recipes

Ginger-Pecan Sourdough Biscotti

Sourdough biscotti have been on my mind for a while, but they posed a bit of a challenge: with sourdough starter comes water, and extra water is not something that we usually want in any cookie dough, never mind biscotti. For these “twice-baked” cookies, the dough is formed into a log and partially baked, then sliced and baked again until dry. Extra water is just not helpful here.

The solution I came to, in addition to using a stiff (50%-hydration) starter, is to cut down on the sugar, which behaves very much like a liquid ingredient in a dough. (If you don’t believe me, try taking a basic unsweetened dough and mixing in a bunch of sugar; you’ll swear you just dumped a bucket of water in there.) So these have about 30% less sugar than you’ll see in many biscotti recipes, but interestingly, they taste plenty sweet to me. I would not market them as “diet biscotti.” They’re definitely dessert.

The dough is still plenty wet, and log-forming is a little tricky. I found a plastic dough scraper helpful to scrape up and shape and smooth the sides once the dough is on the parchment-lined pan. But even if you make your log nice and compact, it’s going to start flattening out before it even hits the oven, and after a few minutes in there will look like a praline on a hot New Orleans sidewalk. Don’t panic. It will rise (a little) and have a pretty good biscotti shape by the time it’s done.

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Look Mom, No Flour!

Yes, they’re Beautiful, Bold, and Brilliant. But who knew that the Bread Baking Babes, whose monthly exploits take them into the far-reaching corners of the global oven, were also Beastly, Brutal, and just plain Bad? That’s the only conclusion I’m left with after undertaking my first bread as a newly-inaugurated Babe. Consider me duly hazed.

Here’s the thing: this bread contains no flour.

When you bake bread with flour, the miller has done a lot of work on your behalf. She has selected the right wheat berries at just the right stage of development, tempered the flour for the proper moisture content, and maybe added malt so the dough will ferment at the right rate. When you bake with no flour, you’re kind of on your own.

Gee, thanks, Babes! Love you too. Do I now have to streak across campus in order to be fully ordained into Babehood?

The procedure goes something like this: You don your Birkenstocks. You sprout some wheat berries. You whirl them up in the food processor with some yeast, salt and honey, and work it by hand a little to make a pretty nice dough. You let it rise a few times and bake it in a pan. You get a heavy, dense, gummy-in-the-middle but crumbly-at-the edges, whole-wheat loaf that transports you back some [mumble mumble] years to your college co-op days when everyone wanted to volunteer for weekly bread-baking because it beat toilet-cleaning, but no one really knew how to do it.

But here’s the other thing: it’s really not half-bad, considering the no-flour thing.

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Grape Schiacciata

I always feel a little presumptuous posting about regional breads, especially ones that are new to me. On the other hand, limiting myself to writing about breads that I’ve known intimately since childhood would mean an entire blog about Pepperidge Farm White Sandwich and Dutch Dill breads, and that might get old fast.

I hope it’s understood that most of what I write here about new breads comes from what I can glean from travels with my virtual surfboard and a fairly good sampling of bread books like these. I also hope it’s understood that I welcome anyone who has any firsthand knowledge of these things to correct, expand upon, or otherwise edit my neophytic commentary. I particularly invite my Italian friends to chime in on this one.

That said, here’s what I think I know about schiacciata:

Schiacciata is a Tuscan flatbread, similar to — or is it a type of, or another name for? — focaccia.
Schiacciata is pronounced something like skya-CHA-ta, and means “crushed” or “squashed” in Italian.
Schiacciata can be plain or filled with fruit, vegetables, meat, or cheese.
Grape schiacciata (schiacciata con l’uva) is a traditional version that celebrates the Tuscan grape harvest. It typically uses wine grapes (with seeds). I used seedless black grapes.
Schiacciata can be made as a rich, sweet pastry with eggs and lard, or as a rather lean dough. The one I made contains just a little sugar and olive oil in the dough, and a little more on top.
Anise seed is not an uncommon addition to sweeter versions of schiacciata. Fennel seed, which I used, seems to be less common but not unheard of.
I did not find semolina to be an ingredient in any of the schiacciata recipes I looked at. I included some in mine because I like the hint of golden color and nutty flavor it adds to dough, and because I’m wild like that.

