The Making Of... French Bread

As many others in this New Year, I have taken some introspective time to reflect on my priorities. Some of the things that I enjoy, that I want to do more of, are cooking new recipes in my new kitchen, and blogging. Thus inspired, I am starting a new series of posts, titled "The Making Of...", where I will visually document recipe testing in my new kitchen.

This blog post is dedicated to Paul Anater, at Kitchen and Residential Design. Paul is an online kitchen design mentor for me, as well as a fabulous baker. One of the recipes he posted awhile back is for a homemade sourdough french bread. I decided to give this recipe a try, as I was attending a French dinner and wanted to make my own bread for my French Onion soup (from Julia Child).

Recipe
You can find the recipe on Paul's blog here.

Kitchen Features Used:
- lowered height baking counter
- "proof" setting on my GE Monogram ZET1 oven
- rolling racks of same ZET1 oven

Result:
The bread was GREAT fresh out of the oven, and everyone in my family loved it. I have never made a bread by hand before. (In fact, I had to google how to knead bread!) Yet, this recipe was sooo easy. Is all baking this easy? I would have to guess "no."

This is definitely a dense french bread. I know some like a lighter, holier french bread. This bread was almost perfect for me. I like a thick dense crumb for my baguettes.

I felt my kitchen appliances and layout performed well for this recipe. The main snag is that I haven't organized my kitchen yet, to put all baking supplies in my baking area. (I realize this is ridiculous given that I have a designated baking area.) I also do not have a water source in my baking area, so that required lots of steps. Not a big deal.

The Process:
1. Make your sourdough starter the night before, and let it sit overnight

2. The next day, about 4 hours before you want the bread out of the oven, add water to the starter and break it up.

3. Add dry ingredients, fold it all in and mix.

4. Turn shaggy dough onto floured counter.

5. Knead for 10 minutes.

Kitchen note: I put a lowered baking counter in my pantry, but honestly my initial motivation was for the look and feel of it. I love the cozy statement of a lowered baking counter. I have never, however, kneaded bread (see above), and rolling out a single pizza crust or pie crust is not so labor intensive that a lowered counter is imperative. Let me tell you though, if you are going to knead firm elastic bread dough for 10 minutes, you NEED that lowered baking counter! It really helps if you lean into it, which is much easier with a lowered counter. My baking counter is 32" high.

6. Let the dough rise about 2 hours until doubled in size.

Kitchen note: After letting the dough rise, I felt it hadn't doubled in size per Paul's directions, despite my selecting a warm area. So, I popped it in my oven on the "proof" setting. This is a very very low heat, basically the equivalent of a light bulb. I could have just used a warm area in my kitchen, but it was definitely handy to have the dough bowl off the counter and out of the way. I must admit I have proofed dough before, in other kitchens, by turning on my oven light and putting the dough bowl in the oven. The "proof" setting on my oven is just a fancy way of doing the same thing. But hey, it's there, so I used it. Of course, you keep the oven door closed for proofing (this door is open just for photo taking, and then it was closed). You can see the "Prf" in orange letters on the upper left of the oven display, which is the confirmation that I have selected the Proof setting on my oven.

7. Setup your "steam oven" by setting a pan of water on a bottom rack during preheat.

Kitchen note: At this point, I was very glad to have rolling full-extension racks. I didn't have to carefully slide a sticky oven rack, loaded with a big water pan, back into the oven, worried that it would spill or generally slosh all about. I just pulled out my rack, set the pan on it, filled it with water, and then rolled it back into place. The rack rolls on ball bearings so the smooth ride ensured a spill-free result. These full extension racks are really nice in many places, but this is the first time using my kitchen I felt explicitly pleased to have this feature.

8. While the oven preheats, punch down your dough

9. Shape it into a long thin loaf (about 3" diameter) and let it rise another half hour.

10. Bake for half an hour. Take it out and admire bread made with your own two hands.

11. Pretend to let it "cool down." Slice and serve!

The Art Cabinet

In the time since we have finished the kitchen, we have had approximately 100+ people pass through our house. That's a lot of people and a LOT of opinions (luckily, most of them good). Various features catch people's attention. Lots of people love the mosaic slate backsplash and hearth-like range area with griddle. Many gush over the amazing view out over the nook. There's a lot of interest in what technology goes into my speedcook oven.

But the #1 most complimented item? -- I never would have guessed. An 11th hour addition to the kitchen, it is an item which has nothing to do with cooking at all. It's an art cabinet for my kids. This simple inset box garners oohs, ahhs, and even a recent gasp out of an architect. One of my neighborhood friends likes to show off the cabinet with a Vanna-like flourishing wave of the hand revealing a new vowel.

