A New Recipe

I've recently become enamored with a new recipe for hamburger/sandwich buns. The taste is great, they are incredibly soft and have a nice open crumb, and they freeze and thaw really well. I've made them twice now, and they've been easy and a success both times. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients
15 oz. flour
8 oz. water
1 large egg
4T softened butter
2T honey
1/4 c. dry milk
1/4 c. mashed potato
1-1/2 tsp salt
2-1/4 tsp instant yeast

Directions
Mix everything but flour together, then added the flour gradually--you may use all 15 ounces, and you may not. You want the dough a bit "shaggy" and it should be fairly sticky at this point. Once it's mixed pretty well, cover it with a damp towel and let it rest 25 minutes. Then come back and knead a bit to develop the gluten matrix. Again, it may be more sticky than you're used to, but avoid adding too much flour because that will make the dough more dense and tough. Put back in the bowl and cover.

Let the bulk rise go about 1-1/2 to 2 hours, stretching and folding it once or twice during that time. It should double in size. Then, divide into 3-ounce balls and place on a cookie sheet that is either lightly oiled or covered with baking parchment. Let rise until they are the nearly the size you want them. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Humidify the oven by pouring water into a broiler pan or brownie pan in the bottom of the oven. Bake for 20 minutes or until browned nicely. Remove and brush with softened butter.

Yield: about 10 3-ounce rolls

If you try this recipe, let me know!

Chicago May Be Greening

There's been a couple of new developments in the urban farming aspects in the Chicago area, and I'd thought they needed some attention called to them.

The first is the nation's first certified organic rooftop farm, right here on Devon Avenue! Uncommon Ground has built it, and also offers a weekly farmer's market during the summer and is trying to set up community orchards in Logan Square.

The second stride forward is a proposed aquaponics vertical farm in the south loop. Here's a related video.

Still Think Growing Lettuce is a Hassle?

E-Coli in the Lettuce. Again.

This kind of thing comes up about twice a year. Any wonder why I prefer growing lettuce in the backyard?

Fresh The Movie/Documentary

Fresh The Movie/Documentary

Looks like another good one. Glad to see Will Allen featured. I'm hoping these kind of movie indicate a groundswell of people rethinking how Americans eat.

First Harvest

Shown above is our first harvest of the year--a salad of baby greens and spinach that was wonderful when tossed with mozzarella cheese and oil and spices. Of special note is that this harvest is at least six weeks earlier than our first crop last year. This is partly due to the unseasonable warm Spring we've been having, but also to starting seeds earlier and having a better indoor growing setup coupled with an outdoor cold frame to extend the growing season back several weeks.

My goal this year: a four-season harvest! Stay tuned for how we will do it...

Sustainable Abundance?

Bryan Welch is a writer who Rancho Cappuccino blog appears as a regular column in the Mother Earth News. Over the course of the last couple of months, he has turned his attention away from negative touchstones of how to combat global warming or the impending doom promised to us by the scientific community, and instead turned in a more positive direction. He asks the question: what does a sustainable world look like? To further break down that question, he focuses on four sub-questions for a sustainable society (each question below links to Welch's relevant post).

1. Is it fair?
2. Is it repeatable?
3. Is it beautiful?
4. Does it create abundance?

The last question piqued my interest, because I believe that every human advance in culture, science, technology, or the arts has come from a society that enjoys abundance. After all, if your main concern is how to make your last $2 buy enough to feed your family of four today, you are much less likely to care about the Eigenvalues inherent to a rational canonical form in linear algebra!

Give him a read. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. 

Urban Farm Potential in Skokie!!

Talking Farms is in negotiations with Skokie to build an urban organic farm about FOUR BLOCKS FROM MY HOUSE! They are planning a vegetable garden (obviously), a greenhouse, composting, and a range of educational workshops and classes.

I'm a little excited at the potential. Here's the full article. Anyone else interested in the prospect of volunteering?

Sandwich Bread Recipe

Several people have asked me for the recipe for my basic sandwich loaf, so I'm going to post it here. This is the bread that I've baked every week for my family for over a year. The girls enjoy it--Ellie especially want the heels because she likes the crust--and I think it's great for toast and grilled sandwiches because it's robust enough to get crispy in the skillet and it really holds in the melted cheese and fillings.

This isn't an artisan loaf or a the product of some complicated process. It doesn't require expensive ingredients or specialized equipment. After the first two times you'll make it, you'll stop needing to refer to the recipe. I've tried a lot of other breads, but I keep coming back to this one. Give it a try, especially if you're just breaking into the world of bread.

