Week 6 (2023) - Icelandic

I wrote all of this last February. I have no idea why I never posted it!

Iceland has been on our "want to travel" list for years, between the hot springs and geothermal spas, beautiful landscape, possibility of seeing the Northern Lights, and the culture which led to their amazing crowd presence at the Euro back in 2016, but the closest we've gotten was our visit to Icelandic Fish and Chips back in 2017 (they have since closed, but will post about it someday). The Week 6 challenge was Icelandic, which I was excited for but also a little concerned about, since there weren't many recipes that seemed easy or in some cases, even doable. Fermented shark may be one of the national dishes there, but that certainly wasn't happening here.

I picked up a couple of cookbooks - one, North: The New Nordic Cuisine of Iceland by Gunnar Karl Gislason, looked delicious but was a bit too fancy and complicated for me, and the other, The Nordic Cookbook by Magnus Nilsson, covered all the Nordic countries and was over 750 pages. There were only a handful of Icelandic recipes in The Nordic Cookbook, especially compared with recipes for Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, but I was able to find more than enough there to pick out something for the challenge. That book is so heavy that you could also use it for strength training while cooking.

I decided to make plokkfiskur, a fish and potato mash, which the book said is commonly eaten with rye bread and with a lump of butter on top. The book also had a recipe for rye bread, rugbraud, but it was meant to be steamed in a geothermal area, which I obviously did not have access to in NYC. The alternative was to put it in the oven for 12 hours or overnight, neither of which I wanted or was comfortable doing. So I found a recipe for Icelandic rye bread on King Arthur Baking which took less than 3 hours in the oven, and that seemed like a far better fit. The King Arthur Baking recipe also noted that rye bread is usually served with smoked, cured, or pickled foods, and is also good with butter, so I thought a repeat of smoked salmon and the mustard-dill compound butter from Week 5's mustard challenge was in order.

Rugbraud (Rye Bread)

This rye bread was a no-knead dough (yay!) consisting of rye flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, buttermilk, honey, and molasses. I thought putting it together would be really easy since it was really just mix the dry, mix the wet, and pour the wet into the dry with no kneading, but it took far longer than I planned. Part of that was because the wet here was sticky honey, sticky molasses, and then buttermilk. It turned out fine, but it was messier and took longer to mix than I anticipated. The dough was super sticky when I added it to the loaf pan, plus our loaf pan was smaller than the recipe which I hadn't realized, so I had to add the rest of it to a second pan in an attempt to make some misshapen rolls. The original recipe also used a pain de mie/pullman pan with a removable lid, which we didn't have either, so our bread wasn't flat on all sides.

The bread bakes at a low temperature for about 2 hours, and then sits in the hot oven for a little longer. I left it in there for perhaps a few extra minutes because it was a little crustier than I thought it should be. It was okay for the most part, the inside was dense but soft, but some of the outside was very hard. I was worried when I first started cutting into it because of all the "brick bread" I've been making recently, but at least this one turned out edible, and with toppings, good. I don't know if I would make it again, since it's on the sweeter side and because it made the kitchen smell like molasses (and not bread) for a few hours straight (not my favorite aroma), but I'm glad we made it for the challenge.

Plokkfiskur

Searching "plokkfiskur" on Google turns up a lot of recipes for "Icelandic fish stew," but this cookbook's representation of it as a fish and potato mash seems more accurate for what we made. There are also Norwegian (plukkfisk) and Danish (plukfisk) versions that differ slightly, so maybe we'll revisit that whenever those countries turn up in the AtWCC (that's a big whenever, since we're still in the letter A).

To make the mash, you melt some butter, add some chopped onion, and then once cooked (but not browned), add a little bit of flour followed by milk (used oat milk). The mixture comes to a boil and then simmers for a few minutes, which I did until it started getting thicker. Then you add in some cooked, flaked fish (boiled some tilapia straight from frozen, only took 15 minutes), and next, boiled potato (will admit that I used instant mashed potatoes here and am not ashamed of it because it is such a time-saver for a similar enough result), salt, and pepper. The end result was basically mashed potatoes with fish in it, and it was delicious, especially with the butter on top. We ate this on top of the rye bread, and while the rye bread tasted very sweet on its own, it was so much better as a vehicle for eating this and the smoked salmon-butter combo. Very glad this was our choice for the Icelandic challenge!