Part of the appeal of the cabinet is the mystery. What is this door on a wall that goes to nowhere? What could you want to store in the wall? Is it spices? Is it wine?

Nope. It's just a humble, built-in art easel. There is also a magnet board inset on the backside of the door:

I'll tell you, this "cabinet" wasn't in any draft of the plan until The Last One. I originally wanted the stair wall cut all the way down to the treads, and banisters with handrail put in its place. But I only want banisters going into wood treads, not carpet (the stairs behind the wall were, and are, carpeted). Push comes to shove with the budget, and I had to accept a little pony half-wall for my stairs. I realized that the resulting wall would look ridiculous out of sorts, with the speedcook oven pushed so far to the left edge -- a position constrained by the staircase construction.

As a result, I had to come up with something to balance out the wall. I considered hanging art but it was too low on the wall. One day I was driving down the street and saw a neighbor had an art easel setup on their front porch for their kid. One idea led to another and I talked to my GC and next thing you know, the ideas for an art cabinet started to gel. Everything in my kitchen is so precisely measured and cut in the shop, except for this cabinet. It was basically built onsite once the staircase wall was exposed, and was truly a creative collaboration between myself and my GC.

A brief description:
- the cabinet is wall depth
- we cut out one stud, and the cabinet inset into the wall spans the resulting distance from stud to stud.
- during rough-in, the electricians did not realize it was going to be a cabinet, so they pulled all their wires through that space (later had to rewire, of course)
- I bought a roll of art paper (Melissa and Doug brand), and my GC took that roll to the shop and had them form a glorified toilet paper holder to fit the width of the paper
- along the right and bottom side of the inset, are simple black strips of magnetic metal
- pen and crayon holder baskets are from the container store
- the metal on the backside of the door is stamped and the edges rolled in the metal shop at my cabinetry firm. They have a huge metal shop because they do cruise ship stuff. And now art cabinets, apparently!
- the door stays open with hinges that are designed to open 179 degrees and stay open
- the pull (see top photo) is a drop ring pull from Schaub. I chose that pull for its very shallow projection. It is 1/8" less than the clearance from the opened door to the wall
- the installation of the wood frame around the door, and stile underneath the door on the wall, was really complex. It looks very simple, but to achieve the look I wanted, various pieces of wood are installed in 1/8" degrees of thickness. The trim carpenter looooved me! :) To his credit, he held up each piece of wood and asked if I liked it exactly that way before he installed it.
- There is a strip of silver metal installed right under the fancy toilet paper holder. That thin strip has some give to it. You can press it in with the pressure of one finger, and then tear off the paper roll against that metal guide.

Snazzy!!

And yes, my older daughter barely plays with the cabinet. She's only two, though, and she can only reach the bottom few inches unless she uses a stool. My friend's daughter is 8, and she loves the cabinet. I'm sure as my kids get older, they'll get some good use out of it. For now, though, I write my todo list for meal prep in the cabinet, and my husband and I check things off the list as we accomplish them.

Advantium - First Review

I have been in our new kitchen for about three months now. The appliance that I am most excited by is the GE Monogram Advantium Oven. I have the 240v built-in version with slim Euro-handles (ZSC2201NSS).

I chose this appliance for several reasons:
(1) It serves multiple functions. When your space is limited, appliances that perform more than one task are quite valuable! This one appliance serves as a microwave oven, speedcook oven, and convection oven.
(2) I was intrigued by speedcook functionality. I have never had this before. Other companies with speedcook include TurboChef, Miele, and several others. Each "speed cook" oven seems to use different technology. I like GE's use of halogen.
(3) It looks good and has easy controls.
(4) Without having done in-depth research to back it up, my gut told me that speedcooking would save energy over conventional oven usage. I read that remark in several places but no one backed it up. No one contested that assertion, however.

The capability of this appliance is very broad -- and as such, I have not used all of its functions, not even close! I haven't touched the convection setting yet.

For microwave, I have only used literally one button - the "express" button which microwaves on high for 30 seconds. Each press of the button adds 30 seconds. I'm honestly not sure what to say in a microwave review. It microwaves well. My food gets hot and the turntable turns. Enough said.