Ingredients:

3 cups water

6-1/2 cups flour

1-1/2 T instant yeast

1-1/2 T salt

Optional: 3 T flaxmeal

Directions:

Throw the flour, yeast, salt (and maybe flaxmeal) into a big mixing bowl and stir it around a bit. Let the tap water run until it's a little warmer than body temperature (about 100 degrees) and add it into the bowl. Mix it up well. If you have a stand mixer, you can use that; if you don't (like me) stir it until it forms a big ball and then knead it around a bit to mix all the ingredients. Shape it into a ball and put it in a lightly oiled bowl. Cover the bowl with a damp dishtowel or plastic wrap. Let it sit and rise anywhere between 90 minutes and 5 hours, preferably in a warm place.

Come back and divide the dough in half (a digital scale helps here, but it's not critical). Spray some oil in your bread pans and then shape each half of the dough into a log that will fit into the pan. Move the dough into the pans and cover with a damp towel. Let this rise about an hour or so, depending on how it looks. You can slash the tops or brush them with butter or milk or something, but I don't do either. It rises plenty and has a great crust without it.

Warm the oven to 350 degrees and put both loaves in the oven for 50 minutes. I check for done-ness and make sure it's at least 180 degrees inside. Turn them out of the bread pans onto wire racks to cool.

Yield: 2 loaves

That's it. It's a really forgiving recipe, and it has FOUR (maybe five) ingredients. If you want to remember the recipe (and be able to scale it and impress your friends), remember the 6-3-3-13 rule: 6 c. water, 3 T yeast, 3 T salt, 13 c. flour. That makes four loaves. The dough, by the way, will keep in the refrigerator for up to two weeks, after the initial rising time.

Anyway, if you try this out and like it, let me know. If you try and don't like it, whisper it quietly down a well somewhere.

First Carrot Harvest

Anyway, as we have some store-bought carrots in the refrigerator now, I'm not going to take a big harvest just yet; the carrots could stand to get a little bigger anyway. But, I think from now on, we no longer have to buy carrots from the market...

Dig it.
After long last, my carrots are finally of a worthwhile size to harvest. I planted them on April 4th, and they were supposed to mature in about 75 days, but it's been more like 95. I guess that's attributable to the cool weather? Not sure.

Perspectives, Organic and Industrial

Plant a seed in the ground expecting to grow food, and you become connected with the world. The cycle of the seasons suddenly looms large, and new dates like Last Frost and First Harvest appear on your calendar. The weather becomes a relationship, friendly and supportive when sunny or appropriately damp; fraught with danger if the wrong conditions prevail. This natural connection exists whether you plant that seed in Iowa, Chicago, or the Australian Outback. You are part of an ancient dance, partnered with the Earth and God.

That was the perspective I'd read about before planting our garden, and the insight I expected to gain from the experience. I didn't expect to gain fresh respect for the selfsame industrial food machine that I was, in part, rebelling against.

The American food system is nothing short of miraculous. I'm not talking about the chemists who contrive Go-Gurt and Pop Tarts, I mean simply the produce that fills our stores. When I walk into any grocery store, be it Whole Foods or Jewel, I expect to find tomatoes, onions, peppers, potatoes, celery, carrots, and mushrooms. I'd better see apples and oranges, bananas and kiwi, grapes and mangoes. And not just one variety, either: imagine if Dominick's had only a single type of apple! The outrage! Furthermore, I expect to be able to buy as much as my budget can afford and my shopping cart can carry, and I expect to be able to do this any hour of the day or night on any day of the year I choose!

I planted carrots on April 4th--absolutely as soon as authority recommended. The greens are now almost 2-1/2 inches tall and the roots are about as thick as a 12-gauge wire. Is it dinner yet? Hardly. The onions are barely wisps of chives, the strawberries are green nascent buds, and the squash and cantaloupe have only a few leaves per stem. Only the lettuce could be potentially harvested at the moment. Yet the produce section at the supermarket brimming with goods.

Obviously, such produce is shipped from around the country and around the world at great cost and a huge carbon footprint. I know that it is produced on huge industrial farms who use every chemical they can think of to increase yield and decrease growing time, and that much of the flavor and nutrition are lost in transit. I even understand that constant access to vegetables and fruits without regard to the cycle of nature disconnects us from the true concept of seasons.

