After three previous attempts at baking my own bread, I was beginning to think it was something I’d just never figure out. As recently as two weeks ago I tried again using leftover whey from my mozzarella making in the place of water in my bread formula. The first loaf was OK, but still had a very uneven air bubble distribution, The second loaf, made from dough that had been allowed to sit in the fridge for a few extra days looked promising if a bit flat:

However, when cut open, it was too dense at the bottom:

Just as I was resigning myself to giving up on the whole idea of bread baking, I got an email from Andrew, my exceedingly patient bread consultant, announcing that he would be teaching a class at his home. I offered to trade an immersion circulator for the lessons, and we had a deal. I would be one of five students attending the class.

I arrived at his home on Saturday aftrenoon just as he was taking this beauty out of the oven, a focaccia with mushroom confit, basil, and cheese:

Having established his credentials and upped the intimidation factor with one gesture, he walked us through every aspect of bread baking. He had dough that he prepared earlier that he would use to demonstrate different techniques, but we also had to make our own “straight” dough with flour, water, yeast, and salt.

Mixing together everything but the salt produced this shaggy mess:

This mixture would rest for 20 minutes, allowing the enzymes in the flour and yeast to develop flavor, a step called the autolyse. The salt was added, and the dough rested, covered, until it was time for the fold and stretch step, which would be repeated every thirty minutes for a few hours. The dough isn’t kneaded, but the folding and stretching breaks some of the larger air bubbles and aligns the gluten. Here’s the envelope fold being applied to a larger batch of dough:

Between folds and rises, I learned about every factor that could influence the final outcome. I already knew about hydration levels and baker’s percentages, but calculating the desired dough temperature was new to me. You need to measure the temperature of each dry ingredient, factor in the amount of friction generated by the mixing method, and then add the water at a temperature that will result in dough at 75 to 78 °F, the optimal fermentation temperature. Ignoring that factor had been one of my biggest mistakes.

After a demonstration of the crucial shaping technique – almost impossible to describe, but simple to understand once you’ve seen it – we moved on to scoring the loaves. This is where I discovered mistake number two: I wasn’t scoring the dough deeply enough. Look at the depth of the cuts on these three loaves:

They were baked on a stone on the oven, with a pre-steam before they went in and more steam added after about five minutes. The steam source was boiling water poured over pans of ceramic pellets that had been pre-heated along with the stone.

Andrew was kind enough to give us each a bag of the pellets to take home, but they can be found at any hydroponics supply store.

After about 45 minutes at 450 °F, the loaves were ready:

Although you should always wait a few hours for the bread to cool before cutting it (the carryover heat finishes cooking the center of the loaf), the bread was cut open to show the even texture.

The class was over at this point, and we were all sent home with a bag containing the dough we had been folding and stretching. Once home, it would need a final shaping and proofing, and then it could be baked. I shaped my dough and set it in a floured banneton to rise.

After the proof, I inverted the dough onto a peel and scored it – deeply – before sliding it onto the oven.

Wait, I hadn’t boiled the water to make the steam! The five minutes that elapsed while I steamed the oven were enough to let the dough spread a bit, but I was committed. Into the oven it went, and, after 45 minutes and two more steam additions (gas ovens vent out the water vapor) I pulled out this loaf:

It was already late in the day, so I waited until the next morning to cut it open, which you can see at the top of this post. Good crust, even crumb, reasonably uniform air bubbles – all that was left was to taste it. I called in my bread tasting expert, She Who Must Be Obeyed, who passed judgment: “It’s your best loaf yet.”

So I’m back in the bread-baking business, and will keep practicing until I can routinely turn out uniform loaves. And very soon I’l incorporate the starter I was given to make pain au levain.

My first attempt at cheese making was successful, but it was also the simplest of techniques. I decided to up the ante and make a hard cheese, cheddar, “the single most popular cheese in the world.” I still had three methods – farmhouse, stirred curd, traditional – to choose from, with the farmhouse method being both the least complicated and having the shortest time to a finished product.

I needed two gallons of pasteurized (not ultra-pasteurized) milk, which was available in bottles. When I was a wee lad, my first household chore was retrieving the half gallon milk bottles that were delivered to our milk box each morning. Those bottles had plastic handles, unlike their modern equivalents.

I poured the milk into a heavy pot, which I lowered into a sink full of water at 100 °F.

When the milk reached 90 °F I added a packet of direct-set mesophilic starter, covered the pot, and let the milk ripen for 45 minutes. The starter contains the bacterial cultures that will ferment the cheese as it ages.

I uncovered the pot, added a half teaspoon of liquid rennet (much easier to work with than tablets) dissolved in a quarter cup of water, and gently stirred the milk for a minute. I drained some of the water from the sink, added more 10 °F water, and let the milk set for another 45 minutes. When the curd had formed, I cut it into half-inch cubes.

For the final heating step I added 110 °F water, which would raise the temperature of the curd to 100 °F over about thirty minutes. I stirred the curds to keep them separated and watched them slowly release whey.

After giving the curds a five minute rest in the covered pot, I transferred them to a colander lined with cheesecloth. (Real cheesecloth is sturdier and has a finer weave than the stuff you find in cooking stores.) I tied the corners of the cheesecloth into a bag and hung it over the sink, letting the curds drain for an hour. I now have a bungee cord attached to the cabinet over the sink, which I’m sure will be a future conversation starter.