Our Next Parwana Dinner

Our next experiment with Parwana recipes was also on Eid (last year), a couple hours after the khetayee fail. We hoped that we would have better luck with these two recipes: kebabeh degee morgh (chicken kebab) and naan flatbread.

The chicken recipe was really easy, especially since I adapted the recipe to use ground spices and omit the mortar and pestle. Just brown 1-2 pounds of chicken thighs, then make a sauce with all the other ingredients (tomato sauce, salt, ground coriander, ground cumin, crushed fenugreek, nigella seeds, ginger paste, minced garlic, cayenne, and Greek yogurt). The sauce then gets added to the chicken, coating it completely, and the whole thing simmers for about 15 minutes until the chicken is done cooking and the sauce is thick. Very, very simple instructions. I knew we had eaten fenugreek and nigella seeds before, but it was my first time buying them, and I was curious what specific flavors they would lend to the dish.

The finished dish reminded me of chicken curries we had previously ordered at Indian restaurants (and less of the one we used to order at our favorite Afghan restaurant), and we really, really liked it. It was the best of the three Parwana dishes we made that day. The flavors were deep and nuanced, and I wondered if some of the dishes we made before could have used the fenugreek and if that was the missing piece. At the time, I was excited to try more dishes with fenugreek and nigella seeds, but I don't know if I've touched them in the year since making this, so maybe it's time to find some more new recipes to try.

The cookbook recommended serving the chicken over naan flatbread, so trying out their naan recipe alongside the chicken was a no-brainer. This was my third attempt at Afghan naan. The first time I made it, it was relatively soft, a little buttery, a little fluffy, and pretty good, even if not that similar to the bread we had previously had at Afghan restaurants. The second attempt didn't go quite as well, but the best/salvageable parts of that one were still on the soft and fluffy side. This time... Well, let's just say my Afghan naan-making skills seem to be on a downward trajectory.

This naan was a yeast bread, so I made the dough, kneaded it, and then set it aside to rise using our usual warm microwave method. Once it was ready, I followed the instructions to divide the dough in half and spread it into the baking pans with my hands, evenly spread out and filling the entire pan. It seemed okay at that point even if not perfectly even. They were supposed to bake for about 15 minutes "or until the naans are golden brown and baked through." I ended up doing it for longer than 15 minutes because they weren't golden brown, but I guess I should have stopped earlier because they came out like a brick. (There was unfortunately a lot of brick bread in 2022...) The tops were softer, but that still meant most of the bread was barely edible because of the texture. It also didn't taste like anything special, just kind of a generic bread that was mostly hard as a rock. 

I was so disappointed with how the naan turned out, and it was the same day as the khetayee, which made it even worse. Thank goodness the chicken curry turned out good, because that saved the entire day from being a complete failure. Considering both the khetayee and naan didn't work, I started to think that maybe I should stick to cooking from Parwana and skip baking from Parwana, since that would still give me plenty to choose from.

Afghan Naan Take Two

I don't remember how I got there, but in looking at Afghan recipes, I ended up on one for naan on My Ginger Garlic Kitchen. I had already made naan during our Afghan food exploration, but since it didn't come out that similar to the one we liked at our favorite Ariana, and the one on this site looked much closer, I figured, why not give it another try? At the time, we had one last meal scheduled for the Afghan part of the challenge (the kabuli pulao in the next post), so I decided to make the naan to accompany it.

The ingredients for this bread were very similar to the last one, just in different amounts:

- 3 cups + 1 tbsp flour

- 1 tsp salt

- 2.25 tsp yeast

- 1 tsp sugar

- 2 tbsp olive oil

- about 1 tbsp butter

- 1 cup + a few tbsp warm water

I had intended to do a cost comparison of the two, but over two years later, that's not going to happen, because I have no idea where my old pricing list is and I can't look up any current prices with all the inflation that has happened since then.

I followed the recipe fairly closely to make the naan, and the steps were:

1. In a small bowl, combine 1 cup of warm water, yeast, and sugar. Let it sit for about 10 minutes. (It should look foamy.)

