Banana Bread For Breakfast

It worked, but as usual, next time will probably be even better. I think that roasting the bananas did bring out a little bit more of their flavor, as well as making the house smell very banana-y, but next time I will keep them in the oven for even longer, until they ("and the brown sugar they rode in on") start to carmelize a bit more. As far as taste and texture goes...I had a slice last night while it was still warm, and I thought it was a bit dry, but today it really was quite moist and delicious. The cinnamon was barely detectable, but it worked. If you happen to have a spice grinder, I do recommend grinding a cinnamon stick - the difference between freshly ground and the stuff you buy at the grocery is noticeable.

Here's the recipe that I actually ended up putting in the oven...it's the recipe my mother recommended (with a few changes):

Roasted Banana Bread, 2 loaves

Bananas..............................4 1/2 cups, sliced

Butter................................1 cup (divided)

Brown Sugar........................4 Tbs

Sugar.................................1 3/4 cups

Eggs..................................4

AP Flour.............................4 cups

Baking Soda.........................2 tsp

Salt...................................1/2 tsp

Cinnamon............................1 tsp

Vanilla Ex............................1 tsp

(I didn't add any nuts - because some people are weird about nuts - but I do think that some toasted pecans would be good. I'd say about a cup would be the right amount.)

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Put the bananas in a baking dish, dot with 4 Tbl of the butter, and the brown sugar.

3. Cook for 30-45 minutes, until soft and bubbly.

4. Let cool completely.

5. Sift together the dry ingredients.

6. Cream together the remaining butter and the sugar.

7. Add the vanilla and eggs, one at a time, mixing thoroughly after each addition, scraping the bowl as necessary.

8. Quickly but thoroughly mix in the dry ingredients.

9. Divide between 2 greased loaf pans and bake for approx. 1 hour 15 min.

Thinking About Bananas

Without reason, the term roasted bananas will pop into my head these days. Without a relevant or identifiable prompt. F'rinstance...today I was walking through the ICU waiting room. There were a few family members in there. The volunteer lady with hair that always reminds me of the horns of a bison was at the desk. There was an elderly couple waiting at the elevators. And before I reached the stairwell, there it was: roasted bananas. The thought just arrives.

Now, on the one hand, it's not terribly unusual that I would be thinking about food while at work. I think about food almost all the time. But I'm allergic to bananas (in their raw form) (so is sister Jane, and we both developed the allergy just a few years ago - weird), I have never roasted a banana, and I can't say that I ever remember having eaten a roasted banana. Anyway...because this phrase has been floating freely among my synapses for several weeks now, I succumbed and did buy a bunch o'bananas the other day, and they have been ripening nicely on the counter.

So guess what...I have 5 cups of sliced bananas, 3 Tablespoons of butter, and 4 Tablespoons of brown sugar roasting in a 350 degree oven right now. I'm a sucker for banana bread. I made multiple loaves of it at the restaurant every week. My mother recently gave me a recipe for banana bread that she said was quite good and very easy (easy? oh god, what am I thinking, that not my kind of recipe at all) so I thought instead of just slicing/mashing them there 'nanas I'd try it with these roasted bananas, maybe that will get them out of my head. A culinary exorcism, as it were.

Cheesecake Trial #1

Well I joined The Daring Bakers - and seeing as how this was my first month to submit an entry, I was kinda feeling a bit of pressure. So I made the recipe yesterday and brought it in to work today. An amazing thing about bringing food to an office/work environment -- it vanishes. No matter which hospital I have worked at - bring something in wrapped in plastic wrap and within minutes, it is gone. I used to take this as a compliment, and on somedays I still do - geez, it must have been really good - I don't think today's cheesecake lasted even 8 minutes on the scheduling table before it was gone. One coworker even admitted that she licked the platter. I must admit that I have brought in some food, an underdone streusal-topped rhubard-compote shortbread comes to mind, that similarly vanished -- and I KNOW it was lousy. Which is not to say my coworkers are nondiscriminating...let's just say they are hungry.

The situation is not unlike working with a stroke patient who spends 45 minutes producing nothing but unintelligible jargon, but who produces that one full sentence, be it a compliment or an insult at the end of the session, and of course it is THAT message that we take to heart. I own a very nice red shirt that I will absolutely never wear again because the single time that I wore it the lovely Grace G. pointed to it and said as clear as can be, "Never again" after an hour of wonderfully fluent but largely unintelligible jargon. And Lisa D. had a great day this past Monday when a confused and disoriented patient told her she had "beautiful breasts."

