What was dinner?

I indeed cooked the 2 pork-and-beef Creole crepinettes, plus made 5 small burgers from the ground applewood bacon burger. The mistake was in trying to grill them--way too much fat, so I had lots of flare-ups and things were generally a little charred. I really like the grilled taste, but I think future bacon burgers or crepinettes will have to be pan-fried or oven-broiled.

The crepinettes were good but not great--not much Creole spice was evident, though the rosemary sprig tucked under the caul gave some flavor. The grind was rather fine, and I think it suffered in contrast to the bacon burger which just had a better mouth feel. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for bacon. :)

Pine Street Market CSA, first two months

This was the January box:
two packages of smoked pork spareribs, prepared with a dry rub
1 lb. applewood smoked bacon
lamb shoulder roast
pork, beef, and lamb meatballs
2 whiskey brined pork steaks
4 links of smoked country sausages
unlabelled beef steak (maybe a boneless rib steak--it was very good)

I don't have pictures of month 2. I took 'em...but there was no card in the camera. :(  They included a note saying the month was focused on quick and easy dinners (there's a note with a partial listing of stuff in the box each month, sort of a blend of "how to cook" and recipes for some of the items).

Here's what I remember:
Lamb roulade stuffed with spinach, red bell pepper, feta
Meatloaf in a foil pan, ready to bake
Beef kabobs, marinated and with veggies ready to be skewered and grilled
Porchetta, also ready for the oven
1 lb. bacon
bacon ends
smoked sausages
dry-cured pancetta
1 lb. Gum Creek Farms ground beef
1 lb. applewood bacon burger
a pate of sorts, which I think was a lamb/smoked pork rillettes--there was a pork rillettes in the meat case today, and it was similar

February had a sort of mix-up, and the initial box I picked up was short (not that I had noticed, personally). Early in the afternoon I got an email saying they had a packing fail, and would deliver the remainder if I would email or call with my address by 2:30. Sure enough, someone showed up and handed over an insulated grocery bag with the rest of the haul. The bag was for me to keep, too. (The usual packing is a cardboard box with foil-backed styrofoam lining, plus ice packs. I take it back to them the next month for them to re-use...maybe they do, maybe they don't. But it's better than me trying to recycle the mixed materials...)

Notes on the concept so far: I'm getting more lamb than I want, being a person who typically eats lamb once every couple of years. I don't dislike it, but it's not a favorite. Even in the blends like the pork/lamb/beef meatball mix come across as 'lamb', perhaps because I *don't* eat it often. The bacon is superb. I don't need to eat a pound of bacon a month, but can always pass the excess to my sister-in-law next door. I liked the 'quick meals' concept, but it's too much arriving fresh and ready to cook for my one-person household, and only some of the items are interesting to the folks next door for possible sharing.

The porchetta was shared next door, and was a winner. I enjoyed the meatloaf--made a barbeque sauce for it that I use on my standard beef meatloaf, but this one had enough interesting spice to not need it. No one wanted to share that one, with or without sauce, however. Sister-in-law joined me in trying the lamb roulade cooked as they recommended with white beans and aromatics, but neither of us wanted a second serving because, well, lamb.

I do need to work on what's in the freezer, though this weekend I'll be cooking things fresh from the March box. Tucked away from January and February are a whiskey brined pork steak, the ground beef, a pack of ground bacon burger, pancetta, the lamb shoulder roast, and bacon.

Meat CSA

Dear me, poor neglected food blog. It's not alone--work and Life in general got pretty hectic, so LJ and Facebook reading and even some email lists got pushed aside, and I may never catch up on the more active RSS feeds. LJ at least got some reflected posts as I tweeted through a Walt Disney World Food & Wine Festival visit in October, a family trip to Italy over Christmas, and back to WDW in January with friends, but somehow the food posts I constructed in my head never made it here. I'm going to try to do better.