2. In a large bowl, combine 3 cups of flour, salt, and olive oil. Mix well.

3. Add the yeast mixture to the flour mixture, and mix well.

4. Knead for about 5 minutes until one big dough ball that's not too sticky.

5. Cover bowl with plastic wrap, and let sit for about 2 hours for the dough to double in size (or close to it).

6. Gently punch down the dough after the proofing time.

7. Preheat oven to 400 degrees while rolling out the dough.

8. Divide dough into two balls. [See below about a possible step before this one.]

9. Create a mixture with the remaining flour and water, and apply it to your hands.

10. Using your hands, flatten out the dough balls into ovals about 1/4 inch thick. Use a fork to make patterns and lines.

11. Bake until browned, about 10 minutes. Melt butter while baking.

12. Brush with butter, cut into pieces, and place on a plate under a foil tent to keep warm and soft.

The results of this naan experiment were puzzling. The first ball rolled out so much better, but then didn't rise. The second ball had holes everywhere when I tried to roll it out, so I ended up rolling it back up into a ball, kneading it a little more, and then trying again. I couldn't get it as thin as the recipe suggested, but sort of gave up, but that one turned out better and actually rose.

When I went back to the recipe page and watched the demonstration video (which I probably should have done before I made it), I noticed that nowhere in the instructions did it say to knead the dough again between punching it down, dividing it, and rolling it into a ball, but in the video, there was another kneading step. I ended up kneading the second ball again because of my poor rolling, so was that why it turned out better? I'm not experienced enough at bread baking to know, so if anyone has any ideas on why they turned out differently, I'm all ears (or, I guess, eyes).

From the picture, I really thought this one was going to turn out more like the Afghan bread we were used to getting at restaurants, but it was fairly similar to the other one we made (well, at least the second oval that actually rose was). Both were soft and fluffy, but the other one seemed a little more consistently fluffy and would probably be the one we'd go back to again since it turned out more successfully in our kitchen.

The Last Third

Time for a group challenge post for the last third of the year! Skipping weeks 40, 41, 45, 47, and 51 because they're also for the AtWCC and week 49 because I already wrote most of that one separately. Not sure if I'm going to get all these posts done before the end of the year, but I'm going to try my best!

Week 36: smashed

My immediate thought when hearing "smashed" was smashed potatoes, probably because A makes them so often (and so well). With A's help, I put together loaded smashed potatoes (based on a recipe from Budget Bytes) topped with cheddar cheese, (vegan) sour cream, bacon bits, and red onions. We don't usually top them with more than garlic and herbs (and they are delicious that way), but it was nice to try something different, especially that tasty melted cheese.

Week 37: honey

I stumbled upon a honey butter biscuit copycat recipe on Let's Dish when doing research for this challenge, and they sounded like a good thing to try since I'd never been to the Texas-based Church's Chicken chain before (and A had never had the biscuits). They apparently sell millions of biscuits a year and have even trademarked the term "Honey-Butter Biscuit" (not sure how since that sounds like a generic description to me, but I'm not a trademark professional). The biscuits were good, although I think I might have cooked them too long since the honey butter browned a bit too much on the bottom, and I personally prefer my drop biscuits not so sticky. Maybe we'll give these another try for the Texas part of the AtWCC.

Week 38: cultured

They announced the week 38 theme far in advance for people who wanted to do things like culture their own yogurt, but that was still far beyond my comfort level for safety reasons, so I figured I would just stick to using a cultured product like yogurt. I went with Molly Yeh's yogurt-marinated chicken skewers which were flavored with ras el hanout and harissa, and skewered with peppers and onions. These came out good, but probably not something I would make regularly at this point considering the marinating time and how long it takes me to skewer things.

Week 39: soaking

I like having overnight oats for breakfast, but they've become a bit of a running joke in our household because I'm always talking about them and rarely making them because I forget to set them up at night. This challenge was the perfect motivation to actually make them, and this bowl was overnight oats with almond butter, oat milk, chia seeds, flaxseeds, cinnamon, maple syrup, and topped with blueberries and blackberries. I really do need to make them more.

