Apple Sourdough Skillet Pancake

I've been culturing a sourdough starter again, and the pets know that they have competition. This mason jar of microbes can command a lot of my attention.

One of my biggest concerns is how to use up all the discarded starter from replenishing the jar with fresh flour and water. 

A New York Times recipe from Tejal Rao for Cast-Iron Sourdough Pancakes caught my eye. It is essentially a Dutch baby with a tart tartine apple layer. 

I tweaked the recipe based on a number of readers' suggestions, and added maple syrup to the batter rather than drowning it in syrup at the end. It proved to be a big hit and I was glad to have more batter for a second pancake. This is a perfect Mothers Day breakfast dish for anyone who is nurturing a sourdough starter.

Apple Sourdough Skillet Pancake

adapted from NYTimes Cooking Tejal Rao's Cast-Iron Sourdough Pancakes

makes two skillet pancakes

approximately 1  cup (225 g) sourdough starter, unfed
1 1/2  cups (180 g) all-purpose flour (or include some buckwheat or corn flour)
1 1/2 cups (368 g) buttermilk or a combination of milk and whey)
2  eggs
2  Tbsp (39 g) maple syrup 
1/2 tsp salt
1/2  tsp baking soda
2  apples, cut into slices
pinch of cinnamon (optional)

4  Tbsp butter, divided

1. The night before, in a large blow whisk together the unfed starter with the flour and buttermilk. Cover and leave to ferment overnight.

2. The next morning, put a 10 inch cast iron skillet in the oven and preheat at 450 degrees. Core and slice the apples. Transfer the pan from the oven to a medium high stovetop burner. Melt 2 Tbsp butter and put in half the apple slices, sprinkling them with a pinch of cinnamon if desired. Cook for a couple of minutes and then flip.

3. Meanwhile, finish the batter by whisking in the eggs, maple syrup, salt, and baking soda. Remove the skillet from the heat. Pour half batter over the apples and melted butter and transfer the skillet to the oven.

4. Bake for 15 minutes until the top is nicely browned. Remove the skillet from the oven. Place a large plate over it and invert the pancake onto the plate, apples side up. Return the skillet to the stovetop and make a second pancake. Slice the pancakes into wedges and serve warm.

Bread Starter Naan

The Bread 101 class I have been co-teaching all term finished up today with a plethora of home baked breads (this Chad Robertson recipe) from the starters that the students have nurtured all term. It was impressive to see the quality of bread produced and to hear about the students' resourcefulness in creating these loaves. A common theme was the challenge of fitting the demands of bread baking into a busy weekend preparing for final exams. Over the weekend, I experimented with using my starter to make naan, which proved to be a successful vehicle for sour, fermented flavors and a speedy enough bread to be able to mix the night before and serve for lunch the next day.

I started with a naan recipe from Neelam Batra and incorporated a portion of my sourdough starter, as well as a small amount of commercial yeast. The dough already contains yogurt (I used Nancy's with live cultures), which gives it a fermented sourness, so the grain-fermenting wild yeast and bacteria of my starter seemed right at home in the mix.  

A dough I started in the evening with an active culture (fed that morning) doubled in bulk overnight. A half hour before noon, I preheated my oven to 500 degrees with a cast iron griddle positioned below the heating element. Rolled out flats of dough placed on this hot griddle puffed up in a matter of minutes, and were eaten hot out of the oven, slathered with melted butter. In the meantime, my students were still busy building the gluten networks of their country loaves. The final results were well worth all the hours of work, but this naan is a good alternative when time is short.

Bread Starter Naan

adapted from Neelam Batra's 1000 Indian Recipes 

makes 8 to 10 naan

1/3 cup active starter (90 g)
1/8 tsp yeast
1 tsp sugar
1/4 cup water (or yogurt whey)
1/2 cup yogurt (125 g)
2 cups flour (250 g) (I used 1 cup unbleached white and 1 cup red fife)
2 Tbsp vegetable oil (I used canola)
1/4 tsp salt or to taste (I used ~3/8 tsp)
more flour for dusting
melted butter or ghee for brushing on the cooked naan

1. Start with an actively growing culture that you've fed no more than 12 hours earlier. Mix together the starter, yeast, sugar, water, yogurt, oil, and flour until just incorporated. Allow to sit for half an hour (autolysis period). Then add the salt and kneed the dough until it is soft and elastic. Cover the dough in a clean bowl and let it rise for at least 6 hours to overnight, until it has doubled in size. 

2. Heat the oven to 500 degrees and place a cast iron skillet directly under the heating element. Divide the dough into 8 to 10 portions and roll into flat ovals about 6 inches in length. Place the dough flats onto the skillet and bake for about two minutes until they puff up. Flip and bake for another minute on the second side, until they are slightly browned. Remove from the oven and brush with melted butter as the next batch bakes. Eat warm.

