Bread for a New Year

January 8, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 16 Comments

The Canadian Food Experience Project began June 7, 2013. As we share our collective stories through our regional food experiences, we hope to bring global clarity to our Canadian culinary identity. Visit Valerie’s blog, A Canadian Foodie, on the 15th for a round-up of this month’s posts.

This month on the Canadian Food Experience Project, Valerie has asked us to make a “Canadian Resolution”. I’m not a big resolution maker or goal setter (this article outlines my preferred method of forward momentum), but a little food-related one can’t hurt, right? So, my Canadian resolution for the year is to bake bread with Canadian grains, milled at home in my WonderMill grain mill when possible. This list of Canadian heritage wheat varieties is kind of astonishing – I had no idea there were that many varieties, and that’s only the wheat! I’m excited to see what’s out there, who’s growing what and where, and most of all, how it tastes. Bonus: one of the great local food discoveries I’ve made in the Cowichan Valley is True Grain Bread, a bakery that not only bakes gorgeous bread but also sells locally grown Vancouver Island wheat, both in grain form and as house-milled flour.

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Humongous Sourdough Popovers

December 20, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 24 Comments

I interrupt the steady stream of sugary treats coming out of my kitchen to bring you these massive sourdough popovers. Seriously, LOOK AT HOW BIG THEY ARE.

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Sourdough Kolaches

November 20, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 30 Comments

I’d never heard of a kolache until I saw a recipe posted on the Homesick Texan blog for strawberry cream cheese kolaches (written in response to the awful explosion in West, Texas) with an interesting back story of how this Czech pastry got so popular there. Apparently lots of Czech immigrants settled in the “Czech Belt” of central and south-central Texas, and now the kolache – a yeasted pastry usually with a fruit filling, sort of like a danish but without the laminated dough – has become widely available at bakeries, gas stations, and truck stops and is synonymous with road trips for many Texans. Like the doughnut and the cupcake, it is gaining popularity outside of Texas as well with unique, artisan interpretations both sweet and savoury.

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Overnight Sourdough Lemon Waffles

September 20, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 31 Comments

Since receiving a waffle maker from Santa-Nate last Christmas, I’ve experimented with a lot of waffle recipes. In particular, I’ve been looking for a really great overnight yeasted waffle recipe, one where you mix up an enriched yeast batter, let it rise and develop flavour overnight, then add eggs and baking soda (for extra leavening power and a light, airy texture) in the morning before cooking the waffles. I made one recipe that came with the waffle maker, which was pretty good, and twice I tried the famous recipe from Marion Cunningham’s Breakfast Book, via Smitten Kitchen, with middling success. The first time I made it I intended to serve waffles to our breakfast guests, but the batter seemed to have given up the ghost and died during its overnight rest*, so I tossed it and had to whip up a quick non-yeasted recipe instead. I tried it again a second time (because the recipe has such great reviews), this time tweaking a few things, for a much better result. But still not quite the overnight yeasted waffles of my dreams (although, thanks to those glowing reviews, I will probably try again to capture the magic).

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Colossal Sourdough Cinnamon Buns

July 20, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 34 Comments

You know those absolutely huge cinnamon buns – the ones the size of your face – that you find at hotbeds of food culture like the mall food court? These are like those in size only – they taste a million times better (that’s a mathematical fact, I can assure you).

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White Chocolate Raspberry Swirl Brownies {with sourdough!}

May 20, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 24 Comments

Of all the things I imagined making with a sourdough starter, brownies were not one of them. This month Sourdough Surprises showed me otherwise. Silly me.

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Sourdough Tortelli Piacentini

April 20, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 38 Comments

Several months ago, Jamie Oliver posted a photo on Facebook showing the most beautiful pasta I had ever seen, which immediately prompted me to start a frantic search to find out what it was called and how it was made.

The picture came from a British food TV show called Simply Italian, which of course I couldn’t watch in Canada, but I did manage to find the recipe for “wedding tortelli“. Unfortunately it didn’t give very clear instructions for how to shape the tortelli, so I turned to the Google machine and found a related pasta shape called culurgiones:

Culurgiones are also known as Sardinian ravioli and usually have a potato filling, sort of like a cross between a ravioli and a pierogi. They are formed in a manner similar to the tortelli in question, however they are more round and plump like dumplings versus the tapered, almost leaf-like shape of tortelli, which is what I was after.

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Chocolate Porter Sourdough Hot Cross Buns

March 31, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 32 Comments

Chocolate Porter Sourdough Hot Cross Buns Happy Easter! I hope the Easter Bunny brought you all lots of chocolate. 🙂

This Easter I wanted to make some special hot cross buns (as in, more special than these or these). I was thinking something along the lines of “hot cross bunnies” (haha, I’m so punny… bunny… sorry) but then I came across these spiced stout sourdough beauties from Lauren Bakes (she recently posted a chocolate chip version, too), which stopped me dead in my cutesy little bunny tracks. Her recipe contained dried fruit soaked in tea plus a sourdough levain made with Guinness, which I swapped out for chocolate porter because, well, I’ll take any excuse to buy it, really….

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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Sourdough Pasta (with a Pasta Machine)

July 24, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 45 Comments

Recently I was lucky enough to receive a pasta machine from a relative (thanks Cecilia!), and I’ve been giving it a pretty good workout lately – it definitely makes homemade pasta easier to churn out than rolling it by hand. This particular pasta machine was made in Italy but comes under the name “NUDELMASCHINE”, which sounds more German than Italian and prompts me and Nate to put on our best/worst German accents whenever it comes out of the cupboard for a pasta-making session.

A little while ago I came across a recipe for sourdough pasta on The Gingered Whisk (one of my Sourdough Surprises buddies), and as recipes for using up excess sourdough starter are always useful, I gave it a whirl. …