Baking with Julia, and about 300 other bloggers.

I've joined an online group. It's a baking blog group. I read the blog http://doriegreenspan.com/ and there is a group called Tuesdays with Dorie (TWD) http://tuesdayswithdorie.wordpress.com/ that was just starting to go through the cookbook Baking with Julia.

 Nathaniel had asked the week before if I could make homemade bread again.  I haven't made it since we moved into this house, partly because there is a Great Harvest Bakery right next to the grocery store and I've been buying bread there.  But, Nathaniel is having a hard time adjusting to his new braces-hardware (his lips and cheeks are tattered and swollen) and there aren't many things that he feels like eating.  So, I found a recipe I wanted to try on America's Test Kitchen's website http://www.americastestkitchen.com/recipes/detail.php?docid=27410&incode=M**ASCA00
Check it out soon because they only have their current season available for free.
  I love America's Test Kitchen (ATK) because they go about testing recipes in a scientific way, trying to figure out what is the most desirable trait in the dish, what are the major pitfalls, and what is the most efficient way to meet their objective.  Martha Stewart always drove me crazy because she tried to make things more difficult than they needed to be just to prove she is fancier than anyone else. ("Don't use orange-flavored jello in a recipe when you could make your own by boiling down some horse hooves and adding sugar cane extract and blood oranges"). 
  Honestly, when it comes down to it, I didn't like Julia Child for the same reason.  When she was demonstrating french recipes, I'm sure her purpose was to show traditional french techniques.  But it always reminded me of the old story where the daughter asks her mother why it was necessary to cut the ends off the potroast before placing it in the pan... "I don't know," says mother, "that's the way my mother always did it."  When asked, grandmother replied that she never had a pan big enough for a whole roast and had to trim it down to make it fit.  So, I prefer recipes made to use modern ingredients and techniques that get the desired results in the most efficient way.  That being said, I like to make things from scratch and avoid cake mixes, jello, condensed soup, and the too liberal use of cream cheese.  I have dropped blogs from my watch-list for depending too much on these ingredients.  Too many ingredients that are unrecognizable as food go into the first three of those ingredients, and cream cheese is used so liberally in everything from desserts to pasta sauces that the purpose is just to mask a mediocre recipe.
  Enough of my rant.  I was ready to put ATK head to head with Julia (actually with Julia's guest baker).  Right when I was about to start, Chris' neice Amanda posted my sister-in-law's (Andie's) bread recipe, so I decided to start with it. http://minasmith.blogspot.com/2012/01/andies-bread.html

Kneading in the mixer.

Rising in warm oven.  They deflated when I moved them from the warm oven to the hot one to bake.  A delicate rise.

Awww... The bake time in the recipe wasn't long enough.  I should have tested the internal temperature.

Amanda/Andie's recipe came out doughy and undercooked.  I really should have tested it before taking it out because the thump-on-the-loaf-to-see-if-it-sounds-hollow method let me down on this one.  Onto Baking with Julia (BWJ)  You can find the recipe here (unless you buy the book or check it out of the library) http://someonekitchen.blogspot.com/2012/02/twd-bwj-white-loaves.html

Photo from book.  This is how it is supposed to turn out when sliced and toasted.

 The directions are a little crazy.  The dough is kneaded first, and then softened butter (a lot of butter) is added to the dough.  The dough becomes a greasy mess, but after awhile the butter is worked in and the result is a springy, silky dough.  Wow.  I wonder if having the fat in the dough during kneading slows gluten formation.  Why is the butter left out until after the kneading?  Is this a cut-the-end-off-the-potroast kind of thing?  The book provides no clues.  (I love ATK because it explains why certain steps are taken.)

Lovely dough, I used 1 cup of flour less than the highest range in the recipe

Beautiful and eaten within a day with the creamed honey Chris bought. 

BWJ white loaves turned out great, just as the recipe was written.  But I had saved ATK for last.  I was sure it would be the best one.   You have to start the night before by making a "soaker" with the whole wheat flour (King Arthur's white wheat), wheat germ and milk.  That is kneaded and left in the fridge over night to soften up the tough wheaty-bits.  A biga (bread flour and yeast) is left on the counter overnight to bubble and develop deep yeasty flavors.  Great.  Then they are mixed together with the remaining ingredients.

It took a long time to get the cold-from-the-fridge dense "soaker" to mix in with the warm, soft "biga", even when the soaker was pinched off into 1 inch pieces.

"Soaker" after spending the night in the fridge.

The dough finally came together and was very soft.  Recipe did not recommend adding more flour than went into the biga and soaker - so I decided to stick to the recipe.

Dough was so cold that I did the first and second rises in a warm oven in a warm bowl of water.

 How did ATK stand up to BWJ?  It really didn't.  To be fair, I wasn't comparing white loaves with wheat loaves per se.  I was comparing the success of following the recipe word for word.  BWJ gives a range of flour needed.  That means I could add just enough until the dough looked right.  ATK did not provide any sort of instruction for variation.  The dough was so soft that I wanted to add more flour, but I was sure their scientific method would have accounted for that and maybe soaking the wheat flour would make it a much softer dough.  The loaves turned out more like batter-bread: the crumb was coarse, very little elasticity.  It crumbles when sliced.  But the flavor is good and it's not as heavy as you might expect with the amount of wheat:white flour in it. 
  Conclusion?  BWJ recipes (at least this one) are written well for the home cook.  The white loaves are a terrific texture - light and springy, but a little dry when toasted.  I'm going to try ATK again, but allow the soaker to warm up before adding to the biga, and then I'll add bread flour to get a little stiffer dough.  I'll try Andie's again too and bake it longer this time (or maybe I'll divide the flour and make a biga and soaker the night before, combining Andie's and ATK's recipes).  What I really need though, is homemade jam (but that's another project for another blog.)

