sourdough

Posted on episode 319

Hacking Extreme Grilled Cheese

Even if you have been a reader of my blog and fan of Cast Iron Guy since it’s very early days, chances are high that you didn’t know me before the pandemic.

I used to be a guy who spent ten to twelve hours per day either downtown, or transporting to and from downtown for work. My home kitchen was something that was reserved for Saturday pancakes, Sunday dinners, and a few home-cooked meals each week between when we we’re dashing about here, there and everywhere.

But the last two years has set a lot of people up with new routines, lifestyles and habits.

I not only started baking a lot more sourdough bread, but my kitchen also got regularly used for the preparation of lunchtime meals: quick foods to be cooked and consumed in time to squeeze a walk in with the dog before heading back to the computer for work.

It’s probably not surprising then that I started making a lot of sourdough grilled cheese sandwiches. Quick, easy, and filling.

It’s probably also not surprising then that I got very bored very quickly with standard cheese on grilled bread fare that is the obvious grilled cheese sandwich recipe for most fans of this dish.

Don’t get me wrong: the classic bread, cheese, butter, heat combo is still a tried and true standard for any time and anywhere.

Yet, even greatness risks becoming mundane in high enough volume. It didn’t take too many months of pandemic-days working from home before I found myself experimenting with this great recipe, bending the rules, pushing the boundaries, and testing the limits of what could be grilled on or between two slices of bread and still taste good and not stray too far from this formula. Simple grilled cheese was no longer sparking my culinary curiosity the way it had, even with fresh sourdough and a hot cast iron griddle to work with.

Now, as much as I’d like to make this a simple post with a great recipe for readers to follow I think the point here is that culinary curiosity and creative cooking is not something that is reserved for highly trained chefs nor does it required elaborate recipe bending.

It can be something as simple as trying new things with something as standard as a grilled cheese sandwich. Adding ingredients (like in the attached photo which includes a fried egg, ham and hot sauce into a tasty grilled sandwich) or changing the order of things (like putting the cheese on the outside of the bread!)

Creating extreme versions of your favourite meals is about pushing the edges of the recipe, understanding what makes it work and cook properly all the while testing the edges of what could make it better, tastier, spicier, crunchier, more satisfying, or changing any variable that makes you happier cooking and ultimately eating it.

My comfort in doing this came from the simplicity of the standard grilled cheese sandwich which is tough to ruin even with a mediocre chef at the helm, but simultaneously can take on new tasty twists even with minor adjustments. It’s a safe food on which to experiment.

My joy came from pushing the boundaries of grilled cheese, changing the cheeses, dusting with spices, and adding or substituting other layers… but still ultimately grilling cheese inside buttered bread on my cast iron griddle.

It is said that in order to learn how to fix something, take it apart and break it first. I learned how to fix computers as a kid by frantically trying to repair the damage I did installing games, trying to get the machine working again before my parents found out. It seems some kind of similar sentiment exists in cooking: learn to fix (or improve a recipe) by taking it apart, breaking it, and trying to make it better. Hacking it.

I didn’t break the grilled cheese sandwich, but during the pandemic the grilled cheese sandwich broke me … enough that I wanted to pull it apart and make it into something better, if only for myself. I wanted to hack the recipe into something more exciting, something more extreme.

I think it worked.

I think it’s still in the works and probably will be for a long time.

Posted on episode 299

Sourdough Muffins

What are English Muffins called in England?

Muffins? Breakfast muffins? Half a Benny?

As I grilled these doughy disks on my cast iron skillet this morning with my daughter lingering over my shoulder hoping she could nab one for her breakfast, I wasn’t really pondering such things.

As 2022 progresses and I recall back to my sourdough goals for this year — in other words, baking with my starter by branching out beyond breads and sandwich loaves — I warmed up and fed my starter yesterday with the intention of attempting to make some English Muffins.

The recipe and process turned out to be much quicker and much simpler than I’d expected.

Unlike the bagels I’d baked about a month ago, the full cycle for this recipe was short and took only about fourteen hours, from idea to tray of hot bready goodness including the twelve hour overnight proof on the counter.

The dough was essentially a wetter, sweeter version of my basic bread, including the addition of liquid sugar (I chose maple syrup, because yes, we just have jugs of maple syrup in the cupboard, ohhhh Canada!) and replacing the water with milk.

the recipe

360g bread flour
240g milk
100g active sourdough starter
20g maple syrup (or honey)
8g salt
cornmeal for dusting

I combined the ingredients (minus the cornmeal) into a fully hydrated dough ball. This took about an hour of resting and folding and resting and folding. My timing here was the critical part, as this needed a twelve-hour counter-top rise. I had this ready to proof for about 7pm so that it would do it’s thing while I slept.