Notes: there are a lot of ways to modulate the sourness of the final bread. For less sour naan, do one or more of the following: use a more recently fed culture, double the amount of commercial yeast, double the amount of sugar, use water instead of whey for the liquid, decrease the dough fermentation time.

Bread Starter Crumpets

Bakers refer to their bread starters as their "mother", but I must admit to harboring maternal feelings towards mine. For the past few weeks, I've fed it when it's hungry, kept it warm, and celebrated its accomplishments. One of the greatest challenges has been to deal with its excessive productively, just like the endless onslaught of artwork that returns in my children's backpacks each day. Sourdough waffles could help, but I needed the moral equivalent of a magical 12 quart minestrone recipe made from macaroni and dried bean collages. 

This crumpet recipe from Chocolate and Zucchini, adapted from King Arthur Flour, is essentially straight fried bread starter. The first time I tried it, my starter was a bit too thick and the baking soda didn't get mixed in well. For my next batch, in a small stroke of frugal kitchen genius, I added some yogurt whey that I had strained out to make a thickened yogurt sauce, which gave it the right consistency and added to the tangy flavor.

Why would someone happen to own crumpet rings, you might ask. Mine were a birthday gift that I received from my future husband shortly after we started dating. Special occasions can be awkward early in a relationship, but he handled the situation charmingly, preparing me a lovely dinner followed by a scavenger hunt for my gift, complete with rhyming clues. At the last clue, I realized with a sudden shock that the gift was going to be a ring, and just as quickly I realized what my answer would be if it were an engagement ring. When I opened the gift, I was overcome with happy relief at knowing I'd met the man I wanted to marry, mischievous scavenger hunts and all, and also knowing that we were only at the crumpet ring stage. Now sixteen years later, we have two children who can help make crumpets for Mother's Day tea.

Bread Starter Crumpets

from Chocolate and Zucchini, adapted from King Arthur Flour

Yields eight 9-cm (3 1/2-inch) crumpets.*

270 grams (1 cup) bread starter (can use older starter that has been kept in the fridge for a few weeks
)
a little yogurt whey or buttermilk for thinning, if necessary
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon sea salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda
butter or vegetable oil for greasing

1. Place the starter in a large bowl. Add the sugar and salt, and whisk to combine. The batter should be the consistency of a very thick pancake batter and pourable. If necessary, thin the batter a little with some yogurt whey or buttermilk.

2. Heat a skillet over medium low heat. Grease the crumpet rings well. When the griddle is hot, melt a pad of butter  or pour on a little vegetable oil and spread it around with a spatula. 

3. Just before you are ready to cook the batter, whisk in the baking soda. As the baking soda reacts with the acid in the starter, the batter will foam and rise. Using a measuring cup or a small ladle, pour about 1/4 cup of the batter into each crumpet ring.

4. Cook for a few minutes, until the top is set and the bottoms are lightly browned when you peek underneath by lifting with a spatula. As they cook, the crumpets will gradually shrink back from the rings. Use pliers or tongs to lift the crumpet rings off the crumpets (you may need to run a knife around the edge to help them loose), and flip the crumpets to brown lightly on the other side.

5. Eat the crumpets warm off the griddle or cool them for toasting later. They can also be frozen once cooled. Wipe down the crumpet rings if necessary, re-grease, and place them on the skillet to preheat again before repeating with the remaining batter.

*Note: Clotilde Dusoulier recommends that if you have multiple cups of starter to use up, you should mix the batter in batches with 1 cup of starter at a time, so that the crumpets are cooked shortly after the addition of the baking soda.

Bread Experimentation

For our Bread 101 class, the five instructors conducted a grand experiment in bread making, with decidedly mixed, but edifying results. 

Each of us has also been experimenting on our own, with more success. Two weekends ago I tried a natural starter bread from Clotilde Dusoulier, author of the blog Chocolate and Zucchini. Dusoulier follows a 1:2:3 ratio of starter: water: flour, which produces a very moist, but manageable dough. For baking, the shaped loaf is placed into a cold Dutch oven, where it finishes proofing as the oven heats. Following this recipe, and using a 50/50 mixture of Red Fife and white flour, I produced a lovely round loaf with a crisp crust. However, in a flu-addled fever, I omitted the salt, which produced a rather tasteless bread (lesson learned: don't bake when under the influence of viruses).

Last weekend I followed the instructions from Bread Lab baker Jonathan McDowell. This time I used all whole grain flour (80% Red Fife and 20% mixture of soft white wheat and buckwheat), and I remembered the salt. This dough is much wetter (87% hydration versus Dusoulier's 67%), which makes it challenging to handle. The hardest step for me was inverting the shaped loaf from my proofing "basket" into a piping hot Dutch oven without deflating it. The final bread had a delicious flavor and lovely crumb, but was decidedly flat. For a beginning bread baker like myself, I would recommend starting with Dusoulier's recipe, but McDowell's offers a great next challenge. Both will produce bread that is well worth the effort of nurturing a bread starter for days on end.

