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nourishing the body

Archives for February 2009

Bread Oven

My wife knows I always love to get cooking related gifts. And with all the bread making we’ve been doing lately she went out and got a great gift for my birthday a couple weeks ago. This is something I have been wanting for a long time but haven’t taken the time to go out and get. I’m talking about unglazed quarry tiles to make a bread oven!

These tiles came from a local flooring store in town. It is important to use unglazed tiles to avoid any offgassing of various chemicals used in the glaze during heating. The store even looked up the MSDS (material safety data sheet) on these tiles to make sure there was nothing toxic in them.

Of course I tried out some of our 5 minute bread dough as soon as I could. The tiles worked perfectly!


One of the reasons I wanted the tiles to replace my standard pizza stone was the size. The tile lined oven has enough room to bake more than one loaf at a time. And the pizza stone was too small to bake a large pizza like the one shown here.

Believe it or not, the
Roasted red peppers and kalamata olives were great together.


See how nicely it fits int he oven?


The 5 minute dough makes great pizza crust!

My forray into 5-minute bread

I’m sure you’ve heard about the book ‘Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day‘ by Zöe Francois and Jeff Hertzberg. There methods have some similarity to the no-knead bread method – like no kneading – but there are some significant difference. A high hydration dough is made simply by mixing the ingredients and storing the dough in the fridge for up to two weeks. Actually waiting a few days before baking improves the flavor immensely and it makes for quick work to make all kinds of bread creations. I’ve been playing around with the basic recipe (1.5 T yeast, 1.5 T salt, 3 C water, 6.5 C all purpose flour) and having some fun making breads and more.

The dough you see on the peel below was made with the basic recipe but I used 1.5 C whole wheat flour and only 5 C of all purpose flour. I cut off a pound or so of the dough and pulled it into a ball forming a skin on top by stretching the dough underneath.

After raising for a couple of hours, the boule was dusted with flour and scored in a scallop shape.

Here’s the result after about 25 minutes in a 500 °F oven on my pizza stone.

I was very pleased with the texture. The crust was chewy and not too hard and the inside was moist and tender. There was a distinct flavor of the whole wheat flour but it was not tough at all when used in this small proportion.

Here’s another one in a batard shape. This dough had 2.5 C of whole wheat flour and 4 C of all purpose flour.

It baked up nice. It still maintained a pretty tender texture inside but it was more wheaty than the prior batch of dough.

You can do all kinds of things with this dough. Here is a flatbread I made with the whole wheat dough. I just stretched it out, brushed it with extra virgin olive oil and topped it with some good Bulgarian feta cheese and kalamata olives.

It didn’t last long!

Please stay tuned for more bread escapades.

One Minute Cake

The other night we were finishing dinner and my 11-year old son said he wanted to make us dessert. He is taking FACS in school now. Of course everything has a new fancy name. When I was in school it was called Home Economics. FACS stands for Family and Consumer Science. He has been learning a bit about cooking in FACS and I hope it helps him expand his palate. Anway, he ran to the computer to look up quick desserts and stumbled across a 1 minute cake recipe on CDKitchen.com. It has no eggs but combines flour, sugar, baking powder, cocoa, oil, milk and vanilla to make a quick batter. The batter was poured into a greased coffee cup and cooked for one minute on high in the microwave. The texture was a bit chewy and not cake-like at all but it certainly tasted ok. I added some walnuts to my batter before he cooked it. I helped him plate them up and served the warm chocolate goodness with some vanilla ice cream.

Bibimbap – Korean Comfort Food

Bibimbap literally means ‘mixed up rice’ and is a traditional comfort food in Korea usually served in a warm stone bowl. I first tasted this delicacy many years ago at a Korean restaurant in Santa Clara, CA. I fell in love with the dish.

It starts, of course, with warm rice. I use Korean rice as it always cooks to the perfect sticky texture.

There are many varieties of bibimbap and when made at home it usually includes whatever vegetables that are on hand at the moment. It also includes some grilled marinated beef. Our sirloin was marinated with soy, sesame oil, vinegar and a little sugar before grilling. Most of the vegies here are quickly sautéed and some are raw. We have cucumbers (raw), zucchini, red onions, carrots, spinach and garlic, and shitake mushrooms.

The vegetables were carefully placed on top of the rice putting complimentary colors next to each other to show off the variety of foods. The beef was placed on top.

I like the traditional way of seving a fried egg on top with a runny yolk, of course.

The dish was garnished with green onion. It is also served with sesame seeds and a spicy chili sauce made from gochujang paste, soy, sesame oil, vingegar and sugar.

That’s it! Mix it all up together and eat.