culinary experiments and explorations

Adapting from The Best-Ever Book of Bread today, I decided to try out making a variation on a granary cob.

A "cob" is one of those lovely round loaves of bread you often see at professional bakeries, the kind that are less frequently sold at supermarkets because they won't fit quite as readily into premade plastic bags to be left on a shelf. I have fond memories of my parents buying fresh-baked cobs at the bakery near where I grew up, usually for use with an Italian deli picnic or as a tasty extra with spaghetti sauce.

I've only made a couple of recipes from this book before, mostly because of my hesitation to approach rising yeasty breads, but with my newfound confidence I've decided to take another look through it and see what catches my attention.

Today's experiment was an adaptation of the first page I dog-eared -- ( An Oat-Topped Granary Cob. )

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy this recipe was to make, and how readily adaptable it was. Moreover, the end result was impressively tasty and I certainly plan to make it in the future as a side to other dishes. The bread is soft and delicious, with a well-formed crisp crust.

Over the past week or so, after finally having an epiphany on how to make yeasty breads rise properly in my rather cool kitchen (namely, let the dough rise in a covered glass bowl near the oven vent with an extended preheating), I've been having quite a bit of fun experimenting with a small handful of recipes.

First off was my test case -- the Mall Pretzels recipe off of AllRecipes.com. Overall, it's really straightforward -- the only part I found, and continue to find, challenging was the shaping of the dough into the "pretzel" shapes after the rise. It just felt like there wasn't quite enough actual dough there to do it properly, particularly with the way the elastic risen dough didn't seem to want to roll out into meter-long pencil-thin ropes for proper twisting.

So I thought, why not play around with the division of the dough? Instead of dicing it into twelve pieces, why not try it with six pieces and a concurrently longer baking time? What about four pieces? I did still try to roll it out into pretzel shapes, but in the end it felt like too much trouble for just having fun experimenting and I chose to put it in loaves instead.

As it turned out, that made for some incredibly tasty bread, particularly once I added to the recipe with minced garlic, various herbs, and a little cheese to top it off.

Here's my ( Final Adapted Recipe for Italian Herb & Garlic Pretzel Bread )

I've totally fallen in love with this bread, and its salty goodness seems to be a big hit with everyone I've given it away to as well. Fresh bread -- it's great! (Unless you have a gluten allergy, in which case it's not, and I'm really sorry for your unfortunate dietary limitations. *wry grin*)

For Christmas, my ever-lovable sister got me an unusual cookbook -- "Homemade Winter", by Yvette Van Boxen. I was immediately intrigued by it -- it's laid out in a very nonstandard, flowing, I-just-wrote-this-recipe-down-by-hand manner. It's got scads of apparently hand-drawn illustrations to go along with the directions, so visually it definitely catches the eye.

This morning, I decided while making breakfast that I was going to give one of the recipes a shot -- ( Gingerbread, or Pan D'Epice. )

Mixing the dough is probably best accomplished with a standing mixer. I initially tried mixing it both with a wooden spoon and by hand, and the dough was so sticky as to coat my hands with scads of gingery flour that had to be scrubbed off under the faucet.

That said, I'm quite happy with the final, modified, result. The adapted recipe produced a lovely loaf of bread -- light, moist, subtly spiced, and quite delicious. I'll no doubt make it again in the future, keeping my modifications in mind.

Enjoy!

Yesterday was the Adam Ezra Group's Ramble (which was, by the by, awesome), and as last year there was a bake-off (with cookies for free to anyone, and you put money into the jars of the cookies you liked the best, all proceeds going to charities to help feed the hungry). Determined to impress, I made not one but four different batches of cookies: traditional oatmeal raisin, triple chocolate cranberry, my spicy ginger cookies, and an experiment...

( Peppermint Chocolate Chip Cookies )

Aside from uncertainty over the color of the cookies (which is why I say the addition of the food coloring is completely optional), these were generally well received. People said, and my experience with a test cookie matches, that they ended up tasting pleasantly like Thin Mints.

(And on a side note, although I didn't get recognized as having one of my batches raise the most contributions -- I came in a close third -- I'm quite happy that the combination of all four different batches just around tripled what anyone else's single batch did. All in all, I'm quite happy with that, particularly since the proceeds all go to charity. *wry smile* )

Last week, I made some of my cinnamon carrot raisin muffins for co-workers, and they were such a hit that I've gotten requests for other types of muffins since. One request in particular was for chocolate chip muffins, so I went to a number of sources, looked at muffin recipes I'd baked before, and tinkered about to end up with this:

( One Dozen Chocolate Chip Muffins )

All in all, these turned out much better than I was expecting for a first attempt. Light and somewhat airy, with just enough sweetness and an excellent aroma of cinnamon.

Again going with a recipe from Emeril's Potluck, I went for just a snack this time -- today's earlier experiment with Sausage-Stuffed Bread was enormously filling. This time, I decided to go for a starter, and despite the recipe not turning out quite how I think it was supposed to I was fairly well-satisfied with the recipe on p. 37 -- ( Spiced Nuts. )

Overall, a pretty tasty snack -- if you can get your fingers on some of the nuts which are well-coated or enveloped by the spiced brown sugar. However, it felt to me as though there wasn't quite enough of the sugar-binder to really make an almost cookie-like treat. What I got was yummy enough to warrant a second try, though -- maybe with more sugar/spices?

Last Monday, I'd tried out a recipe for big soft ginger cookies on AllRecipes.com. They turned out alright, but not quite as good as I'd hoped -- they were actually a bit softer than I would've preferred, and not quite as gingery. I modified the recipe, and I came up with ( Crisp Ginger Cookies. )

Overall, I was quite pleased with the way this batch turned out. Well-spiced with ginger, aromatic, and just crispy enough while still remaining chewy. The cayenne adds a warm afterburn that hits just as the main taste of the ginger is beginning to fade - overall, as near to perfect as I've ever gotten with a ginger snap.

Crossposted from Kitchenklutz.