Anyway...I made the Daring Baker's cheesecake and in a big hurry this morning topped it with sliced strawberries. The concentric circles of slices were off-center, the slices were uneven, I put it in a large shallow dish with sides because I had planned to take it in to work, which means a safe drive over Gates Pass but not a good photo op, and snapped a few quick pictures. And of course, within minutes the cheesecake was gone. Everyone said it was delicious, and I actually was quite pleased with how the texture of the cake itself turned out...though I did not taste a piece myself. But when I got home and looked at the pictures --- ugh. Can a strawberry be garish? -- because that is the word that came to mind when I saw it.

Good news - I will make it again when I can take a little more time on the presentation side of things AND Nik will get a piece this time.

Hurry Up and Wait

Fermenting on the counter, fermenting overnight, fermenting in the 'fridge because I had to work today and the timing would have been all off if it'd sat out all day-- if nothing else, this bread is definitely going to be sour...which is okay by me. The dough can wait.

And that's actually one of the benefits of a levain-based bread like this one...it can wait. In fact, it needs to wait. Or rather, I need to wait while it sits quietly doing its thing...reproducing, fermenting, burping, getting bubbly, rising. This recipe contains no yeast other than that contained in the levain so the turnaround time on it is much longer than an instant-yeast-boosted dough. And let me tell you, this levain was a precocious little minx --

she was ripe and ready for action after just the second feeding. Often it will take 3-4 feedings after I have taken it out of the 'fridge before she is ready for dough-making.

Bordelais

Bread Flour..................................900 grams

Whole Wheat Flour..........................20 grams

Rye Flour......................................80 grams

Water.........................................580 grams (plus whatever is needed to adjust)

Salt.............................................20 grams

Liquid Levain................................400 grams

I did a 20 minute autolyse after the initial mix, but the dough was too stiff, so I added another 3/4 cup water, then did the final mix. It's a pretty sloppy dough, but with two folds during bulk fermentation it tightened up somewhat.

So it fermented (on top of the 'fridge) for two hours (with a fold each hour) but it was getting late so I covered it and let it chill in the 'fridge overnight. Well, over two nights really, because I didn't get to it last night either. (Like I said, this bread might be nicely sour.)
Finally, it came out of the refrigerator and sat in the bowl in the kitchen all morning to warm up, then I divided in in half, preshaped it, rounded it and plopped it into the floured baskets for the final rise...

Now let me say, I don't love alot of things, but I adore these german baskets. Nik and I found them at a store in San Francisco; they were way too expensive but Nik told me to go for it...like he always does when I find something on vacation that is too expensive. So we hauled them around the city in our daypacks that day, to the zoo and then to the Buena Vista, then all the way up and down those hills from the wharf to Nob Hill and back home to our favorite little hotel, The Golden Gate. That's just one reason that I love these baskets.

So then it rises for another 3 hours or so and finally gets baked. I put it in at 460 for 10 minutes and then turned it down to 400 for another 20. It probably could've gone another 5 minutes - OR - the baking stone could've been on a higher shelf so that the tops would brown a little more.

Marti is coming over for our first rehearsal tonight, so we'll try the bread at dinner. She's said she can always count on carbs when she eats here...and is there something wrong with that?

Fermenting On A Saturday In Spring

An instructor once described the difference between cooking and baking with a sports analogy. Cooking, she said, is like basketball and hockey, whereas baking is more like golf. As with most metaphors, it can only be taken so far (indeed there certainly can be some "hockey" moments in a restaurant bakeshop) but the concept is basically accurate.

F'rinstance, today I did nothing hockey-like, not by any stretch of the imagination. I took The Mother out of the 'fridge, she'd been hibernating on the bottom shelf for a couple of chilly weeks, fed her, and now she sits on the counter fermenting and occasionally burping.

(FYI - The Mother is our loving term for the sourdough starter.)

Then I mixed up some milk, flour and yeast as a preferment for a brioche I'll put together either later tonight or after work tomorrow afternoon. And that was that. See...totally a "golf-ish" baking day. (I wasn't totally slug-like though. I did make some chicken broth this morning, which will become chicken noodle soup tonight -- Nik woke up with a cold this morning and needs some old-fashioned medicine.)

The Mother has been a part of our lives for 9 years now. Because I am really drawn to multi-step, complex, cumbersome cooking procedures, when I read Nancy Silverton's instructions for starting a levain in Breads From The Le Brea Bakery I just knew I had to do it. It was the beginning of the acute phase of my obsession/love affair with yeast, and when Nancy Silverton became my bread idol. Not that starting a levain is complex or cumbersome at all; it isn't, but when she writes that you should start it with organic grapes (to obtain the wild yeast that grows on them), and that you need to stir it and feed it on a rigid/religious time schedule, well, that process speaks to my love of rituals and rules. (I have wondered whether I bake because I love breads, etc, or am I really just satisfying some deep-seated need to perform rituals - the answer as far as I can tell...both.)

