Kaiser Rolls recipe, and the Arrogant Bastard..

This is the recipe I've been using the past few times for my sandwich Kaiser rolls. I love 'em! They seem to stay soft and delicious for a really long time, too.. which I think is a bit odd, compared to my regular bread loaf, which starts to go hard after three or four days.

This is from King Arthur's site:

• 3 cups (360g) King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons (9 grams) instant yeast
• 1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
• 1 1/4 teaspoons (9 grams) salt
• 1 large egg
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 3/4 cup (177 grams) warm water

Manual Method:In a large bowl, or the bowl of your electric mixer, combine all of the ingredients, stirring till the dough forms a cohesive mass and begins to clear the sides of the bowl. Knead the dough for 5 minutes, then allow it to rest for 10 minutes (which gives the dough a chance to absorb the liquid, and the gluten in the flour a chance to relax.) Knead the dough for an additional 5 minutes, or until it's smooth and supple. The dough should be quite stiff, but not at all "gnarly;" adjust its consistency with additional flour or water, as necessary. Transfer the dough to a lightly greased bowl or dough-rising bucket, cover the bowl or bucket, and allow the dough to rise till it's noticeably puffy, about 1 hour.

Shaping:Transfer the dough to a lightly greased work surface, and divide it into six equal pieces. Shape the pieces into round balls, and then flatten them into 7" discs. Working with one ball of dough at a time, shape the balls of dough into 5 sided pentagon shapes, by folding the edge of the disc up towards the middle of the disc, equally, on five edges. Repeat with the remaining rolls. Dip the tops into whatever topping you like, for instance, poppy seeds as shown below..

Like this:

This photo shows a 1/2 risen roll, flipped upside right..

Place the rolls cut-side down (yes-cut-side down--this helps them retain their shape) onto a lightly greased or parchment-lined baking sheet. Cover the rolls, and allow them to rise for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until they've almost doubled in volume, flipping them right side up a few minutes before baking so as to allow the tops to get rounded and not be flat from being upside down.

Bake the rolls in a preheated 425°F oven for 15 to 17 minutes, or until they're golden brown. Remove them from the oven, and cool on a wire rack.Yield: six large kaiser rolls.. like these:

Arrogant Bastard.

This is a beer I had once in Denver, CO two years ago and have feared ever since. Ever since this year, I should say. That year in Denver, on a trip to the Great American Beer Fest with my faithful companion Jody, I had a pint of Stones 'Arrogant Bastard' at Falling Rock tap house. That beer beat me up, kicked in my face, spit in my eye, and threw me out of the bar. I could not finish it. It was so arrogant. Down right cruel, in fact. It was liquid sandpaper. It was the beer drinking equivalent of consuming a hand grenade. It was the beer drinking simile of trying to toss back a pint of running chain saw.

And, apparently, it was all bologna. I've had Arrogant Bastard since then.. In another bar, at my house, at the same bar, Falling Rock in Denver, 2009 in fact.. I've had Oaked Arrogant Bastard, and I've had Double Bastard, also at GABF. All have not measured up. I have not had had the same reaction to a beer as I had that first time with the Bastard in Denver. Was that a bad batch? Was that a *good* batch? Was that a particularly *mean* batch? Was that a special brew made just for the guests at Falling Rock at that particular moment? I don't know, but no beer since then has owned me as hard as that one did two years ago. And not tonight, either. 

Tonight's Arrogant Bastard was a fairly straightforward beer.. yeah, it was a little on the coarse hoppy side, but other than that, fairly standard. Dark Mahogany in color, not much head remained after the gentle pour of this bomber into a 22oz snifter. Take note of the photo. Again, it had an above-average hop aggressiveness, but it wasn't mean. I mean, my wife surely wouldn't drink this one, but I didn't think it was over the top. It got better, tastier, after it warmed up a bit. Stone Brewing won't tell you the particular hop variety, but it's one of those high cohumulone types. And this time, I drank it all. And I enjoyed it. Relished it, even. It was a good beer.  I lived to tell the tale, and would certainly drinnk another without fear. 

But now what? Before, I had a beer I knew could beat me. Something that took me out of the game once, and surely could do so again.. but I guess that one was a fluke. What's a fellow to do now? Where's my challenge? I feel a bit let down, actually.. like I've crested the mountain and am now relaxing on the walk down the other side.. 

I need another arrogant beer. I need a bigger, better, meaner bastard. Something to fear.. any suggestions? 

Kombucha revealed, busted loaf, & pickled eggs..

Ha! Fixed that damn snowblower today. Sorta. Parts of it, anyway. The drive chain is still busted, but the thing starts and runs now. Jerk!

Here's the latest flat sourdough that I hurled into space (well, the back yard anyway.. ) this morning:

Darn things keep coming out flat. Just not rising enough. Talking with some folks on The Fresh Loaf website and they think I'm on the right track.. but still doing some trouble shooting on this.

