The Fugue

How much does it cost to bake a loaf of bread? Or put another way, how much money might you save baking your own bread (which will taste better anyway)? These figures will give you a ballpark idea. As always, I'm following my recipe.

• 425 grams of King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour: about 60 cents
• 8 grams of kosher salt: about 1.5 cents
• Sourdough culture and water (practically free)
• Preheat (my) oven with baking stone and dutch oven to 450°: 20 minutes at 2585 watts at 11.482 cents/kWh = 10 cents (I leave the baking stone in because I'm too lazy to take it out. Actually, it's 6 unglazed clay tiles, but that's another story)
• Heating element on during bake, including restoring heat lost when oven door open (yes, I watched the little light with a stopwatch): 10 minutes = 5 cents

Total cost: about 75 cents for a 1½ lb loaf of absolutely terrific artisan sourdough bread. You'll pay 4–5 times that for bread that's not nearly as good (nor as good for you) at the grocery store. So if you save say $2 per loaf you might be able to buy yourself a used iPod after a year. Then again, you might eat 4 times as much bread…

The take-home lesson here is never let anyone give you a guilt trip for baking bread. It costs under 25¢ in electricity, and even if you place a high price tag on pollution it is dwarfed by your air conditioner, refrigerator, etc. One very real issue is baking in the middle of the day in the summer, either making the A/C work that much harder or making you that much hotter. This is mostly a concern in places like Las Cruces where lunatics like myself live. Most of you will have air conditioners that can handle it just fine, though it would be interesting to figure what that cost would be (if you do so, let me know).

As a bread fanatic, I've often dreamed of having my own brick oven. At first I thought it was a complicated and expensive endeavor, and that I couldn't build one because I'm renting. But then I got creative and designed a couple Brick Ovens for the Cheapskate, and I think that I can build a great oven for about $65, which is portable enough to appease the landlord.

Made some delicious pizza tonight. As much for my benefit as yours I'm posting the recipe, since I always forget how much dough to make to feed n people.

Pier 42 Pizza
-------------
Serves 4 (two pies)
As hot as your oven goes

340  g   flour
230  g   water
1.33 tsp salt
30   g   active sourdough start
         olive oil
         sauce
         toppings

Mix and let set 8-18 hours. Longer would be even better, but you'll want to do
it in the fridge (take it out a couple of hours before). If you're in a hurry,
add 1 tsp yeast and let set 3-4 hours. If you're really in a hurry, get 
Papa Murphy's.

Divide dough in two and stretch one half into your favorite pizza shape. Get
your toppings ready, then spread some olive oil over the crust, then spread
some sauce on top of that. Add cheese and toppings (or toppings and cheese),
and place in the preheated oven, preferably on a preheated pizza stone but a
cookie sheet would be ok too. Bake until the crust and cheese are golden brown
and delicious (5-15 minutes).

I didn't make the sauce for tonight's pizza, and frequently we just open a can of tomato sauce and spread that on and then sprinkle oregano, basil, and salt on top. But for completeness I'll give you the sauce recipe as it was told to me (and as far as I remember it correctly):

Sauté some garlic in some olive oil. Add a can of (mostly) drained diced or
crushed tomatoes and bring to a simmer. Salt to taste. Cover with sprinkled
basil, then add oregano and perhaps some thyme. Fresh is best of course, but
you can use dried. Simmer until you declare it done. Or don't simmer it at
all, someone told me that was the purist way.

If you're interested in going all Mario on us, jump on over to Jeff Varasano's Famous New York Pizza Recipe. There's a lot to read and ponder there, and though I don't agree with everything on the whole it's a great starting place. You certainly can't deny that he has some delicious-looking pizza!

Looks like the NYT put the no-knead video on You Tube, bless their hearts. Now you can watch it from the comfort of my blog.

On my mission in Connecticut among the Spanish-speaking peoples of the world, I had many a serving of yuca. Yuca is a delicious tuberous root that most of my peers hated. Many times I tried to ask my hosts if what they were serving was the same thing as yucca, the state "flower" of New Mexico that grows everywhere. I was no stranger to the above-ground part of yucca but I had never heard of anyone eating its roots before. Due to the language barrier, and I suspect the fact that many of these people have probably never seen yucca, I never really did find out.

Fast forward. I live in New Mexico again, and when I go to the grocery store they are selling yuca root in the produce section, labeled as yucca. So for at least a year now I've been thinking it must be the same thing, although probably a specific variety is good for eating. Today I decided to find out once and for all. I have learned many things. First, yuca is not yucca (and vice versa). They are botanically unrelated. Yuca is otherwise known as cassava or manioc. Yucca is otherwise known as that pointy thing in the back yard. Some varieties of yucca have edible parts, but yuca is the plant that anyone talking about eating "yucca" is likely to be referring to. Yuca is the basis of tapioca and is a staple food in many places around the world, but very few Americans have ever heard of it (aside from tapioca) and probably wouldn't like it anyway. But it really is good. I'm going to try some recipes and I'll post when I find one I like.

So let's review. This is yucca:

It is the state flower of New Mexico, it grows all over the place in the southwest desert, some varieties can grow fast enough to stay on top of the moving gypsum dunes at White Sands (but hasn't figured out the descent part - so usually collapses under its own weight when the dune moves on). I like yucca, it's a nice plant. Genus Yucca, family Agavaceae. Rhymes with yuck-a (as in, you don't usually eat it).

This is yuca:

AKA cassava or manioc, the root is a staple food and the basis of tapioca, has cyanide traces when uncooked, grows in the tropics (originally from South America). Genus Manihot, family Euphorbiaceae. Rhymes with nuke-a (as in, packed with flavor. Almost).