The next morning, the dough ball having easily doubled (or more) in size, I patted it out on a floured surface with my fingertips until it was about 2cm thick. This got cut with a “biscuit cutter” into rounds about 10cm across. (My biscuit cutter was a drinking glass.) I dusted the eight rounds with cornmeal and set them onto a cookie sheet to rest and rise for about one more hour.

I set my cast iron skillet over a medium-low heat. The key here is getting the muffins hot enough to cook evenly through to about 200F, while not over-cooking the outside. Low and slow. We’ve bought enough English Muffins over the years that I have a pretty good eye for what a finished product should look like, but I still used my digital thermometer to make sure they were cooked through. This was mostly me setting the kitchen timer for four minute intervals and flipping only on the beeps. It’s tempting to flip-flip-flip, but I think these benefit from minimal fussing.

For my next attempt (some day in the future) there are some minor adjustments I will make, specifically around the cook time and temperatures, but the only advice I can offer here is that you need to get to know your equipment and work along with it for this recipe. I’m still learning too, but my final product turned out pretty good for a first attempt.

The biggest surprise was the timing. I was expecting this to take much longer. Sure, fourteen hours is not a last minute meal idea, but in the world of sourdough it’s essentially instant fast food, and the type of thing I could see putting together the night before needing to make a family breakfast with unexpected company.

Fresh egg sandwiches everyone?

Posted on episode 298

Lotsa Bread

I’ve been thinking about bread a lot more than I’ve been writing about it here.

Eating it too.

I crossed yet another sourdough milestone this past weekend when I extracted from my hot oven a pair of pandemic bread loaves, loaves numbered two-hundred-and-forty-nine and two-hundred-and-fifty.

Yes, I keep track.

And yes, I’ve baked 250 loaves of sandwich bread in the last two years since that fateful day when I got sent home from the office to work in my cold basement.

My starter, which turns three next month, is mature and active and beautiful. I pulled it from the fridge that same afternoon to warm up on the counter, prepping my plans for bread baking even before setting up my laptop for work.

Two years of bread. Three years of sourdough. Two hundred and fifty sandwich loaves and so many other random baking experiments that had I not kept careful record of I might not even believe it myself.

In that time…

My flour collection has rotated through all purpose bags, to generic supply-chain shortage stocks, to small mill local flours, to artisan bakery bags, and grocery store best for bread varieties.

I’ve played with beers replacing water.

I’ve dabbled in mix-ins and spices and cheeses and sweetness levels.

I’ve made bagels and pizza dough and buns and pan bread.

It’s been two years of hundreds of hours of baking that has taught me so much about bread yet has only just whet my appetite to learn more. And there is lots more to learn.

I go back to the office (at least part time) in a couple weeks and the mid-day bread baking breaks will shift to accommodate that new life.

It’s a little sad, but then again, when I started this and was only a couple dozen loaves in I joked with my daughter that someday she would inherit the “pandemic bread starter” that bit of flour and water and yeast that helped sustain us through a weird time in history.

And it really did.

Posted on episode 294

Baking Sourdough Bagels

Now that we’re a few solid days into February it seemed appropriate that I acknowledge the fine dusting of flour on the floor, walls and furniture that is my loosely stated New Year’s resolutions.

I had been lamenting the lack of variation in my sourdough adventures and looking forward to a year of bread-based experimentation in the form of baked goods like doughnuts, English muffins and bagels.

So, it’s good that I can report I’ve checked at least one of those items off my list: bagels.

My initial attempt at making bagels — not just sourdough bagels, but bagels, period — full stop was based on a blurry-lined recipe I found online that was dancing between a New York style versus a Montreal-style bagel.

Sweetened, dry dough. Slow rise. Thick and chewy exterior.

The Ingredients

200g active sourdough starter
360g warm tap water
635g bread flour
30ml honey
12g salt
60g granulated sugar
10ml baking soda
1 egg white, whisked
sesame seeds, to taste

The flour, water, salt, starter, and honey went together just as I would have usually put together a basic bread dough. Blend. Hydrate. Fold. Rest. Fold. Repeat. And finally into the fridge for about 16 hours.

Things changed up on the back end, when after I let the dough warm back up for about an hour, I weighed out twelve equal(ish) portions and shaped into rings. The dough being fairly dry, this was a tough thing to do, at least in as much as I was hoping for smooth, beautiful loops. I wound up with scraggly rings that evened out a bit as they rose but even after twelve hours on the counter still bore my (trademark?) handmade look.

A pot of boiling water to which the granulated sugar and baking soda joined in to make a sweet alkaline broth gave each of the bagels, two at a time in my medium pot, a thirty-second-per-side bath before landing on a parchment-lined baking sheet.

A quick egg white wash on the top and a generous sprinkle of sesame seeds, and the dozen bagels were into the 450F oven for a solid 20 minutes before extraction.

They definitely had a homemade look, but the kid — a bagel aficionado already at age fourteen — scarfed two and declared them worthy. I guess I’m going to need to keep that recipe handy for another batch soon.