Doctor Domestic

A couple of weeks ago, we went out to visit my parents over the Memorial Day holiday weekend.  I was on a bit of a culinary mission:  obtain sourdough culture from parental units.  I took a jar of home-made strawberry rhubarb jam as a barter offer.  It worked, and I came home with a container full of yeast, bacteria and flour.  What a lucky girl I am!

I should perhaps back up a bit.  I guess I haven’t mentioned that my parents (more specifically my dad) has jumped in to the hobby of sourdough bread making.  Yes, a man who at one time couldn’t find the milk in the fridge without the help of his teenage daughter, is making bread from scratch, from cultures he maintains with loving care.  I love the unexpected changes the years can bring.

Its truly amazing I haven’t started doing this culturing thing years ago.  I mean, if there’s one type of cooking that translates from the lab to the kitchen – its culturing microbes!  I have personally maintained cell cultures in the lab for 8+ years.  It has become second nature in my working hours, so I really hope that my mad culturing skills will come home with me after working hours!

OK, enough with the back story, lets get down to some bread making.  I pulled out my sourdough culture, which had been sitting undisturbed in the fridge for the past 2 weeks.  I poured off 2 cups of it for use in this recipe.  With the rest of it, I added water (about 2.5 cups) and flour to bring the culture back to its previous texture.  In case you’re wondering, the texture is roughly that of thick pancake batter.  I transferred the refreshed culture back into my cleaned storage container and put it back into the fridge.  I unfortunately didn’t have a lot of culture left after I removed the 2 cups for the recipe, but I’m hoping the remaining yeast will repopulate the culture.

To the 2 cups of liquid culture (that’s how it is referred to by the cookbook), I added 1 cup flour and 1/4 cup water.  I whisked those ingredients together and let them proof for 12 hours.  This is your overnight step.

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Did I mention that this bread takes about 25 hours to make?  Oh yea, it takes about 25 hours to make.

After 12 hours, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Dr. Domestic headed into the kitchen to stir in another 1 cup of flour and 1/4 cup of water.  Sound familiar?  This second mixture proofs for 8 more hours.

And in case you’re wondering, proofing is optimally done at about 70-72F.  This stuff IS specific.  More science than cooking, really.

8 hours later, I mixed in all of the goodies.  The goodies include: Milk (3/4 cup), cinnamon (a LOT of cinnamon – 1/4 cup), raisins (1 cup), finely chopped walnuts (1 cup), sugar (2 T) and salt (1 1/2 tsp).  I combined the goodies with the proofed culture in my KitchenAid Mixer and mixed it up.  I then added 2 cups of flour (in two stages) and mixed on Med-High for about 6 minutes with the dough hook.

This is not the most pleasant stage of the bread-making process.  Your mixer will NOT like this.  It will get hot, and tired, and eventually try to commit suicide by throwing itself off of your counter-top.  Really.  You must stand there and keep it on your counter because that much dough (4+ pounds of it) knocking around your mixer will cause it to walk all over the place.

At some point, my nice floury, smooth bread dough ball turned into a gluey mass.  I don’t know when or why this happened.  But I took this as a hint to start the hand-kneading.  I turned it out onto a counter-top and kneaded in another 1 1/4 cup flour.

Forgive me for lack of good pictures at this step.  I was in a huge hurry and covered head-to-toe in flour.  It was a bit stressful.

And after 8-10 minutes of hand-kneading, when you’re good and sweaty, you’re done.  The dough is then split in two, because this recipe makes TWO LOAVES.  And do yourself a favor and actually weigh the dough so its truly evenly divided.

Roll each piece out separately into rectangles, about the width of your bread loaf pans and 1/2 inch thick.  Spread over one half of a mixture of 2 Tbsp cinnamon and 1/2 cup sugar.  The other half is of course for the other loaf.  Roll up the dough and place it in a loaf pan.

The loaves now proof from anywhere from 2-3 hours in a warm room to longer (5-6 hrs) in a cooler room.  I opted for the longer rise because I went and made social plans for tonight without thinking through the ramifications for my bread loaves.  I called my mom in a panic to make sure I could let them rise longer than 3 hours and she told me it’d be fine.  Yes, I still need motherly reassurances!

When we got home tonight, the loaves (which had been in our cold basement) were still a bit flat, so I did the “bouncing” technique for inducing a final rise.  Basically, instead of pre-heating the oven, you put the loaves in a cold oven, then heat it.  This extra heating time apparently helps give the loaves a bit of…well…bounce.  It did seem to help tonight, at least a little.

The loaves were cooked at 375F for 25 minutes, then covered with foil.  They then continued to bake at 375F until they reached an internal temperature of 203F.  Yes. 203F EXACTLY.

Too bad I somehow can’t transmit the smell of freshly baked cinnamon bread over the internet.  Really too bad.

I turned the loaves out onto a cooling rack, where they sat overnight under a tea-towel.  One unanticipated problem I experienced was that some of the cinnamon sugar kind of melted out and burned to the side of the loaf.  Woops.  Maybe I’ll just use less cinnamon sugar next time.

And as for the final taste and texture?  Taste – good. Texture – a bit dense, not surprising with the sub-optimal conditions I used!

Boy was this one exhausting!

I’m not posting the recipe for this one quite yet because to be completely honest, I was working off of a copy my dad made out of their cookbook, and I didn’t have both pages of the recipe.  Umm, this could explain a few things…  If/When I redo this one, I promise to do a better job and I will post the actual recipe.  You can gather the gist of it from this post.

Tags: Baking, Bread, Food