Week 43: punny names

"Punny names" is the type of concept challenge that I'm not good at picking recipes for. I spent a long time googling punny foods, punny recipes, and all variations of that, but found very few things that interested me. Eventually, I got attached to the idea of doing pizza for "pizza my heart," but at the end decided on "little pizza my heart," which made more sense because I was making little flatbread pizzas. The pizzas were topped with artichoke pesto sauce, mozzarella, provolone, and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheeses, and a pancetta and mushroom heart. I was actually really happy with the combination flavor-wise, and the hearts, while more difficult to make than I thought they would be, kept their shape thankfully.

Week 44: Greek

The country weeks are usually a no-brainer for doubling up with the AtWCC, but I wasn't in the mood for trying regular spanakopita when this challenge rolled around. I don't know why, but I was really fixated on making it into a Christmas tree. (Note: It was not Christmas or December, not even Halloween yet.) I followed the recipe on Dimitra's Dishes for the spanakopita Christmas tree, and with a little help from A for making the tree "branches," it turned out pretty well. Probably more time-consuming than making regular spanakopita, which I'll likely do next time instead, as fun as this was.

Week 48: leaves

There are lots of things you can do with leaves, but I naturally gravitated toward salad. Now, if I had been doing these in order, you would have known that I made at least three other chicken-based salads in the second half of the year. I can't explain why, but my brain just really wanted salads like this, so I just went with it. This one was very loosely based on a Food52 recipe for a farmhouse chicken salad, and the leaves I ended up using were arugula, parsley, tarragon, chives, and thyme. I also made some tarragon radishes on the side. Good salad, but a ton of work with all those fresh herbs, so this is probably a one-time thing if made exactly like this.

Week 50: rosemary

Last one for this batch! I thought I might end up using this for the AtWCC too, but it was not meant to be. I chose rosemary aloo paratha based on another Food52 recipe, since I'd always wanted to try making paratha and rosemary and potatoes were such a good combination. (I didn't want to make more smashed potatoes since I had just done that for a challenge recently.) Unfortunately, there was something wrong with one of our potatoes and it just would not get soft enough for mashing despite being fork tender when boiled. I should have just used instant mashed potatoes but I was trying to do it the "right" way. That meant that the chunks of potatoes that wouldn't mash broke through the dough, and the whole thing was a mess. I'll try paratha again for the AtWCC, and hopefully it'll come out better next time.

Week 36 - Yeasted

Oops, fell behind on these recaps again. Where did February go?!

Anyway, back to challenge week 36, yeasted. I made a lot of bread in 2020. I'd say, thanks to some cooking classes, it was the year I actually learned how to make bread versus following a recipe. When this challenge rolled around, it had been a while since I last made bread, so I hoped that it was like riding a bike and I'd remember what to do.

I decided on a garlic parmesan herb bread from The Stay at Home Chef, and started off by setting up the yeast. Only... not much happened. Our yeast had been in the fridge for a while, since we bought a giant bag instead of packets (it was all we could get at the time since everyone was making bread at that stage of the pandemic), so it was definitely possible that the yeast was dead. Or maybe the water was too hot. I tried again with a packet that was definitely not expired. It was better, but I was still worried that it wasn't going to turn out right, since the yeast still didn't feel as "responsive" as in the past.

In the end, the bread turned out fine. I still don't know if anything will top how I felt after the sage bread I made back in 2020 where I was shocked that I actually pulled that off. This one made two small loaves, but it didn't rise quite as much as I thought it would. Still tasty though, and it went well with our roasted asparagus, zucchini, and clam strips. Maybe I just need to bake more bread to remember what to do!

Week 14 - Forbidden Fruit

When the Week 14 theme came up as forbidden fruit, I wasn't really sure what to do with that. Using the strict definition of forbidden fruit, something desired because it's not allowed, didn't really work, since there isn't much that isn't "allowed" in our kitchen. We don't cook with eggs for food allergy reasons, so I wasn't going to make something with those. I choose not to cook much red meat or to deep fry in our kitchen, but that's a choice, not something forbidden. I ended up deciding to interpret this as "guilty pleasure" instead, something that I want a lot but don't make that often because I'm trying to be mindful of my health. Using that lens, I decided to make some cheddar bay biscuits (yes, I made them for a previous challenge, but it was a good excuse to have them again) and paired them with some shrimp chowder.