Seeded Emmer Pan Loaf

While the rest of the world may be striving to recreate Chad Robertson's cult status country bread, the breads that caught my attention when I first read through his Tartine Book No. 3 were his dense pan loaves, resembling my favorite German Volkornbrot. I adapted his toasted barley loaf recipe to my pantry supplies from Lonesome Whistle Farm and Camas Country Mill, using cooked emmer (instead of barley), flax seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, and Red Fife wheat flour instead of spelt and einkorn.  

Packed full with all this particulate matter, the dough felt like wet concrete, as the recipe describes. And although never destined to rise above the rims of the baking pan, it achieved the lofty goal of living up to my German bread memories. My starter and I will be moving on to attempt some airier levain breads, inspired by a recent visit from wheat breeder Stephen Jones, who runs what the New York Times describes as "a Wonka-esque wonderland for crusty, airy-crumbed experimentation," but I know I'll be returning to this seeded pan loaf recipe again for its dense delivery of flavor.

Seeded Emmer Pan Loaf

adapted from the Toasted Barley Loaf from Tartine Book No. 3

200 g emmer berries cooked in 400 g cold water
250 g Red Fife or other high protein whole grain flour
157 g buttermilk
10 g dark malt syrup
238 g water
155 g leaven (well fed bread starter, described here)
8 g fine sea salt
102 g flax seeds
52 g sesame seeds
45 g sunflower seeds

1. Two days before you will bake the bread, give your stater an extra feeding halfway through its 24 hour cycle to make it extra active. Also go ahead and cook your emmer berries, simmering and covered, for about 40 minutes, until they have absorbed all the liquid. If you like, you could toast the emmer berries on a baking sheet at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes before cooking. Cool completely before using.

2. Start the dough the morning of the day before you will bake the bread. In a large bowl, combine the leaven with the buttermilk, malt syrup, and water, and mix by hand to incorporate.  Add the flour and mix by hand until thoroughly combined, about 5 minutes. Let the dough rest, covered, in the bowl for 30 minutes (this is the autolysis step). Add the salt, cooked emmer, and seeds and continue mixing by hand until incorporated. The dough should have the feel of wet concrete. 

3. Cover the bowl with a clean kitchen fowl and let rise at warm room temperature for about 3 hours (this is the first proofing). Every 45 minutes or so, fold the dough to strengthen the gluten network, either with your hands as shown here, or if you are less ambitious, with a scraper as shown here.

4. Butter a loaf pan very well. Scoop the dough into the pan and smooth the top with wet hands. Let the dough rise in the pan, uncovered, at a warm room temperature. Cover the pan with a clean, dry kitchen towel and let rise overnight in the refrigerator (this is the second proofing). 

5. The next day, preheat the oven to 425 degrees C. Use a pair of scissors to make shallow cuts in the top of the loaf to score and brush with water. Bake for about 1 hour and 20 minutes or until the internal temperature has reached 210 degrees F. Let the loaf cool on a wire rack for at least half a day before cutting. The bread keeps well for up to one week properly wrapped.

Baking Brioche and Cheater Bostock

Last weekend, in my continued adventures with baking with a bread starter, I attempted a recipe from Chad Robertson's Tartine Book No. 3 for golden brioche. "This is a very forgiving dough" he promises. But not simple. It calls for three forms of yeast: the starter or leaven, an overnight poolish (a sponge inoculated with a small amount of instant yeast), and some instant yeast added at the time of mixing. It also calls for flour from kamult, an ancient grain that is a relative of durum wheat; I substituted in Red Fife. Most importantly, it calls for an ingredient almost impossible to procure in our modern world: uninterrupted time. I tried to attend to my dough's various needs for risings, turnings, and shaping, but it was given short shrift to dance lessons, karate birthday parties, and soccer games. By the end of a long day, the dough had not reached its growth milestones, but I needed to stick it in the oven, just as I needed to send over-exhausted and sugar-ramped children to bed despite the unlikelihood of their falling asleep. Bread baking, I decided, is not unlike parenting and one can only do one's best.

The resulting bread was decided more squat than the lofty brioche loaves pictured in Robertson's book, but it had a beautiful crumb and delicious flavor. I was excited to try it in the recipe on the next page for Bostock, which Robertson explains is simply "twice-baked brioche." It looked easy enough when I scanned the recipe (making a mental note not to trim the crusts as instructed, because discarding even a millimeter of my hard labor would be too painful). But when I began to assemble the ingredients, my heart sank. Not only would I need to make an orange syrup, to be layered underneath marmalade and sliced almonds, but I'd failed to notice the additional ingredient of "Pistachio Frangipane (page 325)." Leaven and polish had been asking a lot, but this was the last straw. Instead, I simply slathered a brioche slice with apricot marmalade, sprinkled on some sliced almonds, and stuck it in the toaster oven. It was scrumptious. And so, below I give you the recipe for Cheater Bostock, made with brioche that you can bake or procure by whatever means possible, because unlimited time is even harder to source than ancient grains.