The drained curds formed a solid mass which resembled a huge blob of mozzarella.

I broke the mass into smaller walnut-sized pieces, a process the pros call “milling.”

After salting the milled curds with a tablespoon of fine salt, I packed them firmly into a cheesecloth-lined mold (a plastic tube perforated with fine holes).

I covered the top of the curds with another piece of cheesecloth, then added the follower (a disc-shaped top for the mold) before adding ten pounds of pressure. I don’t have a professional cheese press, but I discovered that a 28-ounce tomato can fits exactly inside the mold. Two cans, plus one of the bricks I use for pressing terrines, added up to ten pounds. I set the rig over a drip tray to catch the remaining moisture that the salt was drawing out of the curds.

After ten minutes, I removed the cheese from the mold, and peeled away the cheesecloth. The curds were more densely packed.

I inverted the curds, re-wrapped them in the cheesecloth (“re-dressing”), and placed them back in the mold, to which I applied twenty pounds of pressure: the same rig as before, with an additional ten-pound weight (snatched from She Who Must Be Obeyed, who uses it for sit-ups) added.

After another ten minutes, I repeated the procedure with a shorter, denser curd mass.

One more inversion and re-dress, and it was time for the final press, fifty pounds for twelve hours. A cinderblock (you have those lying around, don’t you?) plus two bricks plus a tomato can totaled 52 pounds. I had to push the assembly agains the wall to provide stability – notice the level, which I used to make sure the curds would be pressed evenly. I wanted to avoid a cheese with a sloping top.

After an overnight stay in the press, I unwrapped the cheese, which is what you see at the beginning of this post. I set it on a bamboo mat resting on an old cutting board, and let it dry for two days, rotating the cheese every four hours to promote even drying. As the drying progressed, the cheese developed a yellow rind and a dry exterior.

I melted a block of cheese wax in a metal bowl over a pot of boiling water, writing off the bowl as the permanent wax receptacle.

I brushed the wax over the cheese, making sure I didn’t leave any air voids where mold could grow. After a few coats I added a label with the kind of cheese and the date it was made.

I stored the finished cheese in the Belm Utility Research Kitchen Aging Cave (an old mini-fridge retrofitted with an external thermocouple-regulated temperature controller), where it will age for at least a month. You can see the hygrometer/thermometer at the upper right, it shows the internal temperature as 53 °F and the humidity at 62%. I’ll flip the cheese over once a day to prevent condensation from forming on the bottom.

If I’m patient enough, I’ll wait two months before trying it, but I suspect I’ll give in before then. I might come over all peckish, esurient, hungry like, but at least there will be some cheese and not the situation Mr. Mousebender found himself in with Mr. Wensleydale.

Sources:

Milk: Thatcher Farm
Mesophilic Starter, rennet, cheesecloth, wax: New England Cheesemaking Supply Company

When I saw these three salmon heads poking out of the ice at the fish counter at the Stop & Shop (with the radio on), I though of two things:

Thing the first:

I remembered this post from Ideas in Food, a rethinking of  head cheese. There is a lot of tasty meat in an animal head, and a fish head has the added bonus of consisting of more cartilage than bones, which ups the gelatinization potential.

The preparation was dead simple. I started by brining the heads in a five percent salt solution for ten minutes to remove some of the blood.

Since the Belm Utility Research Kitchen still lacks the CVap oven I’ve been hinting about, I put the heads in my steamer and cooked them for about 20 minutes.

I let them cool a bit while they stared at me with those dead, empty eyes. (They still haunt me, those eyes, my dreams… Sorry.)

I picked all of the meat and fat off the heads, then prepared a seasoning mix of equal parts salt, garlic powder, onion powder, black pepper, and piment d’Espelette. I also readied some white truffle oil and light soy sauce (I couldn’t find white soy sauce anywhere in the area).

I mixed everything together while it was still warm, then pressed it into a square plastic container and covered the top woth plastic wrap.

After an overnight chill in the fridge it was ready to try.

Unlike my previous head cheese disasters, this version sliced beautifully and held its shape at room temperature. The seasoning was just right, spicy but still allowing the salmon taste to come through. I don’t know how often I’ll get to make this, but I’ll keep my (undead) eye open for more fish heads.

Thing the second:

I can’t imagine living without having a huge selection of music to listen to, and knowing that there is a world of music still out there for me to discover still excites me. I know that my voracious consumption of music is not the norm, there must be people who have absolutely no desire to listen to music. Somewhere between those polar opposites are people who listen to a very narrowly defined subset of possible musics. I have met a few of these people, and they have all gravitated to novelty songs, the tunes you could hear on Dr. Demento‘s radio show.

I hate novelty songs. They have a third-grader nyaah nyaah quality that makes me feel like steel needles are being driven through my skull. The lyrics are equally puerile, although devotees quote them as you or I might quote Shakespeare or Milton. I know more about this music than I want to because I shared an apartment with a Demento fanatic. He taped the shows every Sunday evening and played them every day until the next show was broadcast.

What does this have to do with salmon head cheese? As I worked at picking meat from bone, then mixing the spices to make the terrine, I kept hearing THIS GODDAMNED SONG, my ex-roommate’s absolute favorite:

It’s stuck in my head again, after an almost 30-year absence. I think a week-long course of Norwegian black metal will be the only thing to kill the dreadful earworm. Wish me luck.