When the theme notes finally came out, they did have some other possibilities for how to interpret forbidden fruit. It could be something your spouse hates but you like, but there isn't much A dislikes eating that I enjoy. It could be actual fruit, like apples from the garden of Eden (or grapes or figs) or a sometimes-forbidden fruit like durian. I didn't feel like redoing the challenge for one of those interpretations, and the biscuits really are a guilty pleasure, so that was good enough for us!

Week 19 - Ecuadorian

As part of the AtWCC, I'm hoping to make some form of bread (or explore bread in some other way if I'm not making it myself for whatever reason) for each location. When the Ecuadorian challenge came up, the recipe I was most interested in at the time was for pan de yuca, a chewy, cheesy bread, so it looked like I found my bread for Ecuador! I found a recipe on Laylita, and the challenge was set. Although we'd never had pan de yuca at an Ecuadorian spot before, it sounded similar to the Brazilian pao de queijo that we love, so I was hoping this would come out well.

For the challenge, I made a full batch and tried to follow the recipe closely, although I did do a couple of ingredient modifications, using a mix of fontina, asiago, and parmesan instead of grated mozzarella, and substituting flax eggs for the "regular" eggs. I chose to prepare it by hand instead of using a food processor, and it was fairly easy. You basically mix all the ingredients together until smooth, adding a little bit of warm water if dry, form the dough into balls, and then chill them in the fridge for about half an hour. I baked them for about 5-8 minutes, and then broiled them.

I pulled them out from the broiler when they started looking more brown than golden, but unfortunately the insides were still a little gummy. I wasn't sure if it was how I made them or an effect of using flax eggs instead, but I was a little disappointed. They were definitely edible and had a nice crunch to the outside, but the inside just didn't feel right texturally to me.

I tried the recipe again a few months later, only making a partial batch this time (quartered most measurements). I tried to make them the exact same way, but with other things going on, I left them baking a little longer before broiling them, and then maybe broiled them a little longer too. They were more golden than the last time, and this time, the insides were just what I was hoping they would be, not gummy at all. Unfortunately, I don't know if I know exactly how long I baked them for, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to replicate it. I kind of just lucked into it because I was doing other things. I guess I'll just have to give them another try and take notes next time!

Week 10 - Foam

Foam in the food context makes me think of two things: modernist cooking (not really my thing) and Top Chef (so many foams), so I had no idea what I was going to do for this challenge. I considered skipping it until I read on Modernist Bread that proofed dough was a closed-cell foam, bread was an open-cell foam, and fully baked bread was a set foam. I didn't know there were so many types of foam, but with that newfound knowledge, it was pretty easy to choose bread for this challenge.

I was doing a cooking class around this time where focaccia was on the menu, so I made focaccia for the foam challenge. Not sharing the recipe since it's not mine or publicly available, but it was a great class where we made focaccia, caprese salad, and wedding soup. A bit of a late night making three dishes at once in our not-very-big kitchen, but it was delicious!

Week 26 - Proofing

The folks behind the 52 week cooking challenge this year must have really wanted people to bake some bread, considering the themes for the first half of the year brought us from scratch (Week 17), flour (Week 21), and proofing (Week 26). We finally obtained yeast in June, and since we opened it up in the middle of our Afghanistan exploration of the AtWCC, it made sense to check off two boxes at once and make some Afghan bread for the proofing challenge.

We've loved the bread we've gotten at Afghan restaurants, and we always eat way too much of it when we're there. In addition to finding something that looked like that bread, I also needed to find a bread recipe that did not require egg. I found a recipe on Allrecipes for noni Afghani (aka naan), which looked kind of similar, and although it did have an egg on the ingredient list, it was only for an egg wash, for which I could substitute butter. After the lolo buns that turned into lolo cake, I could only hope that bread/yeast experiment #2 actually resulted in recognizable bread.

