Thanks to Michael Ruhlman and his bread baking app for the iPhone, I have nearly mastered the baguette.

Out here in the sticks, we don’t have access to the kinds of artisan breads that I could get even at my not-swanky supermarket in California. I live with a man for whom good carbs are really crucial — and who loves loves loves good bread.

I’ve been making the no-knead bread for ages (as my many posts on that subject attest), but it needs a long lead time and an overnight fermentation. There have been a few times recently when I’ve been out of bread but didn’t want to pony up four bucks for a mediocre loaf of bread at my local market. Ruhlman’s bread baking app is great — you can put in what you want to make, white or wheat, boule or baguette, and up comes a recipe. Yesterday I started the dough at about 3pm and we had bread for dinner at 8 (this is where working at home comes in handy).

The first one I made last night was too long for my oven, so it wound up as a sort of s-shaped baguette, but it tasted great. This morning, I mixed up a new batch, and split it into two loaves. Voilà! Baguettes.

The second batch I tinkered with a little bit — added some sourdough starter for flavor (which required a little math, the starter is 50/50 flour water, so I had to calculate how much flour and water I was replacing from the original recipe), and wheat germ for crunch and depth of flavor. They came out really well (although I haven’t tasted them yet).

There is one minor issue I’m having … scorching. The recipe says to preheat the oven to 450 — I actually cut that to 425 because I’ve found that the no-knead works best at that temp. But both last night and today, I wound up with scorched bottoms when I baked them on the baking stone. The stone is on the bottom of the oven, and this afternoon, I put the loaves on parchment paper (makes it much easier to slide them into the oven that way). Still, wound up with scorched bread. When I smelled the scorching I moved the loaves up onto a rack, where the rest of the crust got nice and brown, but this is an issue. I’m going to have to play around with it.

I have to say, I love the iPhone app for this use. It’s easy to access, the instructions were simple and straightforward, and for the first time I understood how to roll/shape the baguettes so they didn’t go flabby all over the oven. It would be nice if there was a way to make a note on your own copy of the app. But overall, I’m a fan so far.

Last spring when I had backyard greens to spare, I put up several quarts of “green soup.” And boy, am I glad now. It’s winter. It’s not that cold, but it’s grey and windy and grey — and nothing is growing in my garden and yet, down in the basement freezer, there are quarts of this lovely soup, made with my very own greens. A saving grace.

Green soup is very easy. Wash and chop greens of any variety — most of last springs’ soups were made with a mix of broccoli rabe, komatsuna, spinach, and mustard greens. In a big pot, sauté some chopped onion, and maybe a little garlic and red pepper flakes if you like. Then I like to add some peeled and chopped carrot (for sweetness). Sauté for a few minutes to start them cooking, then add all the greens and sprinkle with salt to taste. Throw in a few peeled and chopped potatoes (for a dutch oven full of soup, I’ll put in 2-3 peeled baking potatoes. You want them for the starch, to thicken the soup up.) Wilt the greens and add either stock or water to cover. Simmer until the potatoes and carrots are very soft, and the greens have cooked through. Then puree with an immersion blender. You can add a little cream if you like, or a dollop of sour cream or yogurt to the soup bowl.

I froze this in quart jars, which made me feel guilty for not eating them all summer, but are now rewarding me with late-winter green goodness. With a slice of toast, this is a perfect lunch.

With apologies to my blog readers who have seen this bread before, but after several years, what I find interesting is how the weather affects my bread baking. I can’t get a decent loaf to work for me in the summer when it’s hot, but when my kitchen goes back to it’s usual 65-70 degrees, I can make a bomber loaf of bread.

This is the no-knead bread I’ve been making for years now. Three cups flour (this is one cup each of King Arthur bread, all-purpose and whole-wheat flours, with a nice sprinkling of Bob’s Red Mill Dark Rye for flavor), 1 tbsp salt, 1/4 tsp. active dry yeast, 1.5 cups sourdough starter and about a cup of water. Mix until you have a “shaggy dough” as the original recipe noted, cover with plastic wrap and let rise overnight. In the morning, dump onto a board, knead a few times and shape into a boule (here’s a link to an instructive video with a slightly dopey voice over: http://youtu.be/I5t-1sJwzFs). I don’t have one of those fancy baskets, but I use a collander lined with a floured dishtowel.

