Pita bread

Had leftover chicken from Zankou, but no pita to go with it, so I decided to make some!

I followed this recipe, paraphrased here:

• 227 g (~1.5 C) flour
• 65% water
• 6% olive/canola oil
• 1.5% dry yeast
• 2.7% salt

Percentages are by mass, relative to flour. Special thanks to my roommate, who bought a 2 kg digital scale and a thermocouple reader for his coffee-making.

Let rise for 5 hr at 22°C. This produces a lot more gas than my usual bread recipe at the same temperature, probably due to the increased amount of yeast. Punch down, let rise for another half hour or so.

Preheat oven, with baking stone, to 475°F.

Divide dough into 6 balls. Flatten into discs and then roll out with a rolling pin.

Sprinkle some water on top, and let sit for 10 min or so. Ensure bottom is well-floured, and slide onto baking stone. Bake for 3 min.

Magically, it ballons up and then you get a pita! I still don't understand how this happened.

And it came out pretty good! A bit salty, but that wasn't so noticeable after filling it with chicken and garlic sauce and hummus. Need to be careful not to get it too thin during the rolling and handling process.

Strawberry rhubarb pie

Recipe and notes below:

French bread process development

I've made another few batches of French bread using the recipe from before. Here are my conclusions (no pictures though):

The recipe:

1. Mix 1/2 C whole wheat flour, 1 C white flour, and 1/2 t salt.
2. Dissolve 1/2 t yeast in 3/4 C warm water and mix solution into dry mixture
3. Let sit 15 min.
4. Dump goopy mess out onto well-floured surface
5. Knead in additional white flour (1/4 to 1/2 C) until satisfied
1. It should be dry enough that you can knead it 6 times without additional flour without sticking to the surface
2. It'll probably still stick to your hands and generally be a pain to knead
3. It should still be wet enough that it sticks if you knead it more than 10 times
6. Let rise until nearly doubled (~2 hr)
7. Fold, let rise again until doubled (~2 hr)
8. Shape, let rise while oven preheats (10-20 min)
9. Slash
10. Bake 30 min. @ 425°F
11. Bake 20 min. @ 350°F
12. Cool for 10 min. before cutting

Sensitivity to parameters

I don't have a lot of process control for the kneading/hydration, so I think it must be relatively robust to errors there. I think step 3 is pretty important for getting nice, elastic gluten chains, so that may unload some of the sensitivity to kneading quality.

Salt is pretty easy to measure repeatedly, so that's not a huge issue. I've been using different amounts of yeast, and that just seems to affect rise times.

Rise time, too, is not terribly sensitive. A visual inspection of volume change appears to be sufficient.

Punch down and shaping seem to affect the crumb: to get big, uneven bubbles in the bread you'd want to do these very lightly.

Finally, I've been getting lots of rise in the oven with this recipe compared to some past ones. I think having more water and step 3 both make the dough more elastic and able to support the steam generated in the oven. I suspect that the short post-shaping wait also helps keep the dough elastic going into the oven.

Slashing has a large effect on how it rises in the oven, especially in the distribution of added volume.

So that's it! I'd feel confident calling this recipe a rev A release.

French bread adventures

The recipe:
2 C flour
1 t yeast
1/2 t salt
3/4 C water

1. Mix 1-1/2 C flour, yeast, salt, and water.
2. Let sit 15 min.
3. Gradually knead in additional flour
4. Let rise 1:15
5. Fold, let rise 1:00
6. Shape, let rise 20 min.
7. Slash
8. Bake 40 min. @ 425 °F
9. Let sit in oven 15 min.

 Empirical results:

 

Above is the first time I used this recipe, and I followed it exactly (rather, I wrote the recipe to match the procedure for this bread)

 

 

This time, I was in a hurry so I added a few drops of vinegar and performed the rise in a hot water bath:

 

I skipped steps 2 and 5, reduced step 4 to 1 hour, and may have futzed around with the baking time & temperature as well. There weren't giant air pockets like the first time, but it was still a light, fluffy, springy bread; pretty good for a total of 2 hours.

 

This one was a bit disappointing. I used the hot water bath again, did a 1 hour 1st rise and a 45 min. second rise, and otherwise should have been pretty similar to the original recipe, but the crumb came out a lot denser. It could also be the flour¹ or the slashing technique (diagonals this time instead of one straight down the middle)

---

1. I used 1/2 C whole wheat flour in all these cases, but this time it was King Arthur Traditional Whole Wheat Flour, and the first two times it was King Arthur White Whole Weat Flour

Lemon Meringue Pie

The Recipe
Crust
  1 C graham crumbs
  1/2 C crushed pecans
  2 T brown sugar
  4 T butter
Filling
  1/3 C lemon juice
  1/4 C clementine juice
  1 T clementine zest
  4 egg yolks  14 oz condensed milk
  2 clementines, peeled and sectioned
Meringue
  4 egg whites
  1/2 C sugar

1. Combine crust ingredients, press into pie tin. Bake 10 min. @ 350 F
2. Combine filling ingredients (except clementines), cook on stove
3. Line bottom of crust with clementines, pour in filling, and then meringue
4. Bake 8-10 min. @ 350 F to brown meringue
5. Cool, then refrigerate

The Fish Pie

We made this one about 2 months ago. It's a fish pie because there's a fish shape carved onto the meringue.
We followed the recipe above, and the results are shown in the photo at the top of the post. It was a lot of fun to make (the meringue took forever because we didn't have an electric mixer. Also I couldn't chuck a fork into the 3/8" drill. Maybe if I had a bigger drill with a 1/2" chuck, that would have worked out better), and it was great. I especially liked the clementine sections--a burst of flavor and texture within the lemon custard matrix.

The Giraffe Pie

Oh no! This one came out really runny. We used 3 eggs instead of 4 and didn't cook it for as long...maybe that's why?
Also, we used lemon+lime instead of clementines, and as a result, the citrus sections were still a really nice texture, but now intensely sour instead of pleasantly clementine-flavored.
We did use technology to our advantage this time around, though: a food processor to crumble the graham cracker, and an electric mixer for the meringue.
Also we gave part of this pie to Charlie for her aid rescuing me in the midst of the alternator adventures, and she said it was great! So there you have it; independent verification of our pie-making skills.