Everyone sharpen your pencils, it’s contest time! The first Aurora Bakery contest is about to begin.
Based on the overwhelming sales of the cranberry-walnut brioche braid, it’s obvious that I don’t have a clue what bread is actually going to sell well. Even though it’s the most expensive bread on the menu, I’ve sold five loaves in the week after I introduced this new bread, which is the best showing for a single type of bread yet.
So the contest open to all readers is to recommend a new bread to be added to the menu that you think would be a best-seller. What would be a bread you’d go out of your way to buy? Something special for a weekend brunch? A daily rustic loaf? Something sweet, something with cheese?
The prize is one of any type of bread on the menu, shipped priority right to your home. The contest will be open for one week, with the final selection made next Friday, November 20th at the end of the day. The rules are simple: post your bread idea in the comments section. Watch the comments board and give your support to the idea you like most. The bread with the most votes wins, and the person who nominated that bread gets the prize. If everybody submits one idea and there is a tie, I’ll pick what I think has the most potential.
[whistle blows]
BEGIN!
Last night I whipped up two batches of cranberry walnut brioche. I used ten eggs and one pound of butter. Hey, nobody said this was health food. But I contend that because it doesn’t use any unpronounceable ingredients, it is probably still better for you than Wonder Bread. (For those in urban settings who don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s known to you hip youth as “Wonda Bread”.)
I also tried out my first mini loaf of the no-knead dough that’s been sitting in the fridge. “I’m so smart, I don’t even need to check the recipe again, it’s so simple!”
Uh huh. I let it rise for 20 minutes straight out of the fridge instead of 40, with the result that the interior was still quite cool so the yeast had plenty of time to grow…and grow…and then burst forth from the top of the loaf like a stripper from a bachelor party cake. Sorry, this is a family site. I meant to say like a juvenile alien from its host human’s chest cavity. YAHHHHHHHH!
See, this is what I get for not reading the directions. The bread came out quite tasty, if a bit salty. I think this is because as the dough ferments it creates its own salts, so I could probably cut the recipe amount by a third or half. I’m going to try to make pizza from this dough. With a scorching hot stone, splatterific tomato sauce, and stringy onions and fleshy tomatoes, I’ll bet I can make the pizza look twice as scary as the bread. Double dare me?
I think some people may have been put off by my last post. I can assure you that there are no maggots or grubs in this posting. It is squirm free!*
The cranberry walnut brioche is selling like…well, I’d say hotcakes, but it’s selling like brioche. This has by far been the most popular bread I’ve made, with five orders in less than a week. To this I say, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!” Though you can’t see, I am cupping my Gauloises in my hand and twirling my moustache with the other. Zut alors!
Last night Baby Harbat was Little Miss I’m Doing It. When I picked her up from school, she was furiously drawing either lightning bolts or blades of yellow grass on a chalkboard.
“Hi Babbu.”
No hug, or big celebration. Then she put away the chalk, got the eraser, cleaned off the board, picked up the stray erasers, and put them all away. When I asked for my hug, I got the kind of brush-off you’d get if you were a paparazzo asking Claudia Schiffer for an open-mouth kiss. She marched out the door with a quick, “Bye erry-body” and a wave, then climbed up the stepstool to get a drink from the water fountain. From both nozzles.
“Do you want to ride on my shoulders?”
“No, Babbu, I walking!”
She strode down the walkway, gave a quick evening salutation to one of her teachers, then walked out to the car, climbed into the carseat and sat down with a huff. In that moment I realized I’ve made the transition from loved caregiver to faceless chauffer.
But then all was back to normal when we got home and she clung to me like a baby sloth as I attempted to unload five hundred bags from the car. My heart was happy for it, my lower back not so much.
*Did you think I’d forgotten this asterisk? This post isn’t totally squirm-free. Here is a picture of a lamprey, one of my favorite animals to say, least favorite to see. Happy Wednesday!
I came home last night to find a maggot hanging from the kitchen ceiling. I’m no entomologist, so maybe it was another kind of grub, but it was white, squirmy, and right at eye level. For the sake of my daughter’s ears, I’m glad I saw it before I found it in my hair.
This isn’t our first run-in with grubs at the Soutowood household. Once or twice the trashcan has gotten a fly trapped inside, to the little rascal’s delight. After insect fornication and reproduction, a healthy crop of maggots awaited me when I took the trash out. This is the kind of task my wife cannot do. Last night I should have known better, after the maggot piñata incident, but I asked my wife to empty the compost pail on the kitchen counter. She opened it up and reeled back. Ahh, this explains our bungee-hanging visitor. There in the pail was maggot Manhattan, a thriving metropolis of infestation. (For anti-urbanites, draw your own conclusion about New York City.) I took it out and gave the fly colony a better home in the bottom of the compost pile. There they will learn a new meaning of suffering as they are slowly digested of the course of a thousand years by earthworms. Wheel of life, turn and turn.
