Beer Bread

Got in some baking time last night:


That's a couple of slices of Rose Levy Beranbaum's Beer Bread. I've made a few different beer bread recipes over the years, some with yeast, some without. Overall, I think I like the yeast recipes better. The beer quickbreads that I've made have come out really dense and cakey. That's fine, but with beer bread, I don't want to feel like I'm eating cake. The yeast recipes come out much lighter, although they obviously take longer because of the rising time.

This recipe has both whole wheat flour and white bread flour in it, along with a little bit of either malt powder or sugar to balance out the bitterness from the beer and whole wheat flour. I usually use a stout or a porter for beer bread, but for this one I used some Wolaver's brown ale, which yielded a lighter color bread with a more subtle beer flavor to it. Put some butter and honey on a warm slice of this... that's a couple of minutes of happiness right there. :)

MoJack Flank Steak

How yum does this look, non-vegetarians?

MoJack Flank Steak

A Jack Daniel's-and-citrus-based marinade? I'm intrigued. I've never cooked with whiskey... wine, sherry, vodka, but never whiskey. I'll have to try this out and report back. :)

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Verdict: Yum.



Giant didn't have flank steak when I went, so I grabbed a top round instead. I marinated it for about 5 hours, then slapped it on my electric grill. With all of the citrus in the marinade, I was a little worried that this would come out tasting like lime and nothing else, but I worried for nothing. All the flavors balance out nicely... and NO, it does not taste like bourbon, either. (Lesson learned today: bourbon is a type of whiskey. I learned this at the liquor store, after looking through the "whiskey" shelves in vain... and then finding the elusive Jack Daniel's in the bourbon shelves. A-HA!)

Pretzel Bread

And, if there's "part 1" of homemade snackage, you know there's a part 2... I made a batch of the intriguing-sounding "pretzel bread" rolls from The Bread Bible. They're rolls crossed with soft pretzels: how bad can that be?

First, the with-flash shot of the full batch right out of the oven:



And here's the nicer natural light shot:


I take SEVERE issue with this recipe claiming that you should be able to get 12 rolls out of the amount of dough it makes. I had 8 normal-sized rolls, and they'd have to be really tiny in order to give you a full dozen.

Other than that minor problem, this was a nice recipe. I was raised on Philly soft pretzels, the ones from the street carts that are big and doughy and wonderful, and I miss them. These rolls are definitely NOT soft pretzels, but they have that same dense chewiness that I love.

I didn't do the lye glaze, because lye kind of scares me. You're not supposed to touch it with bare hands because you might get a chemical burn from it... but I'm supposed to put it on rolls that I'm going to eat? Maybe somewhere down the line, but not today. I did the same sugar/baking soda glaze used for the bagels in the book, with good results.

This is a nice, easy, fast recipe -- a yeast bread that takes 2 hours total? Yay!

Maple Caramel Popcorn

Part one of today's homemade snackage:


A batch of yummy maple caramel popcorn, adapted from the recipe found here.



No nuts for me, so I left out the pecans. I only had 1/2 cup of maple syrup on hand, so I cut the caramel syrup recipe down to a third of what it's supposed to be. It's still plenty sweet and maple-y, but didn't require a cup and a half of pure maple syrup (which, having tasted this, I think would make it WAY too sweet).

I have a horrible tendency to burn sugar any time I try to make candy, and I was THRILLED that I caught the syrup before it burned (and yes, it was definitely heading that way). It was around 290 degrees at that point, which is close enough to 300 for me... poured it over the popcorn, and it started to harden almost immediately. I did get it spread out on a baking sheet to cool before it hardened completely, and then broke it up once it had cooled. This is some very tasty stuff, and hopefully, with 8 cups to munch on, I won't eat all of it today. :)

Crackers and breadsticks and chicken, oh my!

Here's what I did with my snowy Sunday...

I made whole wheat cumin seed crackers, topped with sesame seeds and kosher salt:



I experimented with an apricot chicken and rice dish:



I made a batch of crunchy herbed breadsticks (this batch had oregano and parsley, and romano cheese instead of parmesan):


To explain 2/3rds of what I did: I'm not buying any store-bought snack foods during Lent this year, so I'm hauling out various cracker and snack recipes to make in the meantime.

The whole wheat cumin seed crackers are part of a larger Charlie Trotter recipe for a seared tuna something-or-other... I thought the cracker part looked good (fish allergy, blah blah). The cumin seed flavor is actually a bit much in the crackers. I say that as someone who LOVES Indian food and is a fan of cumin seed in general. But, in these crackers, it's kind of overpowering. They're not BAD (half of them are gone already)... just not quite what I was expecting. Happily, I got a chance to test out a substitute "egg" wash that I thought would work nicely for these. Instead of using an egg + water, I mixed equal parts of honey and water, and brushed it on the crackers to adhere the sesame seeds and kosher salt. It worked very well. The honey gives a nice little touch of sweetness that works well with the whole wheat flour in these.

I've made the breadsticks before, and have talked about them here before... they're a nice snacking option, and I figured that I might as well make additional snack stuff while I had the time. :)

The apricot chicken and rice... let's just say that, when it snows around here, other people's driving gets incredibly scary. I decided to stay home and make dinner with what I had on hand. I don't normally make up recipes from scratch; I'll take an existing recipe and change half the ingredients around, but I don't usually just plop down a bunch of ingredients and say, "What can I make with this?" The fact that I came up with something that I actually want to make again... yay! I'll play around with it, and once I get a recipe for it, I'll pass it along.