The ingredients for our version of the bread were:

- 1 tbsp sugar ($0.06)
- about 1.75 cups of water, divided ($0)
- 1 tbsp yeast ($0.20)
- 4 cups flour, plus extra for kneading and rolling ($0.90)
- 1.5 tsp salt ($0.03)
- 1/4 cup grapeseed oil ($0.60)
- 2 tbsp butter, melted ($0.18)

The recipe made 8 pieces of bread for $1.97, of which we had 2.5 left over at the end of dinner. We saved them to eat with another round of moqueca, and using A's microwaving techniques, they turned out pretty well.

Since the bread needed to proof, the entire process of making it took about 2.5 hours from start to plate. The steps for making the bread in our kitchen, mostly following the recipe but not entirely, were:

1. In a small bowl, combine 1 tbsp sugar with 1/2 cup of warm water. Stir.

2. Add the yeast on top, lightly stir, and allow it to stand for 10 minutes until foamy. [Depending on how small of a bowl you use, keep an eye on that yeast mixture. After 10 minutes, ours had risen to the top of the bowl, looking dangerously like it was going to overflow, and I had to rush through step 3 to make sure it didn't.]

3. In a large bowl, combine 4 cups of flour with 1.5 tsp salt.

4. Make a well in the middle, and pour in the yeast mixture along with 1/4 cup grapeseed oil. Set up two small bowls nearby with the rest of the water and a small amount of flour.

5. Mix well, adding the water in small amounts as needed until the dough is soft.

6. Knead the dough in the bowl (or not - at this point in the summer, I was still kneading everything in the bowl instead of on the counter) for 5 minutes. Add little bits of flour to the dough or your hands as needed while kneading until it's not too sticky.

7. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and allow to rise for about 1.5 hours.

8. Preheat oven to 350 degrees after the proofing time, and melt the butter.

9. Deflate the dough. [Since we really had no bread experience at this point, we had to look this up, and were very amused that it was really just firmly and gently pushing on it. It was also fun to do!] Divide into 8 pieces and roll into balls.

10. On a lightly-floured surface, roll the balls out into ovals about 1/2 inch thick. [I am not good at rolling into defined shapes. They just roll into whatever. I tried redoing one of them to make it a better oval and that might have been the worst one of the bunch.]

11. Draw 3 lines on top of each piece, and move the bread to lightly-oiled baking sheets. Brush with the melted butter.

12. Bake for about 20-25 minutes, and then remove from oven.

We needed two baking sheets to do this. The first baking sheet, which baked closer to 20-22 minutes on the top shelf, came out soft and fluffy. The second one ended up closer to the heat and also in the oven for longer because I was doing other things, making that one a little bit crunchier in parts. I was initially disappointed because it wasn't like the ones we had from our favorite Afghan restaurant in look or in taste, but it was never going to be, since they probably make theirs on a grill or in a tandoor, which we can't do. I felt like it was a little bland and didn't even taste the butter at first, but as I ate more of it, the butter came through, I really enjoyed the fluffiness of the bread, and it grew on me. A liked it, and B made it a primary part of his dinner (but then again, the kid usually loves bread), so I guess it was a success. I'd make it again, but maybe only half the amount so we don't fill up on bread alone.

Week 21 - Flour

The Week 21 challenge, flour, got postponed for over a month. Originally, my plan for the "from scratch" challenge was to make focaccia, but I pushed that back to the flour challenge once that was announced because it seemed to fit better there. We were waiting on yeast anyway at the time, so it didn't really matter where we put it. For my first time making focaccia, I decided to follow a recipe I found on Inspired Taste for an easy rosemary garlic focaccia bread. Easy sounded good since I was (and still am) a novice bread maker.

[Note: I made this back in July, and it was our third time baking with yeast, so we still didn't really know what we were doing. Initially, I wanted to post our bread/yeast adventures in order, but who cares about order anymore as the end of the year approaches? I'll admit that it's a little strange finishing and editing this post I started back in July now that we know so much more about bread, and also having recently posted about baking a loaf of bread, but I guess I should just try posting more timely...]