So, I don’t bake when it’s 90 degrees out — and after languishing in the back of the fridge for a while, the sourdough starter takes a few batches to get it’s mojo back. But beyond that, the bread just doesn’t work when it’s warm out. It winds up weirdly flaccid, or it rises too fast, or something. I’ve made probably three or four loaves since the worst of the heat broke, and this is the first one that worked. You could feel it in the dough this morning when I went to shape it. The bad loaves, you couldn’t really get a “skin” on it like you wanted. The dough just felt “dead” in some weird way … this dough, it rose overnight but didn’t seem overly foamy. When I dumped it out on the board, it kept some shape, and it had a little pushback when I went to knead/shape it. How to explain? It just felt like bread.

My kitchen stayed in the high 60s/low 70s all day, and by about one, the bread had risen to the point where when you poked it with a finger, a slight dimple was left. So I cranked up the oven to 425 (which is the temp I like — it springs, but the crust doesn’t get overly caramelized) with the dutch oven inside. When everything came to temp, the bread went in the pot, I scored it a couple of times with a sharp knife, and put the lid back on. It cooks for 30 minutes with the lid on, 20-25 with it off.

And voila! My first fully-sprung, fully-risen lovely bread of the season. Yet another reason to be glad the dog days of summer are over.

Here’s the fresh cheese I made out of Home Made, a cookbook I’ll be reviewing for Bookslut later this week. It’s a good simple cheese that doesn’t require any special equipment.

It is even better topped with the Apple Chutney I made (sort of a mashup between the recipes in Put ‘em Up! by Sherri Brooks Vinton and in Tart and Sweet by Kelly Geary and Jessie Knadler). I put up 10 half-pints of this one, and had a tiny bit leftover for an afternoon snack, which was delicious.

I pretty much quit making yogurt when I stopped buying raw milk from my rancher friend. However, this spring, I’ve been craving yogurt again — on fruit in the morning after my bike ride, and mixed with Aleppo pepper, salt, herbs and olive oil on almost everything else.

So I’ve been buying yogurt, which bothers me on two fronts. For one thing, the plastic containers — they add up. I don’t use plastic anymore for food storage, and we don’t have good recycling here, and it just seems unnecessary. The other problem is that commercial yogurt has weird things added to it. The thick Greek yogurt has extra milk solids and pectin, and the Tillamook (shown above) freaked me out when I read that it had gelatin and “modified corn starch.” I don’t eat things like “modified corn starch” if I can help it — especially not in something as simple as yogurt.

So, I went back to making it. I bought a container of the yummy, and unadulterated Straus yogurt when I was down at the Bozeman Co-Op the other day, along with a half gallon of Organic Valley whole milk. Since there was about half a quart of skim milk starting to turn in the fridge door, I threw that in too (I’d go back to buying milk from my rancher friend, but I don’t go through a gallon a week, and my cheesemaking phase seems to be over for now).

Here’s the method:

1. Heat the milk to 90 degrees Celsius (I use a candy thermometer)
2. Put the pot in the sink in an ice bath and stir until the temp comes down to 50 degrees Celsius
3. Add yogurt (I poured probably a half cup out of the container — you really only need a few tablespoons, but I always add a little more to be safe)
4. Stir to mix
5. Ladle the hot milk mixture into clean, sterilized jars (if you like sweet yogurt, you can add a little jam to the bottom of the jars)
6. Cap the jars (I reuse lids for this since they go in the fridge and it’s not “real” canning)
7. Pack the jars in a cooler, and fill with hot tap water to the bottom of the rings
8. Close the lid and put the cooler someplace quiet
9. Leave it for several hours or overnight, in the morning take the jars out and put in the fridge. With the seal that forms, they stay good for quite a long while.

There it is. Easy. And you get nice, clean yogurt with no weird stuff in it.