With that unpleasantness behind, we can talk about bread! I made the no-knead artisan dough and some brioche…no…I’m still thinking about the maggots. Dang it.
One of my favorite pastimes is to ask my wife ludicrous hypothetical questions to try to get a response. Imagine: she is sitting on the couch reading, and I ask her, “Would you be bothered if I decided to grow one giant tooth?” I’d say about 80% of the time I get no response. I might as well be asking the maggots—at least they’d squirm in response. 19% of the time I get an eyebrow raise, a trademark move inherited from her mother. That last 1% I actually get a laugh or an “Eeew!” This is what I live for, but it takes 99 failures out of a hundred. Last night I asked, “What would you have thought if, on our very first date, I told you ‘You are so goddamn beautiful’?”
Her response: “I’d think you were up to no good.”
Me: “Perfect.”
Saturday morning my wife got to sleep in and I got up with Baby Harbat. With breakfast I made a pot of chai. Then made a fire in the fireplace—after all, it’s the only time of day when it’s cold enough for it. Then the caffeine kicked in.
Over the course of the weekend I managed to do a hundred tasks that I’ve been avoiding. Maybe it was the caffeine, but from that first pot on Saturday morning, I got stuck in high gear and embarked on an almost non-stop chorefest that included getting the oil changed on both cars, cars washed, cleaning and conditioning my leather seats, buffing out and polishing my headlights to restore clarity, rebuilding the innards of the guestroom toilet, installing a wood threshold in the bathroom door, vacuuming, bunny cage cleaning, grocery shopping, fresh dinners from scratch, and laundry. Even on Sunday, on my day to sleep in, I woke at 8 and my mind raced with the things to be done. And the weird thing is, I wanted to do them. Still in my bathrobe, I tackled the toilet rebuild.
Luckily it all wore off by Sunday afternoon, as we took Baby Harbat and a friend with her daughter to a nearby lake. As the sun set, we collected rocks, picked at the last crumbs of a pumpkin muffin, watched the ducks, climbed boulders, chased Baby Harbat down the path, and got stared-down by a strident coyote as the sun set. In sum, a great weekend.
This week I’m going to try out a whole new bread method. I got a birthday present from my step-mother, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which brings me back full circle to where I began: no-knead bread. I’ll be making a large batch of dough then refrigerating it for a few days and cutting off pieces to make periodically. This method has several great things going for it:
1. More time. Every instance in which I’ve given my dough an overnight stay in the fridge, it’s turned out to be more flavorful.
2. Less time. You mix it up, give it two hours, then it goes into the fridge. No kneading. When you are ready to bake a piece, it only needs a twenty-minute proof then it goes into the oven.
3. Dishes. By mixing everything up in the storage container, you eliminate most of the dishes to be washed. For a typical bread I use two bowls and several scrapers, plus the cleanup on the board. I’m fast at it but the dish drainer gets filled to overflowing far too often for my wife’s liking.
4. Scheduling. If I’ve already got some dough in the fridge, I can bake with one day lead time, which is better for my customers. And better for me if I get a hankering for fresh bread for dinner.
I am curious to see how the flavor profile of the bread turns out. When I tried Hamelman’s overnight sponge and folding technique, I found the bread taste to be sweet but shallow. If this new method can get me a more mature flavor, somewhere between Hannah Montana and the Crypt Keeper, I’ll be impressed.
Ecce panem nostrum quotidianum!
This brioche is as rich as it looks, flaky and with just enough sweetness. I was worried the cranberries and walnuts would leach out odd colors into the dough but it turned out a beautiful creamy yellow. This braid grew really fat in the final proof, and it just barely fit in the oven. I think I may need to make wider braids, rings, or some other decorative shape that’ll fit on my baking stones.
Here is the potato rosemary bread. Though the recipe didn’t call for steaming, I did it anyway and am happy with the results. When you lightly toast this bread, the crust is crackly without being chewy, and the rosemary is just strong enough to make your mouth water. Both of these have been market-tested to high praise, so they’ll be added to the Aurora Bakery menu.
P.S. The Latin quote in the beginning translates to “Here is our daily bread.” Someone will undoubtedly correct me by saying that “ecce” should be “eccus” when used with the tertiary generative form of quotidianum. To which I’ll say, “…um…uhhh…wait…what?”
Last night I made two new breads. First was the potato rosemary. It came out prettier than I expected. I would show you a picture here…
…but I don’t have my camera. Imagine, my children.