In January I joined a CSA of sorts: a carnivorous CSA, specifically. It's an experiment by Pine Street Market in Avondale Estates, an butcher shop that specializes in artisan meats. They're known for their applewood smoked bacon, and a number of sausages and cured meats. They don't promise that all their meat is locally sourced, but they do work with a local farm that raises pigs drug-free on pasture for some amount of their meat.

The CSA boxes have been heavy on pork with some lamb and beef. This is a shift from my usual non-poultry meat purchases, which tend to be mostly beef, some pork, and almost no lamb. I'm a little at risk of being overwhelmed by meat, but then January and February had a good bit of travel and thus less home cooking. Travel has been abruptly stopped with the budget sequestration, so I'm going to make an effort to use the current box plus the leftovers from January and February this month.

The March pickup was today, and here's what was in my box:
1 lb. applewood smoked bacon
8 oz. applewood bacon ends
Pork Sausages:
Irish bangers (4, ~14 oz.)
Spiced pear sausage (4, 1 lb)
Mettwurst sausage (4, 1 lb)
4 oz. tasso ham
1 lb 6 oz pork belly ribs
1 lb country (pork) sausage
1 lb applewood bacon burger (ground pork)
1 lb parmesan lamb meatball mix (lamb and pork)
3 cider brined pork chops (oddly cut, 2 boneless and one bone-in, bone-in one is large and very irregularly cut)
2 "Creole crepinettes"--pork and beef sausage patties wrapped in caul

For dinner I think I'll cook the two crepinettes, plus make burgers from the applewood bacon burger and pan-fry them all. Or maybe grill them--the challah is a little behind schedule, so I might not want to be juggling baking bread and grilling burgers.

Whole-Wheat Challah with Dried Cherries

I bake a challah every week (at least, if I'm at home) for Shabbat with the folks next door--sister-in-law and the kids are Jewish. The recipe evolved for a while, but I think it's been stable for several years so it's time to blog it again. (The last blogged version was back on LJ, in Sept. 2008.) As that entry said, this began with a recipe found on the Internet but no longer resembles it much. I'm going to put my preferred measurements first though it's a hodge-podge--I weigh my flour and keep the scale set on grams most of the time for the precision (or appearance thereof), all else is given in American teaspoons/tablespoons/ounces. It works for me, is all I can say. If someone needs other ingredients provided in grams, ask in comments and I'll weigh 'em the next available Friday.


Notes: this makes a small challah, maybe about 12-14" long. I'll give the amounts to double it at the end, as I do the doubled version as one large challah when feeding more people. Or I make 2 smaller ones and leave the cherries out of one if worried about the universal acceptability of dried fruit.

The directions are for mixing and kneading the dough in a heavy-duty mixer, specifically a KitchenAid. I've done it in a food processor, and of course the manual method will work, too. You're on your own for directions, or follow my link above back to the source recipe.

I like this dough a little wet, as an aid to re-hydrating the cherries (and also because it rises better). Because I do all the kneading in a mixer, I don't have to deal with the wet dough coating my hands. Adjust the water and flour as needed so you have a workable dough with your methods.

The instructions say to turn the dough out onto a floured board: I use a silicon dough mat, and with the little bit of oil from my scraper or the rising bowl I don't need to add any flour to the surface as I knead and braid.

The lecithin is supposed to help it keep better, and I add it out of habit. Usually long-keeping is not a big concern with this bread around here...

Whole-Wheat Challah with Dried Cherries

150 grams (1-1/4 cups) whole-wheat flour
65 grams (1/2 cup) unbleached all-purpose flour (plus maybe a tablespoon or so extra if things are really sticky)
1-1/8 tsp. instant yeast (1/2 package)
1 tablespoon granular lecithin (optional)
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 large egg, divided
2 tablespoons oil
2 tablespoons honey
3 fluid ounces hot water (130 degrees)
1/3 cup dried cherries

Whisk together the flours, yeast, and lecithin. Whisk in salt.

Beat the egg in a small bowl. Reserve 1 teaspoon or so for glazing the loaf. In a large mixer bowl stir together the remaining egg, oil, and honey, then add the water.

