Roasted Potatoes and Squash

It's squash season so I thought I'd share my recipe for roasted squash.  I'm using a Greek Sweet Red Squash here, but I also do the same thing with butternut squash.  I make the squash pieces bigger than the potato pieces, since the squash will cook quicker.  If you want to mess with it, you could even put the squash in later.  I also put in an onion, chopped up in big pieces.

Marinate everything in olive oil and your favorite spices, and put into a baking dish.  For this session I baked it in a 400 degree oven, covered, for 45 minutes, and then pulled the cover off for another ten minutes.  Without a cover I would go down to 375 or 350 I think.  It tasted great, and the leftovers were easy to heat up in a covered saucepan.

Best Bread Yet

I baked on Monday in the brick oven.  The dough was in the fridge an extra 24 hours, for a total of at least 36 hours.  Wow!  It's chewy and smooth like you wouldn't believe, and it still bubbled and rose up.  I'm going to try this again.

Spring Stir Fry

My sister asked about my procedure for making stir fries.  I make them almost every day during the summer.

Chop your allium!  Here I have one baby onion and a few garlic scapes.

Take the smoke detector off the wall and put the burner on high.  Get the oil hot first.  I am using olive oil today.

Get the allium glazed and maybe a few brown corners.

Throw in the greens, roughly chopped.  Today I have beet thinnings, which are the entire plants just yanked out of the ground, and baby swiss chard.

Use a cover if you have one to get it steamed and wilted ASAP.  1-2 tsp of apple cider vinegar and soy sauce, each.  Get it off the pan as soon as it is ready.  The above is almost over cooked.  If you sprinkle some water or white wine in at this point you can de-glaze the pan and get some more flavor.

Eat!

Farmers Breakfast

Breakfast year round nearly always includes a couple of eggs, scrambled.  For the past few months I've only had garlic or maybe frozen scallions to add, but I finally have Spring greens!  The spinach was all a bust, so presently I am using beet thinnings and baby swiss chard.

Flint Corn Tacos

I have been muddling my way through what to do with all the flint corn I grew last year.  This crop is very alluring to me and I want to make it a staple part of my diet, somehow.  Experiments with polenta/grits have been so-so, but tacos and tortillas are showing some promise.  Here is where I'm at today.

Flint corn taco with dried beans from the farm.  A nutritiuous meal that is 100% off the farm.

Start with 1 lb of hard corn, in this case, Roy Calais flint corn.  I have selected only the red ears for this meal.  Roy Calais produces about 60% yellow ears and 40% red ears.  We're going to boil it in water with 2 T of slaked lime added.  You can get the lime from a little package in the Mexican section of the grocery, or from the lumber yard in 50# bags.  Slaked lime is a common additive to concrete to improve work-ability.  I have a lifetime supply left over from making the last brick oven.

The recipes I found for making masa recommended 10-15 minutes of simmering, but for my flint corn I am finding at least 30 minutes is needed, and I think it could go even longer.  Stir it several times while simmering, then turn off the heat, cover, and let sit over night.

It's ready if some of the skins can be rubbed off.  I have been rubbing some of the skins off, but not all of them, and rinsing the corn well.  Some of the original liquid should be reserved to hydrate the dough after grinding.

I'm still looking for a good masa grinder. This time I used my old Lehman's grinder with stones, but the auger had trouble feeding the wet corn.  I ended up pushing most of through with a dowel.  However, the stones made a very nice dough in a single pass.  The hand grinder available online feeds the corn very well, but the plates are so poorly made that you have to grind the dough several times.  And the dough feeds though the auger very poorly.  I have tried dressing the plates on the mexican grinder (using a belt sander) and next time I will test it out.

The dough may need hydrating to get the proper consistency.  The hotter the frying pan, the better for cooking.

Sourdough bread

Here is the bread recipe I am currently using.  I am taking elements from Thom Leaonard's The Bread Book, Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads, and whatever secrets I can trick Andrew at Madison Sourdough Company to let slip out when I talk to him.