Now for the speedcook function... this was truly exciting for me. I believe I am the target consumer -- a harried mother trying to get a dinner on the table in a short amount of time. In most ways, I have been really impressed by the speedcook. One initial missed expectation for me is that I expected everything would cook more quickly. That is not the case. The biggest gains, in my limited experience of three months, are recognized with dense and/or heavy thick foods - such as a roast chicken, or a casserole. For some foods, like cookies, speedcooking actually takes the exact same amount of time as a regular oven, if you ignore the time required to preheat. Once I realized that, I read the Advantium documentation more closely and I realized that a lot of the time comparisons took into account the preheat time for a conventional oven. The Advantium is not preheated for use. It's debatable whether or not it's fair to include or exclude preheat time in the comparisons. On one hand, you can easily start your conventional oven preheating right off the bat and usually it's ready by the time you want to put your dish in the oven. On the other hand -- I do often forget to preheat with enough lead time and I am often waiting for my oven to finish preheating.

Here are some items I have cooked and their results:

(1) Chocolate chip cookies. I did a direct comparison of cookies baked in a regular oven and in the speedcook oven... all from the same batch of dough. I had my contractors sample the cookies (see, I'm a good boss!). There was an even 50/50 split of who preferred the speedcook cookies and who preferred the conventional. It boiled down to who liked crispy cookies and who liked soft. The speedcook tended to produce crispier cookies. We were really splitting hairs though -- the cookies were fairly similar. The time was the same between both ovens (excluding preheat time).

(2) Roast whole chicken. The speedcook chicken was certainly adequate for a weeknight meal. It was not nearly as good as the perfect roast chicken in my conventional oven, though. It did not cook as evenly (neither meat nor skin) in the speedcook. Some bits were juicy and fine, others were dry. That said, if I was just roasting a chicken to get the cooked meat for other dishes, I would not hesitate to speedcook it. One negative for me is that I could not put the chicken on a metal rack to let the drippings roll off. You can't use metal during speedcook. As such, my speedcook chicken came out of the oven in a pool of fat. appetizing!

I am going to try roasting the chicken in the speedcook again with trussing (how I do my chickens in a regular oven). Perhaps that might help it to cook more evenly - we'll see.

Time to roast in oven: 80 minutes (excluding preheat). Time to roast in speedcook: 20ish minutes.

(3) Baked chicken breasts. The speedcook did outstanding here! The breasts were tender and juicy and evenly cooked. This was my first real success with the speedcook.

(4) Pizza. The speedcook EXCELS at pizza! Pizza used to be a weekend meal for us and now with the speedcook, I can get a homemade pizza on the table in 45 minutes (and just 30 minutes if I use freezer dough which I often have).

In a conventional oven, pizza has to cook at a very high temp (450 or 500) so I should point out -- the preheat time DOES have a real impact on the timeline here. For a conventional oven pizza, it takes 20-30min to get my oven hot enough to put my pizza in. And then unless I take the time to preheat my pizza sheet, or prebake my pizza crust, I can have problems with the underside of the crust being underdone while the top is fully cooked.

I have no such problems in the Advantium. With the alternating energy technologies, it gets the toppings and crust all done at the same time. And I do not need to wait a half hour for preheating. Total score!

Here are some other Advantium speedcooking notes:

- There is an instructional CD that comes with the appliance. I found this pretty cheesy and useless. Most of the things they used to demo the advantium are food items that I do not make (a lot of freezer foods).
- So far I have only been able to use the pre-programmed menu options for speedcook. I would like to figure out how to convert some existing recipes to speedcook but I haven't found anything from GE to really make this simple.
- There are different rules for which trays and cookware you can use during which functions. While they do all make sense, I worry that one day I will forget and try to microwave with the metal tray in place.
- I love the accessory drawer that I was able to purchase and install under the oven. I wish, though, that the drawer was also available for the pro style handle. Oddly, the drawer is only available for the euro style handle. I switched my choice of handle from pro to euro just so I could get that drawer (and I am glad that I did).
- For the most part, the appliance seems easy to clean. I did have problems with grilling chicken breasts on the ridged tray, however -- a lot of elbow grease went into cleaning that one, even though it's a nonstick surface
- At one point I was concerned what exactly WAS in the nonstick surface (PFOA, PFTE, etc)? I contacted Paul Anater who went on a hunt to answer my query. Luckily, it's just porcelain enamel. (Note, the 120v version of this appliance does have PFTE however, if that matters to you).

Here are some photos of my pizza adventures with the Advantium:

Fresh pizza, homemade pear and gorgonzola with caramelized onion, on the GE Advantium speedcook tray:


Selecting my menu option from the GE Advantium menu:


Watching my pizza cook in the oven:


Sliding the cooked pizza off the tray (onto my end-grain butcherblock counter, love love):