Use Your Microwave as Dough Proofing Box

I don’t now why it took me so many years to realize that our kitchen temperature is too low for proofing bread. Most of the year here, except for the hotter months, our interior temps are in the 70sF (20sC). Bread wants to ferment in the 80sF (upper 20sC). Professional bakers either have a hot kitchen or proofing boxes to maintain this higher temperature.

If you’ve got a microwave you’ve got a proofing box. Just heat a mason jar filled with water for a few minutes and stick your dough in for both the bulk fermentation and proofing. If you don’t have a microwave you could heat some water on a stove and put it and your dough in a cooler. If you want to get really fancy you could use a seed propagation heating mat in a cooler. I don’t have a mat so I’ve been using the microwave and it works great.

There are reasons you might want to cool dough and prolong fermentation, either to develop flavor and/or to put off your baking time to a more convenient hour. Your proofing box and refrigerator thus become, to use an old person metaphor, like the fast forward and pause buttons on a VCR.

Concluding note
I’ve gotten back into bread baking after a pause, specifically making whole wheat breads. If you’d like to try baking yourself, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I highly recommend the Josey Baker Bread book. Why? It’s to the point, beginner friendly, has a lot of whole grain recipes, and is the book most likely to help you develop a regular bread baking habit.

Keep a Rye Starter!

I took a pizza class at Josey Baker Bread in San Francisco this month and picked up a great tip from the instructor, JB pizza baker Caitlin (sorry did not get a last name!). She told us the bakery keeps a rye starter. This has two advantages: rye is more active so your starter will have a higher likelihood of success and you’ll always be ready to make a rye loaf. If you want a white or whole wheat dough all you have to do is add white or whole wheat flour and a spoonful of your rye starter.

I keep a small amount, like three tablespoons of starter on hand that I feed every day. When I want to make bread I do a build overnight and the next day I’ll have the quantity I need to bake a loaf or make pizza dough. This week I switched my starter over to rye using the small amount Caitlin gave us. I’m baking a loaf today and it’s rising like crazy.

As to the pizza we made in the class it was probably the best I’ve ever had. It’s a quirky pie: the secret is a dark, almost burnt crust brushed with garlic olive oil and sprinkled with Maldon salt. They keep the toppings simple as not to distract from the cracker-like sourdough crust. They have a pizza night at the bakery every Monday from 5 to 8 in case you don’t want to roll your own.

Olive Harvest 2021

One of the principle reasons to keep blogging long after social media and Google’s search algorithms deemed the end of blogs is that Root Simple functions as a garden diary. Towards that end let me note my second Frantoio olive harvest on Tuesday September 7, 2021. I harvested just shy of 3 pounds of olives from our parkway olive tree. I’m guessing I lost at least 9 pounds to olive fruit fly damage. I moved up the harvest this year to prevent losing all the olives to the damned fly. We’ll see if harvesting this soon changes the quality of the final product but I read that commercial growers harvest at this early stage.

Following UC Davis’ recipe for Sicilian cured olives I mixed up a brine consisting of:

8 cups water
3/4 cup pickling salt
1 cup vinegar

This was more than enough brine to cover my 3 pounds of olives, which filled one 64 oz mason jar and a half filed 32 oz mason jar. As of today, small bubbles have formed. Two years ago when I brined olives I replaced the brine about every month as the brine got dark. It took 7 months in the brine to get edible (and delicious) olives.

To cut down on olive fruit fly damage, I use a McPhail-type trap baited with Torula yeast tablets to reduce the fruit fly population. I use two tablets and replace them once a month. I definitely capture quite a few olive fruit flies and I think the trap gets me more usable olives but, lacking a control, I can’t be sure.

UC Davis recommends the traps combined with a late season application of kaolin clay when the fruit flies begin to lay eggs in the fruit. They also recommend replacing the bait every two weeks from April to November. This all takes careful observation–I only see the flies in the trap and the damage to the fruit is a bunch of very tiny holes that are hard to see at first. As the larvae develop the damage becomes obvious.

Harvesting and processing olives is one of the more labor intensive gardening tasks around our compound but how cool is it to have a chore the people have been doing for at least 6,000 years?

Inuit Fermentation: Animal-based & Archaic

Probably the most memorable trip I’ve ever taken was a business/art junket to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. While there I had the great privilege of hanging out with Inuit people who shared their food traditions, songs and stories. So I’m especially excited about the last North Carolina State Fermentology seminar this Thursday, June 10th at 12PM ET:

Inuit Fermentation:
Animal-based & Archaic

As part of the Arctic Indigenous diet, Inuit fermented foods are all animal-sourced, even the ones made from plants. From the stomach content of the caribou to the seabirds in sealskins, this short seminar introduces Inuit fermented foods illustrating how these rare foods present us with an opportunity to appreciate the diversity of dishes and flavors that might come from an entirely animal-sourced diet. Aviaja Hauptmann, who is an Inuk microbiologist, will discuss the role that Inuit fermentation has played and has the potential to play in the future.

Sign up here to attend live but if you can’t make it, the video will be uploaded to the North Carolina State Applied Ecology YouTube channel here.

A Simple and Life Changing Bagel Recipe

Based on Jeffrey Hamelman’s recipe in Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes

453 grams (16 ounces) bread flour
263 grams (9 ounces) water
9 grams (.3 ounces) salt
2 grams (.07 ounces or approximately 3/4 teaspoon) active dry yeast

Malt syrup or molasses for boiling

Optional: sesame, poppy, flake salt or other seeds for topping.

Yield: 6 bagels

1. Throw all the ingredients except the malt syrup or molasses into a stand mixer and mix on the first speed for three minutes. Turn up to second speed and mix for an additional 6 minutes. If you don’t have a mixer you can knead. Dough will be very stiff.

2. Bulk fermentation: 1 1/2 hour in a covered bowl at room temperature.

3. Divide the dough into 113 gram pieces and shape into bagels. Here’s how you do that:

4. Place shaped bagels into a covered container and put in the refrigerator overnight.

5. The next day, take the bagels out of the fridge and check to see if they are ready to boil and bake. Put one in a bowl of water. If it floats you’re ready to boil your bagels. If it doesn’t float leave the bagels out at room temperature until they pass the float test.

6. Preheat your oven to 500ºF (260ºC). Put a big pot of water on the stove to boil. Add enough malt syrup or molasses to make a dark tea colored water (around a 1/4 cup). Once the water is boiling place two or three bagels in the pot and boil for 45 seconds. Flip halfway through boiling. If you’re adding seeds let the boiled bagels cool on a rack for a few minutes and dredge them through a plate with your sesame, poppy or other seeds.

6. Placed the boiled bagels on a baking sheet and bake for around 15 minutes at 500ºF (260ºC). Shoot for a light golden brown.

If you have a large mixer you can double this recipe to make a dozen bagels.

Deep Bagel Thoughts
Why did it take me so long to getting around to making bagels? It turns out bagel baking is much easier than the sourdough loaves I sometimes attempt. These homemade bagels are soooooooo much better than store bought or even bagels from specialized bagel bakeries. Why? First off, the boiling step gives you that perfect chewy bagel not found in supermarket bagels. But as Hamelman notes, hand shaping also gives you a better texture than commercially made (extruded) bagels. It may sound like hyperbole but I mean it when I say that this recipe has the best ROI of any baking project I’ve ever attempted.

Trust me, these homemade bagels will open your third eye.