Result?  Squashed loaves.

A Brand New Friend

Nathaniel used to say that we had the worst luck with houses.  We never seemed to find one that came with a dog.  Well, now we finally have a dog and he is so excited.  Even Davis who said he didn't want a dog really likes it and the dog loves to nap on their laps or eat their shoe laces while they do homework.

We brought this little guy home on Monday.  He's eight weeks old.  We don't have a name for him yet.  He's a cross between a cocker spaniel and a jack russell terrier.  He's pretty fun.

The Front Yard is Finally Done

We have finally finished redoing the front yard.  Its very exciting.  Our house is very visible in the neighborhood and we have lots of people watching us as they drive by, making comments as they walk their dogs, and even stopping in their cars to tell us about how much work they have done on their yards.  Luckily, we have nice neighbors (and patient too) and all of the comments have been positive (well, often full of advice, but still positive).  There was one older lady who askedy why we didn't leave the yard like it was, she liked it that way.  Can't please them all.

So, here is a pictoral history of the last year and a half  in our front yard.  I've included a picture of the final product at the beginning for those of you who don't want to slog through the whole process.

See, it turned out nice.  The plants are still pretty tiny, but they'll grow quickly with our nearly-year-round sunshine.

OK, this is what it looked like when we first looked at the house.  It looked great.  But after we signed the contract the owner stopped watering and the tenting for termites (required for home sales in CA) killed back most of the plants near the house.  And we discovered that the hedges and lawn were composed of at least 5 different kinds of plants/grass each.  So, it only looked good from a distance.  

This tree is an ornamental pear.  It had never been trimmed properly and the branches hung low over the driveway.  The roots were breaking up the sidewalk and heading toward the foundation of the house.  But it was pretty.

 So, we stopped watering (we had a $300 water bill because the cable install people had crushed a sprinkler pipe under the driveway when they installed a conduit and we decided we didn't want to spend any more money on plants we wanted to take out anyway.)  The scouts spent two Saturday mornings at our house tearing out hedges.  It was hard work.  And, we poisoned the grass.

 Then the digging started.  Chris excavated the sprinkler system which was way more work than we expected.  It was laid out crazy and the pipes were old and brittle and broke easily, and there are so many rocks in the soil that the digging had to be done by pickax.  That meant either Chris had to do all the digging, or spend a lot of time patching pipe that broke when I did the digging.

So much work.  Thanks Chris.

People would say to us, "You know you can hire people to do this?"  Really?

I dug out the Agapanthus (Lily of the Nile) that completely obscured a lovely landscaping rock.

We did get some help from the boys, but only one at a time.  Chris' grandpa used to say, "One boy is worth half a man.  Two boys are worth no man at all."  Or something like that.

Map of the yard for planning how much seed, mulch, and such was needed.

 After the sprinklers were done it was time to get the ground ready to plant grass.  We had gone back and forth on whether or not to take the eucalyptus tree out.  It was huge.  We had decided that we were going to keep it and just get it trimmed so it didn't blow over on the house.  It shaded the house in the afternoon keeping it cooler.

Rototilling (he rototilled twice to get the slope right.)

This drove me crazy.  The sod that was laid in the 70's used a plastic mesh that we had to keep pulling off the rototill blades.  This bundle was only a small part of what we pulled out.

 Of course, we had a storm come through the day after Chris rototilled that blew down hundreds of trees around town.  So, we needed a new plan for the front corner of the yard.

I like the way the water looks in the rototilled furrows.

One advantage of having high priests help instead of elders is that you are more likely to have access to someone with some good tools.

We had the stump ground up by a tree removal company.  All of the rest of the tree was collected by a neighbor for firewood, some that was left in the street was removed by the city, and we split the big slices of trunk for our own firewood.

 Then we seeded the lawn.

 Since I had the attention of the city (our eucalyptus tree blocked the street for a week) I had them take out the ornamental pear (because it was a city tree) and it was breaking up the sidewalk.

 Biggest problem with the corner now was that it was full of giant roots left by the tree and it was a steep slope down to the sidewalk.

 A lot of work went into moving dirt off the slope to make it more shallow and hacking out roots.

Nathaniel dug out a lot of dirt.  Davis moved it to the backyard in the garden cart.

The city planted a new tree - another ornamental pear.

Nathaniel and Davis take turns mowing the lawn and trimming the edges now.

 The next big project was to install exterior lighting.  That meant digging more trenches and patching more sprinkler pipe.

 We had quite a few large landscaping rocks scattered around the front and back yards that didn't look good where they were.  We used them to stabilize the hill on the corner.  The problem was moving them.  We had to use a winch to pull them onto a dolly or onto boards and drag them across the yard.

Two of the four largest  rocks in place and a giant root that we ended up burning out to get rid of. 

 Finally in December we were ready to put in landscaping plants.  We laid down a weed barrier covered with bark chips because we have put so much work into this yard already, and there is still the back yard to do, that I just don't think I'd have the energy to start pulling weeds after the winter rains.

 We planted different varieties of Agapantha, creeping lily, day lily, and iris under the ornamental pear tree.

The walk is bordered by Huechera (Coral Bells)

This is a sweet (or fragrant) olive.  These tiny white blossoms smell so good.  I put it by the front door so the fragrance will waft in on the afternoon ocean breeze.

White and pink tea trees.  A grizzled old man came up to me at the nursery when I was buying these and told me that the barbary pirates used to boil these leaves for tea.  Hmmm...

Against the wall to the back yard.

The reddish bark makes the rocks stand out better.

Some little succulents that look like rocks.

I wasn't feeling well, so I helped mostly by watching.

Our new little plants even survived some frost.