest honor and achievement, Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie. I have not created any breads from this book, as I have not dedicated anytime to reading it at a great extent.
The second book I got I have already created two breads from and tonight I am working on a third. 100 Great Breads, is a British book as everything talks about grams and such. Luckily for me the author includes measurements for us dumb Americans.

I screwed up one recipe in this because I didn't read his one page introduction. All of his recipes use cake yeast, which if you don't know what is, just know that it's different than the dry yeast you know and love. The first recipe I made was supposed to be your basic white bread. It was horrible, I followed his recipe but it turned out too hard.

I figured it was something I did, because after all he's British so he knows what he's talking about, right? I read the introduction and learned there that he uses cake yeast and if I'm using dry, I should cut the amount by 25%. That's a lot if you know anything about baking bread. Oh yeah, and your wheat type might vary so you may need to add more water. Now you tell me! I should have trusted my instincts. While I did end up throwing away the dough, I wasted time mixing and kneading.

A new finish

After giving up on sour dough I decided to turn my attention to the finish of the breads. Normally for my French and Italian breads, I have had no finish. I would simply give the bread a steam bath to crunch it up a bit.

For the boys family birthday party I made some fresh rolls for the beef that Nana R. made. Chef Logan helped me out with this batch. He enjoyed smacking the dough around and singing "Dough dough dough dough-dough-dough" (from The Wiggles.)

This recipe was a classic Italian that contained plenty of fat (butter and milk) which makes for a softer bread. Very suitable for sandwiches After shaping the dough balls for the rolls I gave the dough a egg wash bath. As you can see after baking this made for a much shinier smoother
finish.

The Sour Dough Chronicals Part Three - Dough Boy's Revenge

So, I started all over again. I threw out the starter and found a new recipe. This one made a little more sense to me. In the sense that this should work. It was essentially pineapple juice and flour. Over many days I changed out pineapple juice and flour and let my baby grow and rise. The theory is that the acidity in the pineapple juice will breed the exact type of tangy yeasties we want.
My little creation grew and grew and bubbled and grew. After the prescribed amount of time I proofed my homegrown yeast and let it rise! Rise!

It was a long time sitting and rising. Hours upon hours the yeast and flour mixed and combined, were born and died along with thousands of their brothers and sisters. I kept the dough properly hydrated so I had a reasonable assumption that this would turn out perfectly. I enlisted the help of my lovely wife to shape the two loaves so they would look very nice.
This little contraption we bought at the kitchen store outlet when we were in Oshkosh a couple of weeks ago. It's for baking, of course, and helps to make the loaves look prettier than if I used my own man hands to shape them.

In the oven they went amidst a great cloud of steam and fan fare. There was great rejoicing in Ranch for the bread smelled divine. There was a nice crust and splendid color but something just didn't seem right.



When I pulled them out of the pan and on to the
cooling rack, the bread felt wrong. I knew immediately that it didn't turn out. The bottom of the loaves felt dense, and while the crumb was acceptable, and the over look appealing, it just wasn't right.

I knew even when we sliced to eat it, that it wasn't meant to be. The taste was just....eh. There was no sour, there was no tang, it was just a mediocre white bread at best. Luckily we had friends over that night, one of them just happened to be a bread junkie. For me that meant constant reassurance that the bread tasted wonderful. I ditched the started that night. It wasn't worth it. It beat me. I'm defeated. I think I'll order a starter from a website. This weekend I went back to my roots and made a French loaf. I'll post pictures of these loaves. I'm sure they'll turn out.