This is a sourdough and I am having the best luck with my 92% extraction Turkey Red flour.  This extraction is an estimate and I have variously labeled it as 90%, 92%, or 94%.  It's all the same thing--stone ground and sifted with a 630 micron screen.  I always make enough for a loaf of bread and a few pizzas.  On baking day, after bulk fermentation, I divide the dough, put 1/2 of it into a proofing basket, and the other half gets made into pizzas.  I eat one pizza and freeze the rest.  When I am done making pizzas, it's just about time for the bread to go into the oven.

Day 1, remove starter from the fridge, dig out the soft inside (I use a stiff starter, wrapped in a dish towel), add 1/2 cup water, and mix in enough flour to make it stiff again.  Keep at 70 degrees for the day.

In the evening, divide the starter, add more flour to the portion that will go back into the fridge, wrap it up, and put it in the fridge.  Add 1 1/4 C water to the starter that remains and dissolve the starter.  Mix in at least 3 C of flour, knead a little bit, and let sit overnight at 70 degrees.  I do all my mixing by hand.

In the morning, dissolve the entire thing in another 2 C of water, add a little less than 3 teaspoons of non-iodized salt, and mix in at least 5 C of flour.  I use so much flour straight from my mill that my volume measurements are very suspect.  Freshly ground flour is very light and airy.  I should weigh it but I never have.  The ideal bread dough is as wet as you can possibly stand it while preventing it from sticking.  I find the wet hands technique to be too much bother, so I just keep dusting in small amounts of flour to keep it from sticking.  Also, you need to keep the dough in motion while it's on the counter.

Immediately retard the dough after kneading.  I put mine into the root cellar, which got it down to about 55 degrees or so.  I think the fridge could be tried, too.  If possible, fold the dough once or twice over the course of the day.  We are going to wake up this dough at some point in the next 12-24 hours.  To do this, heat up a thick earthenware bowl by letting it sit in your proofing area for awhile, and use a proofing area that is ideally 75-80 degrees.  

About 2-3 hours before you want to bake, put the dough into the preheated bowl and put it in the warm proofing area.  At about the same time, you can start pre-heating the oven.  At home I have an ordinary gas oven that I put 6 thin firebricks into.  This will be the baking surface for pizza and bread.

After an hour or so of re-awakened bulk fermentation, divide the dough into your pizza dough and your bread dough.  Don't punch it down or knead it.  In fact, don't ever punch the dough down when working with this kind of flour.  For your bread dough, fold it carefully a couple of times, dust it, and put into your proofing container.  I have been using a cane banneton lately, but a cloth towel in any kind of bowl also works fine.

While the bread dough is doing it's final proofing, you have time to make and eat pizza.  With this recipe I can make 3 for freezing and one for eating.  I usually work in a little more flour so that the pizza dough is a bit stiffer and drier.  Enjoy.

After no more than 90 minutes of proofing, tip the dough onto a baking peel, slice the top with a sharp, wet knife, and slide it into the oven.  The oven is as hot as you can stand it--you may need to pull the kitchen fire alarm off the wall.  You'd like to get 600 degrees in the oven, but of course most home ovens red line at 450.  So just get it as hot as you can.  I use 450 at home.

Use a spray bottle and spray the entire inside of the oven for 10-15 seconds.  Then close the oven and don't open it up again for at least 20 minutes.  After 20 minutes you can check on it. I usually go about 25 minutes.

Cool it on the rack, and enjoy!  Don't forget to put your smoke detector back on the wall and test it.  I mean, test the bread, and also test the fire alarm.

This last shot is a loaf from Madison Sourdough on top, and my loaf underneath it.  Both loaves are really quite nice, and they are both made from exactly the same wheat, from the same field and the same harvest.  I think Madison Sourdough is using 100% extraction, which gives it the darker color. (they have their own stone mill, I just sell them whole berries)  It's also a bit sharper and tangier than mine.