The ingredients for the focaccia were:

- 1/2 cup of olive oil, plus extra for oiling the bowl and baking pan ($1)
- 1 spoonful of minced garlic ($0.10)
- garlic powder ($0.03)
- rosemary ($0.10)
- thyme ($0.10)
- freshly ground black pepper ($0.02)
- just under 1 tbsp of yeast ($0.19)
- one small squeeze of honey ($0.10)
- 2.5 cups of flour, divided, plus extra for flouring surface/hands ($0.47)
- 1 cup of warm water ($0)
- 1/2 tsp of salt ($0.01)

The cost of the focaccia was approximately $2.12. I don't think I had ever realized how inexpensive it was to make your own bread. Paying with your time and labor, I guess! We paired the focaccia with a simple pasta dish with spinach and turkey meatballs, so my estimate for dinner (without knowing the exact costs of any of those) would be somewhere around $10. Not bad for a lot of food.

The steps to make "easy" focaccia were:

1. In a small skillet, heat 1/2 cup of olive oil with the minced garlic, garlic powder, rosemary, thyme, and black pepper over low heat for about 5 minutes, constantly stirring and making sure the garlic doesn't burn. Remove from heat and allow to cool to room temperature.

2. In a large bowl, mix the warm water, yeast, and honey. Stir and allow to sit for 5 minutes.

3. Add 1 cup of flour and 1/4 cup of the infused oil to the bowl with the yeast. Stir and let sit for at least 5 minutes. Make sure the oil is cool before being added so it doesn't kill the yeast.

4. Add 1.5 cups of flour and the salt. Stir until mixed together and a dough has formed.

5. Knead on a floured surface (I did it in the bowl, adding flour to the outside of the dough and my hands, maybe not the best idea looking back) about 10-15 times. [Ours felt really wet and sticky. Knowing what I know now after taking some bread-making classes, I should have tried adding more flour before kneading.]

6. Oil a large bowl. Put the dough in the bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and let sit for 1 hour so it can rise.

7. Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Using a 9x13 baking pan or dish with tall sides, grease the pan with 2 tbsp of the olive oil mixture. If not oiled enough, add some regular olive oil.

8. Transfer dough to pan, press down to the edges, and then dimple the dough with your fingers.

9. Top the dough with the rest of the infused olive oil, and then let the pan sit for 20 minutes for the dough to rise again. [Not sure ours did.]

10. Bake for 15 minutes. Remove and cool on wire rack.

Looking back at this bread experiment (which, as I mentioned, was the third time using yeast after the fun coconut buns/coconut cake experiment, and then some Afghan naan), I really had no idea what I was doing. I still consider myself a beginner at making bread, but I've learned a lot from some really knowledgeable people in the interim, so I kind of wish I had finished writing this post before that so I could see how far I've come. That night after I made the focaccia, I went reading other recipes and comments on how to make focaccia, and came across people using dough hooks and stand mixers, and they were testing their dough with the windowpane test. I hadn't done any of that, and I didn't even understand what the windowpane test was (I do now!), but something at the time told me that my focaccia hadn't come out quite right, didn't really rise enough, or some other issue that I couldn't identify, which is why I ended up researching. My guess now is that the dough wasn't the right consistency at the kneading step (probably needed more flour), and probably wasn't kneaded enough. No way I'm going to know unless I try it again sometime, and since I love focaccia, I probably will.

Technique aside, how was the bread itself? It was delicious! Maybe it wasn't as fluffy as restaurant or bakery focaccia, but the infused olive oil had great flavor and we all liked the bread. Even if it wasn't perfect, I was happy with how it turned out. Definitely want to give focaccia another try sometime.

Week 50 - Sage

I love sage, but it was difficult to choose a recipe for the Week 50 challenge because sage isn't usually the spotlight ingredient whenever I use it, even if it does play an integral part in the flavors of a dish. I originally thought about baking some chickpea sage fries, but when I went to read the recipe an hour or so before dinner, I saw that the batter was supposed to chill in the fridge for a few hours before frying (or, in my plan, baking), so that wasn't going to work. I was lukewarm on making the fries in the first place, so instead of trying that another day, I went back to search for more sage recipes. That's when I found a recipe for sweet onion sage bread on Kitchen Divas, and decided that would be a better fit for us.