Still, wow. We are so blessed to have such a daily cornucopia at our whim. Remember that, too, as you try to break from the industrial food machine. We are so fortunate to have a choice.

Eureka

I think I've found the recipe for 100% whole wheat sandwich bread:

1 c. warm water
1/3 c. sugar
2 1/2 t. instant yeast

2 T canola oil
1 1/2 t. lemon juice
3 c (12 3/4 oz) whole wheat flour
3/4 t. salt

Combine the water, sugar and yeast; stir and let it sit a bit until it becomes foamy. Mix the dry ingredients and add the yeast mixture. Stir until dough is formed then knead a fair amount: about 15 minutes or more. The dough should be slightly tacky, but not overly sticky, and shouldn't tear easily when you stretch it. Form it into a boule and place in a lightly oiled bowl. Cover with a wet cloth or oiled plastic wrap and let rise 90 min to 2 hrs. To develop the flavor a bit more, you can place the dough in the refrigerator. This will make the rise time longer, perhaps 3 hrs, but will deepen the flavor.

Gently transfer from bowl to shaping surface, and shape a batard loaf, then gently place in an oiled baking pan. Let rise again for an hour or so, until the top of the dough peaks somewhat over the rim of the pan. Just before baking, brush the top with butter and slash in your preferred design.

Bake in a preheated 350-deg over for 40-50 min, or until the internal temperature of the bread reaches 190-200 degrees.

Here's what my loaf looked like:


I have to say, this is one of the best sandwich loafs I've ever made. It is incredibly soft--even more soft than my regular white sandwich bread--and so tasty you can eat a slice without any adornment. The flavor of the whole wheat is wonderful: warm and nutty and delicious.

I'm a happy boy, especially if I can reproduce this loaf week after week.

Learning All Over Again

So, my 50# bag of wheat arrived this morning--timely because we are nearly out of sandwich bread.

So after work I set up the grinder and got started. The grinder itself works great: took a little less than 15 minutes to grind the 6-1/2 cups of flour I needed. Probably would have gone faster normally, but the girls wanted to help. I decided that since I had no idea if the flour was fine enough, or what would happen with 100% whole wheat flour, now was not the time to try a new recipe.

I chose my standard 4-ingredient sandwich bread recipe, because I have that one completely down. Any aberration in the result would show the difference between white bread flour and whole wheat. A-a-a-nd, like I guessed, I got whole wheat doorstops. Well, not really (I've certainly baked worse) but they didn't rise much and so were overly dense. My standard recipe wasn't intended for this kind of flour.

Next, I'm trying a 100% whole wheat recipe from KAF (King Arthur Flour). These guys are the ones who mill most of the flour that artisan breadmakers use, so I trust them. The dough includes honey, oil, and dry milk, and it had a really odd consistency. It rose, though, though not quite as much as my white bread flour, and I'm interested to try it.

It's in the oven now...

Community Supported Agriculture

Well, we've officially embarked on our first CSA (community supported agriculture). For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, a CSA is a system where you pay a monthly fee to a local farmer and then get a "share" of the products of the farm. This is most often a weekly box of vegetables, but in our case, it's a monthly distribution of various meats.

Why do this? Here are our reasons:

• We are getting grass-fed and -finished meat (meaning no feedlots or antibiotics or grain-fed animals), which is nourished by natural means and has better nutrition in the meat itself.
• We are trying to limit the meat in our diet to a reasonable amount, and "rationing" our partions over the month will help that.
• We are directly supporting local farmers rather than national meat processing companies. We like the idea of being able to shake the hand that feeds us.
• We are supporting ethical treatment of animals, rather than using meat that comes from feedlots and animal "factories" that abuse their animals to increase profit margins.
• Later in the year, we may likely volunteer an afternoon to help on our CSA farm, in order to help our daughters understand where food comes from.

So what did we get? A chicken (whole), some pork chops, a pork shoulder roast, a big rack of lamb, some Italian sausage, beef stew meat, and a nice beef roast. Several of these cuts will span multiple meals. It's probably less meat than we have eaten in a month up until now, but see Bullet Point #2, above.

We're going to try it for a few months and see how it goes.

David's Dead-Easy Granola Bars

Because my 4-year-old had a craving, I made granola bars again today. Since every single commenter on this blog so far (OK, only 1 to date) has asked me to share recipes that I like, I will do so. These granola bars can be made quickly, taste great, are more filling than most store-bought varieties, and can probably be made with stuff you have around the kitchen.