There’s a great piece over at Civil Eats this morning, Our Deadly, Daily Chemical Cocktail on the sheer amount of chemicals in the food most people eat. Here’s the quote that got me:

Based on the anecdotal information I see in my client’s food journals, people eating processed and packaged foods are taking in exorbitant amounts of artificial ingredients and additives. Typically, a client will say something like, “I eat a bowl of cereal with low-fat milk, have yogurt for a snack, and a Subway sandwich for lunch.” While this sounds relatively harmless, here’s what it might actually look like based on some popular “health food” items:

• One serving of Kellogg’s Fiber Plus Antioxidants Berry Yogurt Crunch contains more than 13 different additives, preservatives, and food dyes, including Red 40 and Blue 1, which are known to cause allergic reactions in some people and mutations leading to cancer in lab animals. It also contains BHT, monoglycerides, and cellulose gum. In addition, conventional milk often contains residues of artificial bovine growth hormones, known endocrine disruptors as well as antibiotics used in industrial milk production.

• Dannon Light & Fit Peach yogurt contains more than 11 different additives including Red 40, aspartame, potassium sorbate, sucralose, and acesulfame potassium.

• A Subway sandwich of turkey and cheese on nine-grain bread with fat-free honey mustard, peppers, and pickles contains more than 40 different additives, preservatives, and dyes. The pickles and peppers have yellow 5 and polysorbate 80, the bread has ten different additives including dough conditioners, DATEM, and sodium stearoyl lactylate, and the turkey contains ten additives as well.

The person in this example has consumed more 60 food additives eating breakfast, a small snack, and lunch alone, to say nothing of dinner, dessert, further snacking and drinks. Consumers Union’s Dr. Hansen told me, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it were up to 100 additives or more that people are taking in on a daily basis.”

Excerpts like this make me feel like actually I’m weirder than I think. I don’t buy any of that stuff, in part because it seems like a ripoff to me (those little pots of yogurt) and because I’ve always been suspicious of processed food. And Subway. Ugh. The bread is sweet! There’s so much sugar in what most people think of as “regular” food.

While I’ve always proselytized for eating “real food,” I do realize that since I work at home, and don’t have to commute, and don’t have kids, I’m in a different demographic from many people, and hence, it’s easier for me. Or is it? Really, how hard is it to buy plain yogurt and, if you like it sweet, add a dollop of real jam? Or make a sandwich at home from real ingredients that you can control? Or even bread — I make bread once or twice a week depending (except in the summer when it’s too hot) and it’s not hard at all.

But more fundamentally, I don’t understand why people trust these huge corporations, whose motive is only profit, with the food that goes into their bodies. Why, for example, would someone think that food produced in some huge factory someplace, by strangers, then loaded with chemical sweeteners and emulsifiers and preservatives is somehow better than what you can make at home from simple ingredients?

A couple of weeks ago I took a stab at the Classic Rye Bread recipe that Michael Ruhlman ran on his site. My beloved likes rye bread, and had asked for a sandwich bread. The recipe was really simple, so I took a shot at it (minus the caraway seeds because neither of us really likes them).

The first loaf I made was sort of heavy, and the crumb lacked elasticity. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t great.

So this time, I did a mashup between the original recipe and the no-knead sourdough that I do weekly. I added a cup and a half of sourdough starter to the dough, mixed it to the “craggy wet” consistency of the no-knead, and left it to rise overnight. What I wanted was the stringy gluten that a long ferment seems to produce so effortlessly. This morning, it had risen to the top of my bread bowl and had that nice wet bubbly texture that I’ve come to appreciate from overnight fermentation.

Because it was so wet, I plopped it in my trusty 40-year-old Kitchen Aid and added some flour while it kneaded. I kneaded it for about 10 minutes, and probably added an extra cup of bread flour along the way (this might be one cause of the mutant oven spring). It still seemed pretty sticky, but it was very very elastic. I made a rectangle, folded it in thirds like a letter, and tucked it inside a big pyrex bread pan to rise. About an  hour later I was thrilled to see it rising really nicely, so I slashed the top and put it in the oven.

Twenty minutes later when I checked on it, I saw this: mutant classic rye bread. It had sprung up and out of the pan, and was splitting open along the seam where I’d slashed the top.

Mutant shape aside, this bread tastes great. It’s got a nice elastic crumb, the rye taste is detectable but not overpowering, and I think it’ll make really nice sandwiches. Which is what we wanted.

Next time, will probably not add so much extra flour, or I’ll use my larger bread pan. This is an easy loaf and tastes great.