ooh la la, elle a fait croissants!!

I finally ventured in the complex art of homemade butter croissants. Following the Tartine recipe, it took me 3 days to finish! Patience is really the key here, along with strong muscles to hammer down the butter and roll out the dough. In the end, they tasted delicious!

DAY 1: prepare the overnight poolish and a sourdough levain, they will serve as ferment allowing a slow rise and a more complex flavor.

DAY 2: mix the dough, beat the butter into a flatten sheet and laminate the dough with the butter. Before spending the night wrapped in plastic in the fridge, the dough is folded and laminated with the an immense quantity of butter. The folding and rolling out the dough is what gives it its ultimate butter flakiness.   

DAY 3: after a slow rise in the fridge, I rolled out the dough, cut it into triangles and rolled the croissants. I made 2 batches of small and regular croissants and froze 1/3 of the dough to use next week. 

These are going to lucky fellows over at Outsystems.  

blog to book

a student documentary on the future of print

I'm been spending my evenings editing this blog's content onto Blurb so I can have a printed version of my blog. I'm doing this mostly because my blog is a diary and I don't believe in the eternity of the electronic format. And because it's was on my list... 

Electronics are ephemeral, invisible and disposable. You don't feel it. And if you can't touch it, it does not exist. I need to "touch" this blog, only then I'll believe it really exists and I can store it on a physical and real shelf. Knowing that it's there and that I can pick it up at anytime. If you love books, you can relate. It's human nature. 

This however, is a hard process. Not because of all the copy/paste labor, but it makes me look back at my life in Portugal and it makes me cry with saudade. It's a process. 

bread in a dutch oven

Kinfolk's Dutch oven bread 

Making bread is a process. A slow and patient process. This film by Kinfolk portraits bread making beautifully: with every step follows a waiting period, so you need to take the time.
I've always read that to achieve better results in retaining moisture during baking to use a cast iron dutch oven. I finally got one. Last night I baked my first loaf with it.

Everyone always asks me for the recipe, but I don't really follow any recipe. I just randomly mix the ingredients. But I promise I'll write a post with a step by step recipe to make a loaf. 

blueberry jam

A few days after we went blueberry picking, I made jam.
Simple recipe with no measurements: blueberries, brown sugar and apples for pectin. 

blueberry picking

This past weekend, aside from being volunteers at the Youth National Sport Climbing Championships, we managed to go blueberry picking at a local farm. I had this romanticized idea that it would be fun... it would have been lots of fun but not under a 40ºC heat picking teeny-tiny berries one by one from the bush!! We were exhausted and sticky after almost 2 hours of picking. 

We picked about 6kg of berries (around 2 gallons in american metric system - a thing I will never figure out...). It's all going into smoothies, homemade jam, pancakes, bread, salads you name it, it'll have blueberries in it!

homemade pesto

I've always wanted to make homemade pesto. I love the taste of it with pasta, salads or smudge potatoes with it before roasting them. So good.... 

In our last trip to the farmers market we bought 3 bundles of basil, Parmesan cheese and walnuts (you're supposed to use pine nuts, but walnuts are just as good). 

You can find hundreds of pesto recipes online, but read up on 2 recipes and based on what they said, I did my own pesto: with no accurate measurements, a blender, a bit more garlic than usual (cause I love garlic) and not too salty. It probably won't preserve for long, but I doubt it will last long in the fridge, because it tastes so good. 

101 cookbooks has an amazing pesto recipe straight from an Italian grandmother, but she chops it all by hand... which I think it really does make a great sauce, but I had no patience, so Just tossed everything into a blender. The other recipe is Jaime Oliver's pesto. No secret here. 

Honestly, it takes about 10 minutes to make and the flavor is just wonderful. Try it and you'll never want to buy supermarket pesto ever again! Oh, and the bread was also made by me: cinnamon, raisin and cranberry bread. 

pizza and bread

thanksgiving dinner and apple pie

# 94 - apple pie from scratch: from this smitten kitchen recipe (even though I didn't follow it strictly)

# 90: what better way to get into the soon-to-be american way of life than by hosting a thanksgiving dinner a day before! We had friends over and ate turkey (not a whole one cause that wouldn't fit in the oven!) with spicy lentils with feta cheese, baked sweet potatoes and pumpkin, peas and carrots, cranberry wannabe sauce, rice, corn bread, cheese, wine, tuna dip, ice-cream and my beautiful apple pie. 

bread baking sunday

Today was bread making day. I followed this recipe from the baker but with a few differences: I added some whole wheat flour and kneaded the dough with this very energetic french kneading technique which I've been wanting to try out.

It came out beautifully, though I do tend not to over bake. (I miss my grandfather's wood oven....) If anyone wants a bit of starter to bake their own bread, I have plenty to share.

I think next time I'll make small little round buns.

Tartine Bread

After several attempts at baking the basic country bread recipe, I realised something wasn't right because all my loaves were coming out pancake styled and nothing like the beautiful loaves in the book. Until one day the Baker enlightened my path and discovered what I (and everyone else who strickly follows recipes) was going wrong. Recipes are meant to be reinvented! When it comes to artisan bread you really have to understand the bread making process. So the problem was the original recipe has too much water. In this wonderful post, the Baker explains exactly what was going wrong and how to fix it.

After testing out my grandfather's amazing stone oven, I tripled the original recipe, plus the extra amount of flour suggested by the Baker and mixed in almost 400gr of organic seeds. The rest of the process went smoothly... exactly as discribed in the book, though I did give the dough some extra turns. 

I don't know if the secret is in the dough or in the oven, but I was astonished at how fast it baked: 15 minutes! I saw it rise and crisp, right before my eyes. In Lisbon, the baking process took more than an hour.

Nine beautiful and perfect loaves: crispy on the outside, soft and moist on the inside. 

In the end, it was a scary feeling because I had just realized that I would be very happy as a bread baker... 

# 38 make cornbread in my grandpa's stone oven

Broa (cornbread) has always been part of my childhood memories: I remember my grandfather making it, just for us, when we came on holidays to Portugal, as a special treat. Broa hadn't been made on a weekly basis since over 30 years ago, when industrial bakeries took over the bread making tradition. The firewood oven became a deposit for junk and all the wooden utensils were put away.

Being in Viana for the month of August, I was determind to bake broa once again despite everyone opposing me with all sorts of arguments: you can't find cornflour; the oven it's working properly; it takes too long to heat; you don't know how to make it, etc.; etc.

I asked around for cornflour, tested the oven, cleaned out the utensils and convinced my aunt to help me out. The last time she baked broa was in fact over 30 years ago before she moved to Canada and had to make an effort to remember how it was made. 

At local mill I bought cornflour (not the best quality) and the yeast came from a local bakery (the next time I'll use my homemade starter). We couldn't use the maceira, because it wasn't in very good conditions, so instead  we mixed the dough in a large clay bowl used to season chouriços. 

The oven heated very quickly and acelerated the bulk rise process.

Before baking broa, our grandfather would always bake bolinhas: small sized cornbread where he would mark small holes according to our age. So my aunt and I did the same!

These bolinhas are baked before the broa, when the oven is extremely hot and it doesn't require a closed oven door. They bake in about 10 minutes are are best eaten straight out of the oven.   

My aunt shaped the broa herself and tossed each loaf very carefully into the oven which was then sealed with clay to in-hold the heat during the baking.

The loaves were removed from the oven only 1h30 later, distributed between my family that was so thankful for my persistence and, of course, my aunt and I were proud of our delicious accomplishment!