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Fruit and Nut Sourdough

Okay, I know this is not a very appealing photograph. I do like it, though, because it illustrates a few things.

See the ultra-shiny crust? This illustrates what happens when you steam your bread too much. It’s like shellac. Not really the effect I was going for.

See how dark the crust is? This illustrates what happens when you don’t really remember how to operate your oven (this would be your occasional oven, not your most-of-the-time oven) and the oven display is broken so you have no visual clue that you’re operating it incorrectly, and you haven’t really turned the temperature down when you think you have. The very learned Raymond Calvel said it is nearly impossible to overbake bread. Maybe I should gain some satisfaction in knowing I nearly accomplished the near-impossible. (I say nearly because the crust did not burn. It’s just very very dark. Again, not the effect I was going for; merely very dark would have sufficed.)

See how the resolution of the photo is not very good? This illustrates what happens when you do something brainless, the details of which you’d rather not get into at the moment, and end up wrecking your DSLR camera, and have to use your little point-and-shoot (and then have to crop the photo so the really dark parts of the loaves are conveniently omitted).

Okay, lessons learned: Don’t pour too much water into the steam pan. Read The Fine Manual (and better yet, call the oven repair guy). And don’t be stupid. Simple enough.

Now consider this photograph:

I like this one because it illustrates that even when a few things go wrong, you can still end up with a pretty nice, 50%-whole-grain, fruit-and-nut-laden, pleasantly-dense-and-chewy, thinly-sliceable, great-on-its-own-or-with-soft-cheese kind of loaf.

So there.

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In Defense of Crumbs

Packrat (n): a collector of miscellaneous useless objects.

Now I’m not saying I fit this definition. Decide for yourself. Let’s say you came to my house and poked around in my cupboards and drawers. Let’s say you found, among many other things, four empty shoeboxes, a deck of 49 cards, the cannon from a Monopoly game that was shot to hell long ago, and seven returnable ceramic yogurt jars. Let’s say you made a judgment. I’m not saying you’d be wrong. There is evidence.

However, if you looked on my counter, and thought to include, in your body of evidence, the end or two of stale bread that is likely to be hanging about… well, I’d have to object. Stale bread ends are not miscellaneous useless objects — they are bread crumbs waiting to happen. And bread crumbs are plenty of deliciousness waiting to happen; as evidence, I offer fig upside-down bread pudding, ajo blanco, steamed ginger-persimmon pudding.

And, of course, gazpacho. You read that right, chilled soup fans, gazpacho has bread crumbs in it. At least it does when it’s prepared the traditional Andalucian way. True, this gazpacho based on cantaloupe and honeydew — and no tomatoes — can’t exactly claim to be traditionally Andalucian, but it can claim to be a savory, refreshing summer soup that gets loads of body, not to mention flavor, from a hefty dose of dried out sourdough bread reduced to kibble in your trusty food processor.

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Goat on a Roll

I have to say this was a pretty good sandwich.

The meat is goat shoulder, which shows up in my meat CSA box with unpredictable regularity and which I have never, until now, succeeded in preparing beyond the “barely recognizable as food” level. Of course, this is not because there is anything wrong with the goat itself, but rather because I am just by nature, it seems, mystified by meat. Baffled by beef, perplexed by pork, foiled by fowl, and saddest of all, bullied by billy. Poor me.

Time to buckle down and hunt in earnest for something foolproof. I found it in Simply Recipes’ pulled pork recipe, which worked beautifully for the piquant, sinewy goat meat. The only change I made was to pressure-cook the meat with the water for 20 minutes before adding the sauce and simmering for two hours; it was then so tender that a stern glance was all it took to make it fall apart. Who’s bullying whom now, hm?

The rolls are a variation on my usual hamburger buns; the primary change was making the prefermented dough with whole wheat rather than white flour, which boosts the proportion of whole wheat flour in the rolls to about 72%. So they’re good for you, but if you use white whole wheat flour your kids will never know the difference between these and store-bought rolls. Oh, except these taste a lot better, and hold up better buried under a pile of bullied goat, too.

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