Cheater Bostock

slices of brioche
orange marmalade or apricot jam
sliced almonds

Slather your brioche with orange marmalade or apricot jam, sprinkle with sliced almonds, and toast in a toaster oven until the almonds are golden and fragrant. Enjoy and savor your free time.

Bread Starter Waffles

Like a microbial cultural anthropologist, I've continued to try to study the habits of my bread starter. And like my co-instructors, I've been wondering what to do with all the leftover starter generated by a regular regimen of diluting my culture into fresh flour paste. Great minds think alike and so, like them, I resorted to breakfast fare; in their cases pancakes of one kind and another, in my case waffles. I started with a sourdough waffles recipe from King Arthur Flour, which I melded with these yeasted buckwheat waffles from Deborah Madison. The dough made with the starter had significantly more integrity than those I had made with an overnight sponge from commercial yeast, and the waffles had a more complex, tangy taste that paired nicely with tart, stewed rhubarb and fresh strawberries. I'm thinking that it might work well to keep my culture growing slowly in the refrigerator during the week and revive it on the weekends for bouts of bread baking and breakfasts. The microbes in my culture are likely studying me as well and learning to understand the habits of their human cohabitants who dash out of the house five mornings a week and lounge around the other two.

Bread Starter Buckwheat Waffles

(makes about 6 waffles in a Belgian waffle iron)

overnight sponge
1 cup sourdough starter, unfed
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1 cup buckwheat flour
1 tablespoon honey
2 cups buttermilk

waffle or pancake batter
all of the overnight sponge
2 large eggs
1/4 cup vegetable oil or melted butter
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda

1. To make the overnight sponge, stir down your refrigerated starter, and remove 1 cup. In a large mixing bowl, stir together the 1 cup starter, flour, honey, and buttermilk. Cover and let rest at room temperature overnight.

2. The next morning, finish the bater. In a small bowl or mixing cup, beat together the eggs, and oil or butter. Add to the overnight sponge. Add the salt and baking soda, stirring to combine. The batter will bubble.

3. Pour batter onto your preheated, greased waffle iron, and bake according to the manufacturer's instructions.

Serving suggestion: a dollop of plain yogurt, a drizzle of stewed rhubarb, fresh strawberries, and maple syrup.

Bread Starter

Teaching is the best way to learn, and this term I have the great pleasure of teaching a class on the science of bread, which I hope will make me more knowledgeable not only about the theory but also the practice of bread making. This breakfast spread of fresh breads at a recent conference in Germany offered further inspiration for bread baking.

And so, along with my students, I have been tackling the challenge of cultivating and nurturing a bread starter, following the detailed instructions from Chad Robertson’s new book on whole grain baking, Tartine Book 3.

The process involves a certain degree of precision (flour and water doled out in grams) and a great deal of chance, as one hopes for wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria to alight in one’s bowl and set up shop fermenting the complex polysaccharides of the grains. 

Magically my flour paste started to produce bubbles after a day (can one fault the proponents of spontaneous generation?)

Rather than leave it all to chance, I took my starter out for a bit of wild yeast hunting at Noisette Pastry Kitchen. I can't be sure whether this inoculation helped along the starter, but over a matter of days, I had an actively bubbling culture with a somewhat pleasant yogurt smell. 

How is it it that time and again, when people offer up a flour paste to the air, they are able to produce a leavening for bread? What we consider as the generous efforts of yeast and lactic acid bacteria to aerate our bread and fill it with delicious flavors, is, from a microbial perspective, quite antisocial behavior. The yeast strains that humans have selected over our history for their utility in bread, wine, and beer making, are unusual among microbes in their metabolic choices. When confronted with an abundance of simple sugars and plenty of oxygen with which to burn this fuel through aerobic respiration, Saccharomyces cerevisiae instead chooses to gobble these up in the sloppy and wasteful process of fermentation. Their voracious devouring of resources, spewing fermentation products in the process, inhibits the growth of other microbes who are outcompeted and repulsed by the yeasts' greedy and sloppy eating habits. Only the like-minded lactic acid producing bacteria will set up shop with the yeast, using a similar wasteful fermentation strategy once oxygen is depleted from the environment. And thus bread starters, although possessing individual nuanced flavors, are remarkably similar in their composition of microbial boors, who can produce the most refined breads.

Stay tuned for experiments with baking with this starter. And you can read more about my co-teachers' adventures with starters here and here.