Second was a brioche base with walnuts and cranberries. This one loaf of bread uses a half-pound of butter and five eggs. It had better taste good cuz that’s like…um…one thousand hundred dollars or summat. That dough is chilling in the fridge now and will be made into a braid tonight. Maybe by then I’ll get my act together and take some pictures too.
In local San Diego news, a woman and her boyfried (but not baby daddy!) went out for dinner, leaving their two kids with a baby sitter. When they came back two days later they were all shocked when the police was like “Wazzup wit you two?” and the mom was all about she “…could do whatever she want.” That second quote is real. Parenting: F. Giving people on the Union Tribune website something to bitch about: A+.
Disclaimer: If you have any intelligence, morals, faith in humanity, or common sense, please don’t follow the link. If you slow down at car wrecks so you can see pieces of viscera and crushed metal, click away.
I’m hoping to add a few new breads to the Aurora Bakery menu: potato rosemary, cranberry walnut braid, and maybe brioche. I’m going to make the potato bread tomorrow night and maybe try the braid again tonight. If I’m clever I’ll be able to make a simple brioche that can be the base for several different rich dessert-type breads like the cranberry walnut. I’ve noticed that people go for the sweeter breads, so I might as well feature them on the menu. And since I’m a piggy piggy fat fat I’ll be forced to try out all these new breads myself.
I should explain. Yesterday my stomach was upset most of the day because I ate too much Halloween candy the night before. So after a day of gurgling belly and regrets, what’s the first thing I do when I get home? Eat four Reese’s Penaut Butter Cups from the candy basket! Then I felt sick all the rest of the night. So this morning I’ve decided to eat a more sensible diet. Last night at the grocery store I bought, with the exception of some granola, only raw ingredients: eggs, milk, yogurt, meat, vegetables, flour. We’ve been cooking bigger batches so it’ll last two days, and by making everything ourselves we can eliminate those things that cause stomach issues. (See what I did there? Eliminate?...moving on…)
I’ve been reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, and I keep repeating the mantra printed on the cover: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” I realize that I still eat a fair amount of processed foods. Besides not tasting as good, they are really bad for you. Pure chocolate, rich sauces, fresh greens, natural cheese, grilled meats, homemade bread—all these things are real food. Hydrogenated soybean oil, guar gum, soy lecithin, high fructose corn syrup, blue lake #5—these things are not food. I imagine if I had to see and taste the individual ingredients that go into something like a Twinkie, I’d get sick.
I’ve still to figure out whether it’ll be more expensive to eat real food. If you’ve browsed the aisles of a convenience store, you know how cheaply you can eat crap food. Last night I spent almost $70 and only had about six bags of groceries. But a lot of that money went towards meat that will last 2-3 meals each. And since I enjoy cooking and spending time in the kitchen, making stuff from scratch will be more rewarding than buying it pre-made.
Now gimme sommore dem Reese’s! NOMNOMNOMNOM!
Go forth and fill your libraries with media.
Seriously, thanks to everyone for being so amazing and patient. You are the reason I love Vox.
Halloween may be over, but the overconsumption of processed sugars is still underway. Baby Harbat enjoyed trick-or-treating, which mostly consisted of walking around, riding on shoulders, and seeing everyone in the neighborhood. I felt a little bad going to doors since she was obviously not the ultimate recipient of the candy, but people liked her costume. And how couldn’t you?
On Sunday we went to the park and BH demanded swing time and, interestingly, alone time. I was hanging around with her near the slide when she gave me the hand and told me to, “Go play, Babbo!” So I sat on a bench while she sang songs and climbed on the stairs. I knew it would happen: I’ve become uncool dad who is “cramping her style” while she’s “trying to hang out with her friends.” Though in this case her style involved sitting on climbing blocks and the only other living things at the park were chattering mockingbirds and some trailing rosemary bushes. Fine. [picking at fingernails and kicking dirt] I’ll just do my own cool thing over here.
In the afternoon we went to the zoo with hours of build-up and promotion. When we got to the petting zoo area, she just sauntered over to the goats and sheep, gave them a quick pat, then looked at me. I was hoping for some more excitement, but she did get a few laughs chasing after a goat’s waving tail. Good thing she didn’t pull on it and get a treat.
Lately BH has been learning more vocabulary than I can keep track of. This morning she laughed at a playing card and said, “It’s spinning!” The flip side of this new lexicon is that she’s still not able to pronounce things well, and without obvious cues and context, I often have no idea what she’s saying. Like I’ve said before, it’s like having an excitable foreign exchange student in the house. I often laugh at what I presume is a joke, say “Oh really?” to what turns out to be a question, and sing along with re-purposed songs. To the tune of Frere Jacques, Amalia sang “Where is lemur?” at the zoo. I love that little pumpkin. Now if I can just teach her to eat from a spoon without turning it upside down on the long trip up to her mouth.
