LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

bread

Bread (part 1)

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I shouldn’t be writing this yet, but Lauren is in bed. Walmart has stopped carrying the bread that I like. It was one of those breads where you could actually see the seeds. Not just sprinkled on top, but in the bread itself. I can’t remember the name of the bread. I never needed to. It was always there… Until it wasn’t…

So I have to find a new brand of bread. I tried what I think that they are thinking is the replacement, but it’s not as good. Not enough seeds grains in the bread. Plenty on top, but they didn’t make it inside.  Today, when we stopped at the Wal*marts for some things that Lauren needed, I threw a different loaf of bread in the cart.

I’m pretty sure that this is going to be my new favorite, because it’s the most expensive. I think it was $5.44 a loaf, and it’s not  very big loaf. My guess is that that’s going to come to about $0.35 per slice. But I had to buy it. With a name like, “Dave’s Killer Bread”, it has to be good. Right?

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Hard Rolls

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I stop by Super Savers about once a week to pick up hard rolls. Lauren likes it when I do, because they are her favorite food. Well, one of her favorite foods. Well, I think her exact words were, “Food I don’t have to cook.”

We put butter on them and make open-faced sandwiches. They are amazing, because the bread is amazing. Hard, crispy crust and soft, fluffy inside. It’s a lot like the bread my grandma used to make, but even better, because of the greater crust to bread ratio.

bread1

Side note: As I typed that last bit I remembered that my grandma used to always say, “Eat the crust, because it makes you pretty.” I was about to write that she said that to all of her grandkids, but now that I think about it, I think she said that to all of the boys, and she would tell the girls, “Eat the crust, because it makes you handsome.” Grandma liked to mess with us. Don’t even get me started about giving us a knife and making us go out and cut our own switch when we’d been bad.

Anyway, where I was going with this was that for the past month or so, the hard rolls have been in a plastic bag that makes them not crispy. This is a real downer. Lauren knows some sort of sympathetic magic that makes them become crispy again, but she refuses to teach it to me, because she’s afraid that I will leave her once I know all of her eldritch ways.

Anyway, I was looking around at the bakery section of Super Saver yesterday to see if they had any “having not sat around in a plastic bag” hard rolls. The store director happened to be in the area and he noticed me looking for something and I said I was looking for hard rolls. He pointed me to the bags and I asked if they still sold them without the bags.

He immediately knew why I was asking and talked for some length about how they had tracked the time of day when they sold hard rolls for some time and they had decided that the best time to take the remaining hard rolls and make them inedible put them in plastic bags was at 3:00pm.

Then he handed me his card and said, “But call this number, ask for Tina and tell her to set some aside for you.”

Prepping for summer

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Blessed Easter, everyone!

Summer is coming, and I need to find a way to support my bread habit without having a 450 degree oven on for an hour. I’d really like to have some way to bake it in the basement, where it’s perpetually cool. I’ve given serious thought to this, and even went so far as to price those cute little 30-inch wide apartment stoves they have at Menards. I took a picture so I could remember the price, but some guy who works there said, “Ma’am, store policy says that you can’t take pictures in the store.” Dnag it, if I’d have been quick enough, I would have replied, “Well, it’s my policy to take pictures everywhere I go.” (I said it to the empty air in the car on the way home, and I felt much better.)

Back to the stove thing. I knew a crockpot wouldn’t get hot enough, and I don’t want to buy a toaster oven. ( Decide: are you a toaster or are you an oven? You can’t be both.) I gave a fleeting thought to a roaster, but the only kind they had at Shop Ko was a little oval one.

Well, Friday I went to a different Shop Ko, and they had the big one for the same price! I was hoping my Pampered Chef baking stone would fit inside, but it’s not to be. If I want to make the pain d’epi, I’ll have to get some unglazed tiles or something. For today’s prototype, I made the circle bread from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day on my big plant saucer. I think it’s supposed to be much, much prettier than this, but it’ll do for dinner. As we say, “It’s good enough for who it’s for.”

“During the first use, some smoke and odor may be noticed.” FIRST use? Don’t they know me?

Woo-hoo!!

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Thanks, Jeff Hertzberg! Thanks, Zoe Francois! Thanks, people at the bookstore in Minneapolis that I can’t remember the name of!

My bread book came today! I’ve actually been looking for it in bookstores in Lincoln, but they never had it. You may recall that Jeff (we’re on a first-name basis now) said that he’d sign my book if I was at the bookstore in Minneapolis a couple of Saturdays ago. Well, being stuck in Nebraska but desperately wanting an autographed copy, I called the bookstore to see if they could help out. Magers and Quinn – that’s the name. They were most accommodating, and took care of the whole shebang.

It's here! It's here!

I’m eager to read through it tonight, but we’ll have to see how many recipes I actually try. It’s just Lloyd and me around here, and he’s getting a little tired of being served bread every single night. (Not me, man. I’ve had a couple of nights where all I eat for dinner is bread. I announce, “I’m eating bread ’til I puke. You’re on your own.”) When I make loaves of the regular recipe, they’re really only as big as a large dinner roll.

The very best part of this whole process is that I got to request what he’d write. Thanks, Jeff! (How do I frame an open book to hang on the wall?)

He likes me. He really likes me.

New, better, more powerful bread

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So, I’m never making no-knead bread again. Too many steps, too messy, and too much time. I’m now hooked on ‘Artisan Bread in Five Minutes’. The real recipe is here, but I cut it by two-thirds so I can make it in the plastic coffee cans that keep getting donated to the CDC. This is awesome! You mix together (for the coffee can) 2 cups of warmish water (not hot), a packet of yeast, 1 tablespoon of kosher salt (2 1/4 teaspoons of regular salt), and four cups of flour. Mix until the flour is wet, cover loosely with something (not a cat) and set it somewhere warm for 2 – 5 hours to rise. Then you put the lid on, toss it in your fridge and cut off hunks when you want to bake a loaf.

pre-rise

You quickly mold it into a ball, let it rest on a cornmeal-covered board for 40 minutes and bake it in a hot oven on a pizza stone (I use a stoneware cake pan). If you throw a cup of water in a metal pan in the oven it makes a rockin’ crust!

so tiny

I’ve had two batches going in the fridge. The one on the left is all white flour, the one on the right has some wheat flour. The dough improves with age, and the wheat bread was better the second time I baked some.

Gimme some butter.

I love crusty bread with butter!!!! Warm from the oven, my life is complete. If you want to see a You Tube demonstration, click here. I love you, bread.

Keep your expectations low

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First of all, Happy Birthday to Mark!

Nothing on Thursday turned out how I expected. I thought I’d drive to work in the morning, but I walked – because my truck battery was dead. I thought Lloyd would be super-helpful jump-starting the battery when he got home, instead we exchanged misunderstandings, choice words and insults (and later some apologies). I thought my bread dough would be awesome, but it was incredibly sticky (drat my tinkering). I thought I could set ovens to 450 degrees without a problem, but apparently I set them to 510. I thought that the strange plastic smell in the house might be the spray paint I was using in the basement, but it was the plastic handle on my pot burning at 510 degrees. I thought the bread would be a total loss, but it wasn’t. Let’s hope Friday turns out more predictably.

This is what stuck to the floured towel and didn’t make it in the pot.

That can't be right.

Awesomely crunchy outside, not quite finished inside.