Add flour mixture to bowl. Using the dough hook, stir at lowest speed until flour is moistened. Increase to KitchenAid level 4 and knead for 6 minutes, adding the dried cherries about a minute before the end. Dough will not be cleaning the sides of the bowl, but should be looking "stretchy" to indicate that the gluten is developing. Add more flour if necessary. The cherries won't be fully incorporated.

Scrape the dough from the bowl and dough hook with a greased dough scraper or a spatula onto floured board and knead for 2 or 3 turns to get the cherries all covered with dough. Put into greased container, cover, and put in warm spot until doubled - about 1 hour. Alternatively, place in refrigerator overnight or for several hours until ready to let it rise.

Turn doubled dough out onto floured board and knead for 2 or 3 turns to deflate it. Divide dough into 6 pieces (or as many as you want to braid) and braid. (Here are the braiding instructions I use.) Pinch ends together when done and place on parchment paper on a baking sheet. Cover with greased plastic wrap or place in a proofing box.

Let formed loaf rise for about 45 minutes to an hour or until doubled. Begin pre-heating the oven to 350° at least 30 minutes before baking. Dilute the reserved egg with about a teaspoon of water, and brush the challah gently with the mixture, being careful to get into the nooks and crannies. Sprinkle with poppy seeds, if desired.

Bake for about 20-25 minutes. An instant-read thermometer will register 180° when the loaf is done. Remove from baking sheet and put on a dish towel or a rack to cool.


Doubled recipe:
300 grams (2-1/2 cups) whole-wheat flour
130 grams (1 cup) unbleached all-purpose flour
2-1/4 tsp. instant yeast (1 package)
2 tablespoons granular lecithin (optional)
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
2 large eggs, divided
1/4 cup oil
1/4 cup honey
6 fluid ounces (3/4 cup) hot water (130 degrees)
2/3 cup dried cherries

BBA #39: Stollen

I mostly worked half days this pre-holiday week, using up some of my excess annual leave. This let me tackle the relatively quick stollen during the week instead of waiting for a weekend opportunity. My stollen, like my panettone, has no candied fruit, though I did use some candied orange and lemon peel. (First time I'd ever tried the candied peels, and I won't repeat the experiment--they really are bitter despite being candied, and many times have an unpleasant texture.) My fruit mix was dried tart cherries, chopped dried apricots, and golden raisins. I decided not to add crystallized ginger, though maybe on some other occasion that would be interesting. All that plus another 1/2 cup of mixed fruit went into a plastic container with the brandy and orange extract 4 days before starting the bread. I shook the container regularly to re-distribute the liquid.

Not counting the fruit-soaking, stollen is a one-day bread. The process starts with a yeasty sponge with flour and whole milk, and that sits for an hour until very foamy. The main dough is more flour, a little sugar, cinnamon, salt, then the wet ingredients of butter, the sponge, and an egg. Or half an egg, in my case--I halved the recipe as usual. That dough is mixed, sits for 10 minutes, then the fruit is added. I added very little water to the dough process, maybe a half-ounce, but the fruit was very moist and tipped the balance the other way and I added more than a quarter cup more flour to get a dough that wasn't too sticky to handle. In the process (I machine-knead) the dough got worked enough for the fruits to color the dough.

First rise was very slow--I can't see how I could have killed the yeast, so I attribute it to the heavy load of sweet fruit inhibiting the yeast activity. After 2 hours with only a little bit of puffy area showing, I gave up and formed the loaf. The instructions for folding the stollen were pretty baffling even with several photos to illustrate them, but I made some reasonable attempt at the double fold shown. As a lover of almond paste the option to include marzipan or almond paste instead of sliced almonds was the way to go, though that may have complicated my attempts to follow the shaping method--I was using the tube-form marzipan (Odense), that being what was on hand, so I cut the tube in half lengthwise, and rolled half out to the length of my dough. That got tucked into the first fold along with a little additional soaked fruit. For the second fold, I cut a strip off the remaining marzipan, again rolled it to flatten, and tucked it in. My loaf didn't have the fruit spilling out of the folds, but the thing was more or less shaped like the picture.

