Making a Lot of (Sour)Dough

Today I started my very first poolish-style sourdough starter, a preferment for eventual use in baking some sourdough bread.   I’m following the advice and instruction of Jacob Burton over at FreeCulinarySchool.com, a very excellent podcast that I listen to, written and performed by a honest-to-$DEITY professional chef that details everything about gourmet culinary skills from the ground up.   His newest series of podcasts is all about bread making.  If you are a foodie of any level, I highly recommend picking up his show.

For our “homework assignment”, we are to get a sourdough starter up and running so when the next podcast comes out, he can instruct us how to turn that into a great loaf of bread right away.    It sounds horrifically fun, and I adore a good sourdough, so let’s hope this works!

To make the starter, I put 400g of bread flour and 400g of water into a bowl, mixed it thoroughly, which makes a halfway thick better, much like pancake batter.   Next I peeled the skin off of 2 Honeycrisp apples (and ate the rest, which was really hard to do), put the peelings into a cheesecloth and then pushed that into the middle of the batter.

This batter will then sit out on the countertop for 3-5 days before I really start to see anything.   The apple peelings will infuse it with the first shot of naturally-present yeasts and bacteria.   Once the little buggers have taken good hold, I can remove the peelings and it will self-perpetuate.    I’ll have to feed it every 3-7 days depending on how it does, but it should make some terrific bread, or so I hope.

My wife is convinced it’ll kill us all, either through gastrointestinal distress, or we’ll wake up some night in the wee hours to find it standing over our bed with a rolling pin, hard-bent on revenge.   I’ve assured her that this is how sourdough is made, whether at home or at Hardee’s, but she’s traumatized from too many “Amish friendship bread” experiences gone south.

Rotisserie My Ass

I hate, HATE, our “Baby George” Foreman rotisserie oven.   I can never fit a chicken into the bloody thing unless I completely whack it into bits, removing the wings and thigh/legs.   Otherwise, as it rotates, it hits or catches on the burner coils and stops the movement and results in blackened bits that stink up the house.    While the chicken that actually comes out of the oven is moist and lovely, I hate having to trim it all up to make it work.    I suppose on the coasts or a place like Australia where the chickens are the size of pidgeons, this probably works like a charm, but around here, where ours are 5-7 lbs apiece, it just sucks.

So…my kingdom for a rotisserie that doesn’t blow goats.     All that this one is going to be doing from here on out is the occasional gyros and/or beef roast, but its chicken days are over.

The Slathering Beast

If there is anything better in the world than cold, sliced roast beast on a sandwich and slapped with ketchup, then I don’t want to know.   This is something I’ve had for years and years, starting in my childhood, and there’s just something about the bite of the ketchup that marries with the cold, savory beast that is just…well, it’s a culinary guilty pleasure, that’s what it is.   I’m sure there’s some chef flopping about in his vault right now, but so be it, sometimes my tastebuds dance for the cheap thrill.