Why the confusion? My dictionary says the origin of Yucca is from the 16th century in the Caribbean, denoting cassava. So somebody took the word yuca and mistakenly applied it to the yucca plant (probably a variety that looked somewhat like yuca). So there's a long history of confusion. Don't you be confused no more. If anyone misuses the two terms, be sure to set them straight.

If you're blessed enough to have a kitchen scale, here's my version of the recipe that the last few posts have been about:

450  g   flour
325  ml  water
1.25 tsp salt
0.25 tsp instant yeast

Mix, cover, let sit for 12-18 hours. Dusting surface and hands as necessary, spread the dough out on the counter and fold like an envelope. Shape into boule/bâtard/loaf/really big baguette/whatever, and let rise until the dough doesn't spring back quickly when poked. Slash and bake at 500°F in a preheated cloche or heavy metal pan with lid for 30 minutes, then remove the lid and bake to your favorite shade of brown (another 10-20 minutes).

I actually measured how much a cup of flour weighs this evening, something I've been meaning to do. Relative humidity is 61% at present, and a cup of scooped King Arthur whole wheat flour is about 135 grams. A cup of Gold Medal all purpose flour is about 150 grams. Since whole wheat absorbs more water anyway, I'm going with the convenient 150 grams. 325 ml water is about 72% hydration, and actually a bit shy of what the original recipe called for (355 ml). I like 72%, it's a nice number that has worked well for me in the past.

I took a little bit closer look at that article and recipe, and I'm sorry to report that the reporter spoiled everything.

Ok, not everything. If you make it his way it will still turn out very good. But he has replaced the no-frills down-to-earth perfectly elegant technique you see in the video with overcomplicated Betty Crocker-ish instructions. To take the words out of the mouth of one of the presenters at ICMC today (who was talking about quantizing Brazilian drum patterns), he destroyed its very soul. And he got some things wrong, too.

Let's start at the top of the recipe. Step one: blah blah blah, add 1 5/8 cups water. 1 5/8? One and five eighths? Do a sloppy one and a half cups water like the real baker in the video does. A little more? Fine. A little less? No problem. The humidity difference in one place alone, let alone the difference between New York and wherever you live, will make that 1/8 cup water mostly irrelevant anyway.

I wish "warm room temperature" was 70 degrees where I live. That's cool room temperature to me. Whatever. You don't need a thermometer here. Just let it sit at room temperature. If you live in the Sahara, put it in the shade and shoot for less time.

"Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles." No, the dough is ready after 12-18 hours, whenever it's convenient for you. Statements like these are for when you're watching a pot boil, not for many-hour ferments.

The one place where he should have gone into journalistic detail he failed to do so. Don't just "fold it over on itself", which is vague. Fold it like a letter going into an envelope. Once one direction, and again in the other direction.

He wants you to let it rise for 2 hours. I'm betting it won't take that long, but it will depend on your altitude and ambient temperature. He's right about when it's done rising though.

"Heat oven to 450 degrees." How much do you want to bet the PHBs at the NYT wouldn't let him put 500 to 515 degrees out of some silly (un)written safety policy that says, "Never ever under any circumstances tell people to bake at more than 450 degrees. They will undoubtedly burn their hands off and start a fire. Do not break this regulation no matter how much better the bread would turn out, or you will be sentenced to life in the same kitchen as Julia Child."

Finally, and this isn't the reporter's fault, I think 30 minutes + 20 minutes at 500 might be a little long, and the bread in the video confirmed it for me. Some of his crust looked charred a bit beyond maillard. Not a hard variable for you to adjust to your taste. Enjoy!

The New York Times website has a nifty short video (and accompanying article) that shows you how to make no-knead bread. It's so simple, a six year old could do it. It's not quite the way I tend to make bread, but I know the no-knead bit works and works well, so do yourself a favor and give this a try. It couldn't be easier. I guarantee it will taste deeeelicous.

I'm serious. Try it. This weekend. Go ahead. I'm watching you.

My wife is out of town, which means you can bet your britches I'm eating all the stuff she doesn't like this weekend. You know, like sauerkraut, corned beef, swiss cheese, rye bread. Hey, those are the basic building blocks of one of the most delicious sandwiches ever invented: The Reuben.

This post isn't about the Reuben. It's about the rye bread I used to make the Reuben. It turned out very well. Here's the recipe I used, which I adapted from somebody's New York Style Jewish Rye recipe:

300g 100% start
560ml water (2 1/3 cups)
1 T sugar
2 c light rye flour
2 T kosher salt
2 T caraway seeds
4.75 c flour

I didn't want three bâtards though, so I thirded the recipe. I mixed the dough for a few minutes in the mixer. I had to add some flour, but the dough was still plenty wet. Oh, and sugar is boring and my honey was crystallized so I used molasses instead. I stuck it in the fridge for five or so hours and took it out just before going to bed. When I woke up I preheated the oven at 400 for 20 minutes then baked under cloche for 10 minutes, then without cloche to an internal temperature of 200 F.

It's delicious, but next time I'll use just a tad less salt and caraway. Incidentally, caraway is the taste you probably associate with rye bread, not the rye itself. There was no oven spring to speak of, I think because it was just barely overproofed, in spite of starting the proof cold. I guess I'll just have to sleep less or proof during the day.

I was talking with Redbeard about steam and bread, and he reassured me that steam is good for bread. Helps you get that thin crispy crust. So I decided that the batard I am experimenting with today deserved the steam treatment. There's lots of interesting ways to get steam into your oven at the right time, but one of the more sensible ways is given in this post. It's quite sensible, that is, until you go and try to use a pyrex pan instead of an old metal baking pan or cookie sheet. Man, I should have known better. I once exploded a light bulb with a squirt gun on accident. That was less spectacular than this was.