For awhile I had both a liquid levain (The Mother) and a firm levain at the ready all the time. But now I just make a firm levain for specific recipes - it only usually takes an overnight fermentation when the firm levain is started with Mother. There have been times when I hae been busy/neglectful and have kept her in the refigerator for weeks at a time - and yet everytime she bounces back after just a couple of feedings. A really ripe, tangy dark liquid develops on the surface, which had me worried the first few times, given that it smells like paint thinner. I love pulling back a corner of the plastic wrap to get that strong first whiff - so strong it can actually choke you up a little -- ahhh, good stuff.

The formula I use for feeding The Mother is 500 grams of bread flour, 625 grams of water, and 100 grams of Mother. Mix it up, cover it up and let it rip. The first day or two after taking her from the 'fridge I can usually get by with feeding her just once a day, but once she is bubbling and mature she needs a twice a day feeding. Yes, yes, yes, I could decrease the amount of Mother that I include at each feeding once she gets going strong, but I haven't tried that yet and I don't like to mess with Mother too much.

Biscuits and Stories

So I learned something about a friend the other night.
Tim loves biscuits and, maybe even more, he loves strawberry shortcake.
(Yes - this is/was Tim) Now, some people might not think twice about this news, but to a food-and-flour-freak like me, this is like an insight into someone's soul.

Biscuits are dear to my heart. I have an old, well-used and much-stained recipe card in a zip-lock bag in the pantry that is titled, Grandma Finch's Baking Powder Biscuits. When I left home back in 1983, that is one recipe that I had to take with me. It works everytime.

But biscuits are also the source of a personal story of shame and ridiculuousness. As it happened, baking powder biscuits was the recipe that was assigned for our first practical exam in culinary school. There was NOTHING difficult about the recipe. In fact, it was not terribly different from Grandma's, a recipe that I had made at least a hundred times. Face it, how much variation can there be in a biscuit recipe. But nerves, stress, the clock, and who knows what other stupidity invaded my brain and caused me to LEAVE OUT the baking powder. It was our first exam, I didn't know I could do it over, I was not familiar with a convection oven...blah blah, blah. So instead of submitting light, delicious biscuits to Chef W. for tasting and critique, I offered a plate of gluten-based hockey pucks. Seriously awful. AAAAARGH -- the shame, the horror, the end-of-the-world. Well, not really...but yes, at the time.

So I have since been on a bit of a mission, or an occasional mission, to perfect my biscuit. There are those that would say that biscuit skill may be genetic -- as in...there are those with "a biscuit hand" and those without. I doubt that. I'm not stupid. I'm trainable. But biscuits continue to be a struggle. (too tough, too heavy, underdone, delicious but ugly) Anyway -- last night we had leftovers -- roast chicken, beef stew -- so I made biscuits to accompany the dregs. They (the bisuits) were alright...Nik loved them, but of course he would. (gotta love him)

So here's Grandma's Biscuit Recipe and my adaptation...

AP Flour...............2 1/4 cups.................2 cups

Baking Powder.......4 tsp........................1 Tabl

Baking Soda........................................1 tsp

Cream of Tartar......1/2 tsp

Sugar...................3 Tablespoons

Salt.....................1 tsp.......................1 Tbl

Shortening............2 oz

Butter...............................................4 oz

Milk....................2/3 cup

Egg.....................1

Buttermilk..........................................3/4 cup

The technique is the same for each.

Sift the dry, cut in the fat, quickly/deftly add the liquid.

Fold a few times. Roll out and cut.

Place upside down on a baking sheet.

Brush with a dairy product.

Bake at 450..........10-12 min..................12-15 min

Grandma's Biscuits----------------------------------------My recipe

So here's the verdict -- Grandma's had a finer texture and, at least for this batch, rose more evenly, whereas my eggless adaptation was moister and flakier. Of course, the goal is to achieve the fine texture in a biscuit that is both moist and flaky. I preferred Grandma's but Nik liked my recipe. I told him that I thought a combination of the two would be best - he continued chewing but was essentially nonplussed by my analysis.

So...the trials continue...next time...a combination of butter and shortening AND include an egg with the buttermilk. Another day.

The recipe (so far)

Whole Wheat Bread (50%)
Biga
Bread Flour... 4 oz
Wheat Flour... 4 oz
Instant Yeast... 1/8 tsp.
Water... 5 oz
Mix, cover, and let stand at room temperature for 12-16 hours.

Final Dough
Biga... All of the above
Wheat Flour... 1 lb.
Bread Flour... 1 lb.
Salt... 1 Tbl.
Instant Yeast... 1 tsp
Water... 1.5 lb
Ferment 1 hour. Fold. Ferment 45 minutes.
Divide in half and preshape.
Form two batards. Place in linen-lined baskets.
Cover and let rise 1 hour.
Bake 25-30 minutes at 450.

Next Time: decrease/omit the yeast in the final dough, increase the percentage of whole wheat flour, retard the dough for bulk fermentation overnight.