The second rise was again slow--I gave it an hour and a half, and saw very little increase in size. Finally with the hour getting late, I went ahead and baked it, and the results seem OK to me. The loaf is a little dense with the various fruits, and the marzipan didn't give me the effect I wanted--the larger piece folded as I shaped the loaf and is a thick C-shaped piece in each slice. What I wanted was for the marzipan to meld a little with the bread so I wouldn't get a separate "marzipan bite" in each slice. Maybe almond paste would be softer and integrate better, maybe a superior type of marzipan would, or maybe this just isn't the nature of the beast. If I repeat the stollen, I think I'll go with sliced almonds. <g> Actually, I'll probably go back to the panettone--I liked it better than what I got with the stollen recipe.

BBA #38: Potato, Cheddar, and Chive Torpedo

My other BBA bread from last weekend was the Potato, Cheddar, and Chive Torpedo from the Grace Note chapter at the back of the book, a recipe from Tim Decker,one of Reinhart's bread apprentices. The potato part of the name is from mashed potatoes and water from cooking the potatos in the dough, making it a very soft, tender bread. The chives also go in the dough, but the cheddar is sliced thinly and rolled up in the dough to get a spiral, and the loaf is slashed so that the cheese can also bubble out during baking.

A barm is used but there's added yeast as well, making the barm a flavoring agent. The most confusing part of the recipe was another of those "dough should be tacky but not sticky" instructions for the kneading process, this time saying "very tacky". I maintain that tacky means sticky in this context, so finding the line for these breads is tough. The other note on the recipe is that I don't see how the weight and volume measures for the chives can both be correct--for my half recipe I should have used 1/2 ounce or 2 tablespoons of chives per the directions. I started with the weight and realized I'd have well over 1/4 cup of chives if I included all I'd weighed out. I ended up putting in about 3 tablespoons or so.

The dough rose enthusiastically on both rises--the barm plus the yeast gave it plenty of lift. I nearly burned the loaf--it got to nearly black on the first interval of the hearth baking, though the internal temp was still low. I covered it with foil to keep it from further darkening, and the finished bread was just very dark brown.


Taste results: it's a bread with that ultra soft potato-bread texture, not a favorite of mine. It had nice crumb, and a very crisp crust from the hearth baking--almost too much with the very soft interior.

BBA #37: Swedish Rye (Limpa)

Last weekend was my first back from my vacation (I came home the previous Sunday night, so no weekend at home), and I spent it in my classic nesting activity: cooking. Three different breads, two soups, and other stuff. Oh, and prep for the stollen I plan to bake this week. First bread up, after the weekly challah, was this last rye bread from The Bread Baker's Apprentice, the aniseed-, fennel seed, orange-, and cardamon-flavored Swedish rye. When a search of my many herb and spice bottles failed to find aniseed, I substituted star anise--it was difficult to get it ground with my old blade coffee grinder, but any larger fibrous bits weren't noticeable in the finished bread.

I made my usual half recipe, and went with a loaf pan instead of a free-standing loaf. The bread starts out with a sponge, and an odd-looking one--the flavorings are brought to a boil with molasses and water, that gets cooled, then added to a barm (rye, in my case) and additional rye flour. The molasses/spice mixture looked evil (dark brown liquid with...stuff floating in it) but smelled great. The sponge sits out for 4 hours or until foamy, then is refrigerated overnight to build flavor. The next day the rye sponge gets additions of bread flour, yeast, salt, brown sugar, and a little melted shortening to complete the dough.

The dough was slow to rise for both first and second rises, even when I gave up on "room temperature" and moved it to the warming drawer on 'proof'. I gave up on the second rise after 2-1/2 hours when it had crested the pan at 1/2 inch (not the called-for 1 inch). As a result, the loaf was a little short.

Tasting report: a lovely light rye, not overwhelmed by the spices but nicely flavored by them. Texture was great, with a nice 'chew' and even holes. Should I want to bake rye bread, this recipe will be a top candidate.