I'm still here!

I just went a bit domestic over the past few days and decided that 103 degree days were the perfect time to get back into baking and such.

I've owned Dough for over a year and have not really had the time to do anything with the methods Bertinet describes. He advocates a really wet dough and then "kneading" it without dusting your work surface with flour. I don't have any photos to show you the mess because my hands were completely covered in dough. Essentially he has you stretch, slap and fold the dough to incorporate air until it (eventually) firms up.

Now I think I added just a tad too much water to the mix which may explain some of my problems. You are supposed to pick up the dough by spreading your fingers and sliding them under the dough. You then flip it all so that your fingers are on top (fast enough that the force stretches out the dough). The biggest issue I have with this is that the dough goes flying off at this point. I don't mean the entire batch, but I am still finding little specks of the stuff all over the side of my kitchen exposed during the process. Bertinet includes a DVD with the book and shows how he does it all. I didn't see dough flying off there. He also managed to very quickly get things into a cohesive and relatively non-sticky dough. I found that I could only do that if I let the dough rest periodically al la no knead bread.

After about an hour of on again-off again dough slapping, I finally had something that was approaching usable. In the book, Bertinet only gives baking instructions for the dough I made if you bread the batch into smaller bits to make rolls, breadsticks, baguettes, or other fun shapes with the exception of a gruyere and cumin loaf that sounds yummy but not what I wanted. I wanted a regular old loaf so I had to wing it a bit and ended up overcooking the loaf a bit and didn't get enough cornmeal on the stone so it stuck causing a great deal of swearing in the kitchen. In the end the bread came out fairly nicely though. I didn't get much of a crust but the crumb was wonderful.

The other thing I've been doing in my kitchen is making yogurt. I ordered this fun toy which I've been lusting for every since we taught our intro. biology labs about fermentation by having them make yogurt. Very few of the students were brave enough to eat their yogurt. I don't think many of them eat yogurt and, if they do, I seriously doubt they have ever had plain yogurt. We do provide them with all sorts of good things to add to their yogurt to make it palatable to them but the initial smell of yogurt seems to put them off. If you add enough syrup and crap to yogurt, it doesn't really smell like yogurt I suppose. It all smelled great to me and it showed me that you can make a fairly firm yogurt at home. In the past, I have read reviews of homemade yogurt and "yogurt makers" that suggested that it was fairly soupy. It turns out that you only have to boil your milk or add dry milk to the mix and it is perfect.

You don't need a special toy to make yogurt though. There are fairly good instructions on how to do it in your oven or in a cooler but it will require a bit of babysitting. That being said, I should have babysat my own yogurt a bit better. The instructions suggested incubating for seven hours but that was too long for my batch and a few came out with whey pooling on top. I'll show you the process the next time I make a batch so you can see how easy it is.