The ingredients that ended up going into the bread were:

- 1 red onion ($0.77)

- a few tsp of dried sage ($0.10)

- freshly ground black pepper ($0.02)

- olive oil (not measured, used in several instances) ($0.40)

- 2-1/4 tsp yeast (equivalent of one packet) ($0.40)

- 1/2 tbsp sugar ($0.06)

- 3/4 cup warm water ($0)

- 2-1/2 cups all purpose flour, plus more for kneading (another cup or so) ($0.40)

- 1 tsp salt ($0.02)

- olive oil cooking spray ($0.15)

- Herbes de Provence ($0.20)

- a few grinds of salt ($0.02)

You might notice that there are two onions in that ingredient photo while the ingredient list only mentions one. When I started, I was following the measurements in the original recipe, but it just seemed like such a big recipe, using two packets of yeast and five cups of flour, so I decided after already chopping the onions to cut the recipe in half. The total cost for the bread was a little more than $2.50, which is pretty good considering how much bread it made. We ate it with plant-based breakfast sausage and some vegetables (zucchini, carrots, and the other chopped red onion), each of which cost approximately $4, so it was about $10.50 for a lot of food.

I generally followed along with the steps in the recipe, also using some techniques and tips we picked up from some of our bread-baking classes this fall. The steps for making our version of the bread were:

1. Prep - finely chop red onions.

2. In a skillet over medium heat, add some olive oil, and once hot, add onions, dried sage, and some black pepper. Cook until onions are soft and then set aside to cool.

3. In a small bowl, add the yeast, sugar, and warm water. Stir and then let sit for about 10-15 minutes. (It should be frothy and growing.) After that, add about 1/2 tbsp of olive oil.

4. In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour and salt. Then add the yeast mixture and onions, and mix well, making adjustments of water/flour until texture is ready for kneading. (I added a little water.)

5. Put dough on a flour-dusted surface and knead for at least 5 minutes, adding flour or water as needed. (I kneaded it for 15, adding a little bit of flour each time as I kept going along, totaling probably around one cup. I don't know how to explain how I decided when to stop, but it was based on the stickiness and stretchiness of the dough. I also used the windowpane test.)

6. Spray the inside of a big bowl with olive oil cooking spray, put dough in the bowl, flip over, and spray the top with more cooking spray. Cover with plastic wrap (also sprayed with cooking spray on the inside). Set aside to proof for 45-50 minutes until it doubles in size. (I used the microwave as bread proofer here, and after trying that a month or so ago, we haven't done it any other way.)

7. Once dough has doubled in size, punch it down gently, divide it into 2 pieces, and shape into loaves. (Even though I was only making half of the recipe, I still separated it in two.)

8. Grease a rimmed baking sheet, add loaves, and brush loaves with enough olive oil to cover them.

9. In a small bowl, combine a few grinds of freshly ground black pepper, a few grinds of salt, and a few spoonfuls of Herbes de Provence, and mix well. Sprinkle over loaves, and then let loaves sit uncovered for another 30 minutes to rise.

10. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake loaves for about 30 minutes. (We checked the temperature to see if it was 190 degrees at that point, and it was more. The original recipe said to leave it until the crust was golden brown. Ours didn't get that golden, but we pulled it out anyway.)

11. Remove loaves and cool on wire rack.

I loved the texture of this bread. It came out so soft, which was good for me, because I like soft bread more than bread with a harder crust. Each slice was soft, pillowy, and so full of olive oil and herbs in flavor. It was like biting into bread that had been dipped in olive oil and herbs, but without the actual dipping. I was having memories of Carrabba's (haven't been there in years since they closed the one near my parents) and their delicious bread, olive oil and herb mix, and it reminded me so much of that. As far as the challenge, you could taste the sage as part of the herb mix, but I don't think I would say that the bread tasted strongly of just sage.

This bread was so delicious that A and I definitely ate more calories in bread than we were planning to, but it was so hard to stop eating, especially knowing that freshly baked bread tastes so much better right out of the oven than out of the fridge or freezer (although it was pretty good out of the fridge the next day too). I'm still amazed that I baked a real loaf of bread, something that I would have never expected to say if you asked me a year ago. (But who would have predicted 2020 last year?) I've come a long way since my first yeast experiment with the lolo buns (that turned into a cake) earlier this year, and I'm still shocked that this was made with my own two hands. I would definitely make this bread again.