culinary experiments and explorations

Third bread recipe for today, appropriately enough, is adapted from the frankly very impressive Panera Bread Cookbook. This recipe made a lot more bread than I was expecting, particularly with the four-smaller-loaves pattern I'd been following -- two loaves sizeable enough that they wouldn't have been out of place on sale at a full-size bakery stall in the market.

Pleasantly enough, despite a substantial amount of rising for the dough, it also went relatively quickly. It's also adaptable to, well, whatever three or so different cheeses you might have on hand. I used what I had available to create a batch of ( Three Cheese Bread. )

Incredibly tasty and savory cheesy bread, equally servable sliced thin or with people just tearing off hunks at a party. The base recipe also makes a stupendous amount of bread, enough for two full-sized loaves -- I gave one loaf away to a convalescing friend and took another in to share with about a dozen or so other friends, and everyone got a decent quantity. Highly recommended, and I'll be trying out a number of other Panera recipes in the future.

One of the things I've wanted to do more this winter is try my hand at baking bread. I've got a handful of cookbooks with many recipes to try, but one of the first ones I wanted to try was a recipe card I picked up at Penzey's back around Yule.

It looked intriguing, and I'm definitely more of a fan of bread recipes that don't require yeast and substantial rising periods. I didn't know how it was going to turn out, as I'm usually not an enormous fan of drinking beer, but the result was astonishingly good.

( Beer Bread )

Alternatively, instead of placing all the dough in one 8x4 bread pan, you can split the dough into a six oversized cup muffin tin. If you do so, reduce baking time to 28 - 32 minutes -- the smaller volume of dough in each cup means it will bake notably faster.

I admit I had my doubts about this when I first set out to make it, largely because I'm not a huge fan of Newcastle Brown Ale. (I've used Brooklyn Ale for a particular spicy Cajun stew before to great effect, though.) To my delight the Newcastle turned out amazingly well with the Savory Beer Bread option, so I urge anyone else who tries this recipe to experiment with beers of their liking.

Towards that end, I'm intrigued to try out the Sweet Beer Bread option using Redd's Strawberry Ale. Its alcoholic content isn't particularly high (3.2%?) but without any yeast in the recipe I believe it's the carbonation that's important.

Back sometime last year I got inspired by a cup of hot chai tea. Soooo tasty... were there any recipes that could duplicate that particular taste in a cookie? I did a little searching and turned up no existing recipes out on the web.

So what goes in chai tea? A little more creative Googling and I'd turned up the various ingredients that most commonly go into chai tea mixes. From there I started experimenting on cookie doughs, and after half-a-dozen drafts I finally arrived at a final result I was satisfied with. Now, at last, I feel comfortable sharing it with the world. Try these out, and let me know how you like ( Chai Cookies. )

I always have a fun time handing these to people and asking them to tell me what they think it tastes like. Many of them can identify some of the ingredients, but rarely all of them... and when I tell them they're chai cookies, this look of dawning comprehension always comes over their faces and they immediately agree. Try it and see for yourself!

Adapted from another one of the discovered trove of Chinese recipes, I kind of threw this one together from a couple of different sources. I tinkered with some of the quantities on the ingredients, because parts of it seemed far out of proportion to what else was up there. Nonetheless, I ended up with a surprisingly tasty result -- pleasantly comparable, I must argue, to the kinds of Chinese dumplings (potstickers, specifically) I've eaten in restaurants or bought in frozen packs at the market.

( Juicy Fried Dumplings )

( Hoisin Dipping Sauce )

Overall, I was very pleased with the way these came out. For cooking the potstickers, I do recommend edging towards a 7-minute cook time rather than 6 minutes -- it makes them a bit crisper without being overcooked. Your mileage may vary, of course.