(One is missing because Eleanor couldn't wait until they were fully hardened)

Ingredients:
2 cups rolled oats
1 cup peanuts, crushed
3/4 cup wheat germ

4 Tbsp. Butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup honey
2 tsp. Vanilla
1/2 tsp. Salt

1-1/4 cups dried fruit of your choice.

Directions:
1. Mix together oats, peanuts, and wheat germ and spread in a baking dish or a jelly roll pan.

2. Turn oven to 350 and place dry mixture inside to toast for 10-12 minutes, stirring twice during the toasting process.

3. While the mix is toasting, dump the butter, brown sugar, honey, vanilla, and salt into a medium saucepan. Heat thoroughly (but do not boil), until the butter melts and the brown sugar carmelizes.

4. Pull the dry mix from the oven, and dump into a bowl. Add raisins, dried cranberries, or your preferred dried fruit (chocolate chips work, too). Stir to mix. Pour the liquid mixture over the dry and stir completely. The liquid is the "glue" of the bars, so make sure all of the dry mix gets coated or it won't stick together later.

5. Dump the sticky mass into a 9x13 glass dish lined with wax paper. Spread the granola out to fill the dish evenly. Top with another layer of waxed paper.

6. Press down HARD with a flat tool (I use the edge of a wooden butcher's block). It is important to compress the granola firmly and evenly so it won't crumble when you cut it.

7. Let the granola harden for a couple of hours, then remove the top wax papers and cut into bars. It is easiest to use a knife like a French chef's knife (or an Ulu) that allows you to cut by pressing down, rather than cut by sawing.

8. Wrap the bars individually in plastic wrap, and enjoy!

Yield: about 12 6.5-inch bars or 18 4-inch ones.

If you try out this recipe, let me know how it went!

The Power of Community

Since posting the Facebook note about this blog, I've received lots of support from friends who are also taking steps to eat locally. Some also make bread, some craft yogurt and cheese, some make beer, many have gardens. Living in the city can ironically lead to isolation, especially when one follows pursuits that seem more...agrarian. It's good to be tangibly reminded how we live in community.

Which brings me to a crazy thought: Urban Supported Agriculture (USA?). Here in Chicago, none of us have the land area, barns, root cellars, etc. to be self supporting food producers. But if I make bread and you make yogurt, and he brews beer or has a ton of extra zucchini, what about some informal bartering? I'll concentrate on bread, and trade you 2 or 3 loaves for a couple blocks of cheese or a dozen tomatoes. No money changes hands, we still know where our food comes from, and we all don't have to do everything.

A community supporting itself; a farm collective in a major city.

A New Gastronomic Leaf

After reading the book In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, our family has decided to eat whole foods. No, we're not deciding to exclusively shop at high-end yuppie supermarkets--we are following Pollan's simple dietary rules: 1) Eat food, 2) Not too much, 3) Mostly plants. What do I mean by "food?" Anything your great-grandmother would recognize, not what the American food system tries to force-feed us (Go-Gurt? Velveeta? Vitamin C-enriched Froot Loops?). A few corollaries guide us as well: a) if it lists health claims, it's probably not healthy, b) if it has ingredients you can't pronounce or can't find in your cupboards, it's probably not healthy, c) always eat at a table, preferably with others, d) no, your desk is not a table.

For the complete (and very convincing) details and research supporting this philosophy, you should you read the book yourself. Here's a few of the ways our lifestyle has changed in the last month:

• We're really cutting down on processed foods and cooking from scratch with real ingredients, including making things like tomato sauces, soup, and the occasional batch of French fries.
• I now bake all of our family's bread. Have you seen what they put in an average supermarket loaf, including the "whole wheat" varieties? Many more posts will be devoted to this, as it is quickly becoming something of a hobby for me.
  
• We have joined a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). many of these supply fresh vegetables, but we will go to any number of farmer's markets for that. This CSA supplies us with a monthly share of chicken, lamb, beef, and pork. All the animals are grass-fed and finished (meaning no feed lots) and are humanely cared for without growth hormones or antibiotics.
• We are greatly expanding our garden from last year. Many more blog entries will be devoted to our efforts in this area, too.

Our switch (which happened in late January) has had at least one additional effect: I've lost 4 1/2 pounds! Cutting out most soda and mindless snacks has probably been the reason, but that also ties in with Pollan's sociocultural principles of responsible eating as well. And have I been hungry? No way! I'm eating homemade sourdough bread, lots more fresh vegetables, drinking whole milk, etc., etc.

I'm loving this.