Shawnigan Sourdough Bread

September 11, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 26 Comments

While I have been keeping my sourdough starter pretty busy baking with Sourdough Surprises every month, it occurred to me that I haven’t actually used it to make a lot of bread, especially considering that I bake bread at least twice a week to keep us in sandwiches and toast. Lately I have been making some variation of Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread (that famous one that was in the New York Times), using yeast and just throwing a little bit of sourdough discard in with the dough for some added flavour, but not actually using the sourdough starter for its leavening power. I really really love Lahey’s no-knead bread (even more than the 5 Minutes a Day bread) so I decided to try to convert it to sourdough. This in itself proved to be a learning process, because it meant converting the recipe from volume measures to weight, and it involved percentages and math, which is not really my strong suit. But I must have done something right because, lo and behold, it worked! The bread came out beautifully crusty, with a soft, chewy, light interior crumb and a nice full flavour thanks to the starter.

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Kanelbullar and a New Kitchen!

August 30, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 22 Comments

Big announcement time: Nate and I bought a house!!

We moved in the middle of August and have settled in pretty quickly – we love it here. We are in Shawnigan Lake, about 40 minutes from Victoria where we both still work, but we traded up for lots of privacy and green space. 🙂 Plus the Cowichan Valley has a seriously thriving local food scene, which I am very much looking forward to exploring!

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Shaping and Baking a Neapolitan-style Pizza

July 21, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 19 Comments

Now that we’ve covered making the dough, it’s time to turn it into a pizza! This is the fun part. 🙂 (And if you haven’t already, you should read my previous post on Neapolitan-style pizza dough.)…

No-Knead Neapolitan-style (Sourdough) Pizza Dough

July 20, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 47 Comments

A little while ago I posted a pizza I’d made, and promised to report back with the details on the process once I’d worked out the kinks. I’ve been working with Jim Lahey’s no-knead pizza dough and a few methods for baking it in a home oven that are supposed to mimic the effects of a commercial wood-fired pizza oven. The Sourdough Surprises project this month was pizza, so I took the opportunity to make a sourdough version of the dough.

sourdough no-knead neapolitan-style pizza

sourdough Neapolitan-style pizza heading into the oven

To clarify, when I say “pizza”, I’m talking Neapolitan–style pizzas: thin-crispy-chewy-airy crust and a few carefully chosen toppings, baked in a wood-fired oven at a zillion degrees so they come out minutes later, smoking hot and slightly charred and delicious. …

100% Sourdough Bagels

June 20, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 23 Comments

This month’s Sourdough Surprises project was bagels, yet another item that just so happened to be on my “summer to-make” list. The recipe comes from Susan at Wild Yeast, a fantastic blog and resource for all things concerning bread and the home of YeastSpotting, a weekly round-up of user-submitted blog posts featuring bread and yeast (to which this post has been submitted!).

You should really head over to read Susan’s original post of this recipe, because not only is it witty, it is also very informative. I’ve never made bagels before, but I do agree with many of her opinions, including the one that the only good bagel is a chewy bagel. This means kneading the heck out of the dough, and unless you have arms of steel and a lot of free time, you’re going to “knead” a stand-mixer. (Sorry, that was terrible.)…

Daring Bakers: Challah Back Y’all!

May 27, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 77 Comments

May’s Daring Bakers’ Challenge was pretty twisted – Ruth from The Crafts of Mommyhood challenged us to make challah! Using recipes from all over, and tips from “A Taste of Challah,” by Tamar Ansh, she encouraged us to bake beautifully braided breads.

After this challenge, I can’t say “challah” without thinking “holla!”. I had so much fun with this one!

I made three different kinds of challah: plain honey white challah, whole wheat challah filled with apples, cinnamon, and maple syrup, and sourdough challah. Even more fun than all the different varieties were the different braiding techniques that Ruth, our host, encouraged us to try. I went for a six-strand braid, a five-strand braid, and a four-strand braided round. If you’ve never shaped bread like this before, challah is a great way to start: the dough was really easy to work with and good for braiding….

Sourdough Danish Pastries, Part II

May 24, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 39 Comments

This is the second post in a series of three – click to read Part I and Part III.

As promised, here’s the follow-up to my last post on Danish pastries: how to shape and fill the Danishes. So fun!

I got really excited about the different Danish shapes I was going to make, so I tried a whole bunch of them. They were all pretty successful so I’m confident that I can pass along my skillz ;). I only used half the batch of dough to make these (I couldn’t justify making sixteen Danishes for only two of us) so I will be experimenting with the rest of the dough sometime soon… stay tuned for Part III! ;)…

Sourdough Danish Pastries

May 20, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 76 Comments

This is the first post in a series of three – click to read Part II and Part III.

In my last post, I was extolling the virtues of making something simple from scratch. Now I am going to extol the virtues of making something rather complicated from scratch: Danish pastries using sourdough starter. Yes, we are doing this!

At the end of April, I wrote a list of stuff I wanted to make for this blog over the summer, and Danish pastries was on it. I had my first taste of making laminated dough when the Daring Bakers made croissants a while back, and I wanted to try it again. But I was kind of putting it off because it’s a lot of butter and a lot of work: all that rolling and folding and rolling and folding and resting and waiting. Then, during the Daring Bakers reveal last month, I came across Sourdough Surprises, which is another baking group that a few Daring Bakers members have created to bake together once a month using their sourdough starters. And their recipe for May was sourdough Danishes! Well, it seemed like fate. I was in….

Bread, Butter & Jam

May 17, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 13 Comments

May 19 is Food Revolution Day. This is a “day of action” organized by the Jamie Oliver Foundation to promote better food and food education – essentially, to get more people engaged in the acts of growing, buying, cooking, and eating real food. Food enthusiasts are encouraged to take part by hosting Food Revolution events that focus on getting back to basics, learning healthy food habits, and understanding the importance of where food comes from (ie, grown on a farm and prepared at home from scratch versus industrially processed, individually wrapped, and sold ready-to-eat at the store). I am currently re-reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which relates to these issues, and Food Revolution Day really struck a chord with me. I wanted to “host” something on my blog, but I wasn’t sure what….

Daring Bakers: Dutch Crunch Rolls

March 27, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 31 Comments

Sara and Erica of Baking JDs were our March 2012 Daring Baker hostesses! Sara & Erica challenged us to make Dutch Crunch bread, a delicious sandwich bread with a unique, crunchy topping. Sara and Erica also challenged us to create a one of a kind sandwich with our bread!

Despite the fact that I was really hoping for a ridiculous, elaborate, sugary baking project for this month’s challenge, these Dutch Crunch Rolls are pretty fantastic. I had never heard of Dutch Crunch bread, but it turns out that it’s a San Francisco local specialty that originated in the Netherlands (hence the name). In Dutch, it’s called tijgerbrood, or “tiger bread” because of the way the topping cracks to look like tiger stripes (although there’s a growing consensus that it looks more like a giraffe’s spots!). “Dutch crunch” refers to the yeasted rice flour topping that is applied to the bread before baking, rather than to the bread itself, which can be any kind of soft-ish sandwich-style bread.

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