Baking Our Own Bread

For the past two weeks we've been enjoying our own bread. Two weeks ago my brother-in-law Tristan decided to make focaccia bread again after a long hiatus. He wanted a father-daughter Saturday afternoon activity with 5-year-old Lilo. So they trooped to Baker's Depot at Robinson's Galleria and bought bread flour (about PhP26/500gm), whole wheat flour (for roughly the same amount) and SAF-Instant yeast (PhP70/small pack).

This recipe is of great significance because Tristan and my sister Joy learned it when they were still dating. Their friend Elena taught them how to make focaccia and pizza dough in exchange for them being interviewees for her master's degree course at the Ateneo. (Elena is a baker and currently sells her artisanal breads at the Mercato weekend market at The Fort.) That Saturday produced several tasty small loaves flavored with rosemary, shallots and garlic that looked like this:

Needless to say, the bread was delicious toasted, with or without butter. It had a soft crumb and a lovely color from the olive oil spread on top of the loaves before the last ten minutes of baking.

Next Joy wanted to make No Knead Bread. New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman popularized the recipe, by Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery, in 2006. We saw chef Michael Smith make his version on his Asian Food Channel show Chef at Home. What convinced us was Jaden Hair's Steamy Kitchen blog entry, showing her cute then-4-year-old son Andrew assembling the dough. We are 5 years late to the baking-and-blogging NK Bread party, but then we only acquired a Lodge 5-quart cast iron Dutch oven some time last year (it was on sale at Gourdo's, for something like PhP 2,500). The recipe requires a sturdy, heat-resistant baking vessel with a close-fitting cover, usually a heavy enamel casserole pot or a cast iron Dutch oven. It should be able to withstand 450 degrees F for an hour or so. The blog 80 Breakfasts even tells us of a brave soul who made her NK Bread in a crockpot body covered with a ceramic plate, then baked inside a turbo broiler. Talk about ingenuity.

We started after dinner one night and left the dough to rise overnight, producing a wetter dough than you see in the video or in the Steamy Kitchen blog. See the blow-by-blow pictures here. We're not sure if it has something to do with the high humidity in the Philippines. Next time we'll reduce the water from 1 1/2 cups to 1 1/4 cups. We'll also use foil or baking parchment as a base when the dough undergoes its second rise; that way we can put the entire thing in the extremely hot cast iron Dutch oven safely. Letting the dough fall from the floured towel made a huge plop that deflated the dough. It also left some dough on the towel that was hard to scrape off (if you took all that trouble to prepare the dough, you wouldn't want to lose some of it to the towel!). However, we ended up with an interesting 9"-round rustic whole wheat loaf that rose some 2 1/2 inches. We should have waited for it to cool completely, but we were too impatient. The bread had a tasty crust and a hole-y crumb.

We slathered it in butter and nearly finished it in one sitting! We managed to leave a bit to go with the seafood chowder we had for dinner that same night. Yes, we're making it again. I read through many other bloggers' experiences with the recipe and we will make adjustments accordingly. We'd love for the bread to rise higher, but that would require a smaller, narrower (3-4 quart) Dutch oven.

Many Filipinos prefer their bread soft and sweet, but we rather like the No Knead Bread precisely for the difference of its texture and flavor. It reminds us of French or Italian country breads, the boules and batards, the kind you toast and use to scrape up your delicious soup or gravy. The kind you dip in a mix of herbed olive oil and balsamic vinegar and enjoy as an appetizer. The kind you have toasted, spread with butter and honey for breakfast, because it doesn't need much else. As an idea, it has romantic charm. The tasty reality is a very good thing.

We're eager to try other bread recipes, of course. The cost of liquid petroleum gas is up, but baking our own bread is worth it.

Journalling

I realize I haven't blogged since September last year. I believe that was the time our wi-fi connection was going wonky. Was it the wi-fi modem? Apparently not; it was the PLDT modem that was overheating because we kept it on 24/7. We're still on the same fritzy modem, but are thinking of switching to other networks.

The last quarter of any year is always the most hectic, too. I also haven't been lugging around a camera to capture life's bloggable moments with, since I do have to share the camera with the other members of the family. Once I caught myself telling my mother to stop taking pictures all the time and to choose to enjoy the moment - there is the danger that we record moments out of habit and yet forget to savor them to the fullest, thinking that looking at pictures will do that for us. We end up drowning ourselves in information and have difficulty choosing which ones to highlight. I go through a phase like this periodically.

What I have been doing regularly for the past two years is write in my journal. I used to journal in college; I have 9 black books in my closet from those years. I still haven't tried re-reading them. Maybe when I'm down low I'll open them and be able to laugh at my teenage angst. I had dream journals in those days too; my dreams were weird and wonderful and interesting. I used to keep them next to my bed and wrote in them the moment I woke up, because the moment I folded my blanket the details of the dreams would disappear. I didn't start journalling again until 2007. I had all these fountain pens and inks and needed a way to regularly use them in rotation.

This year's journal is a 2010 diary that I never got to use as a day planner. I have six different fountain pens inked in different colors (because I'm "maarte" that way, and I know several people who are like me), and I use a different pen every day. I don't care if it looks strange, and I don't care if the ink may fade. I get a kick out of feeling the glide of the fountain pen's nib on the paper (it's such a tactile pleasure). I write whatever comes into my head, as the journal isn't intended to win any literature prize. I don't have to be politically correct in my journal, but I must be honest. I celebrate things of significance only to me. I vent my feelings and afterwards remind myself to be kinder and more generous in my daily actions. I guess it helps me maintain a more even keel.

I've decided to blog regularly again. I'm planning to get a new phone with a better camera (more on that later). While the journal is just for me, there are things in life (when a Facebook status or Twitter update isn't enough) worth sharing with my friends and relatives.

Guinea Pig Lap Time

It's Eid al'Fitr, a national holiday, and today I celebrate the first time our pet guinea pig Moonball got Lap Time!

Every day my sister and I would scoop her up and give her some liquid vitamin C via syringe, and at first she would struggle. Eventually I got the hang of handling her by the shoulders so she wouldn't slip from my grasp - I'd wrap her quickly in a soft face towel and Joy would feed her the vitamin C. Moonball is a warm little thing, with a little round belly, so I try to be as gentle as possible and not give her a fright.

While I was out having lunch Joy discovered that she could pet Moonball on her lap if she gave her carrot peels to munch. Moonball allowed herself to be stroked and occasionally nodded off. Naturally my little niece Lilo was delighted; her hands were too little to hold Moonball properly, so she just patted Moonball while she was on Joy's lap.

This afternoon after returning from errands Joy surprised me by putting Moonball on MY lap. She ate two or three little pieces of carrot peel and snuggled on her face towel. I loved stroking her! She purred and chirped and made these little sounds of contentment. She even fell asleep a while. "We just have to get her used to the idea that she will get carrot peels whenever she has Lap Time," Joy said. We figured twice-a-day Lap Time would be sufficient. Before this she was a frisky little thing that kept trying to evade us unless she smelled grass in our hands.

We used to have dogs, and I miss having them, but having a little guinea pig to pet is almost quite as good.