Here's a shot of the Kombucha project.. the first one, not the second. This one is all bubbly in the bottle now, and tastes just FINE. *Really* fine, in fact.

The second version of the Kombucha monster is still churning in the jar downstairs, but really probably is done by now. Interested to see how that tastes, since I used Lapsang Souchong tea as the base.. heh.

Here's a pic of the jar of pickled eggs I made up a couple days ago, too.

Here's the recipe:

• 1 cup white vinegar
• 1/4 cup balsamic red vinegar
• 3/4 cup water
• 2 rings of onion (small onion)
• 1 clove of garlic
• tsp of crushed red peppers
• dash of all-spice/lawries stuff
• 3 glubs of hot sause

All but the all-spice and hot sause brought to a boil then cooled. Add to 6 hard boiled eggs after. Easy as that. Only reason I used balsamic vinegar is I just didn't have *quite* enough white vinegar to do the job.. and now the whole project is a deep red color. Curious. We'll see how that works out, as I've never pickled eggs before and have no idea if I even will like them.

Speaking of eggs, this is becoming a pretty typical sight for a morning:

Four large eggs, ranging from 52 to 57 grams per egg. This is the girls' collecting bucket.. they like it, and keep them from breaking the eggs in their hands while trying to open the doors to bring the eggs inside. Kids are funny like that.

The new, bestest thing.. and snowy chickens.

These chickens just got their first taste of real snow. And they're not that interested. I opened the door to the outside world this morning after collecting 4 eggs from the ladies to see hat they thought of the place. Only two were on the ground eating at the time, but nobody else came down after I unlocked the door.. and that's really unusual. They normally would have been out of that box like a shot.. but not with the 5-ish new inches of snow/slush on the ground. Have to keep an eye on them and see how they progress.. cause it ain't gonna get any nicer out there!

This is the new, bestest thing for breakfast here in my house. The two scrambled egg and shredded cheese, salsa covered and hotsause infused breakfast burrito. It is *awesome*. And no, I did not make that tortilla. I tried and failed in the past at that.. I know my limitations now, and tortillas are one of them.

My snow blower is broken again. The new drive chain is still on order.. but since that's hopefully gonna get fixed, the spark seems to have just given up the ghost just now.. and I was *almost* done, too. I also have no adequate shovel with which to shovel the deck or front walk.. so that project failed utterly.

I'm going to go make some bread to attempt to cheer myself up.

100 posts, IPA review (sorta) and.. snow.

So, it snowed last night. There's about an inch and a half on the ground out there. I hate it. My M/C hasn't been properly put away yet for the year, or my lawn mower, for that matter.. and the snowblower is still not fixed quite right. Heck, it's still upside down in the garage, in agony, from last year.

In other news, this was a really good beer. Surprised me, because it's good, it's been on the shelves here for who-knows-how-long, and I'm not sure I've ever even tried it before. I cannot remember any details on it, other than it had a fairly agressive flavor from the hops.. but I remember being rather pleased it it, overall. Go drink one, and lemme know how you make out.

According to Google, my *last* post was my 100th post on this blog. Sheesh. Hooray for me, 100 posts of dubious quality in just under one year. Well, if nothing else, it's a fairly permanent record of what I did and what interested me during that time.. should be fun to look over n my one year anniversary of this thing next month.

Had another 5 egg day today, although one was broken.. still counts as five. I am not supplying supplemental lighting for my chickens, and do not plan on it. If that light I installed there ever goes on, it'll be for heating purposes only, not for supplemental light for egg laying production. I get, normally, 3 or 4 eggs a day, and that seems to be quite enough to supply this family just fine, with a *few* extra to give out every other week or so. Maybe during the summer that will increase, but right now, it seems to be less extra than what I had originally thought. But for us, here in this house, we're just fine with 5 hens. I think I'd like one more, for a round 6, but 5 will do for now.

I broke out that 1+ year old Colombian bean that was giving me fits roasting a couple months ago.. nothing but disappointing cups, one after the other. I took a break from it, came back last week, and the results are now fantastic. I have no idea what was going on there. Weird.

Still no signs of souring activity on the surface of the Hanssens beer I did solo a while back.. will be 1 month's time this week, I think. Curious... might have to go find another sour beer to help that one along, maybe.

No pics for this, but had some experiments with a 10% pale ale malt bread loaf that I did yesterday.. there were some snafu's along the way, so I'll try the recipe again paying more attention as I go, and maybe dropping back to 5% barley malt next time. It did somethign weird and just collapsed in the oven as it was baking. It rose fine, although a little on the sort side, but when in the oven, the edges on parts of the loaf just sorta fell in on itself. When we cut it open, right out of the oven (I know, I know.. don't do that!), it as still *really* moist... and that's being kind. It was really actually sticky. I wonder what's up there, and does barley malt need special attention when baking with it? As opposed to regular barley flour, I mean? I'll look into that before next I try..

That's it, I'm hungry. Go click my Google ad before you go!

Couple of reviews, Kombucha repitch, etc.

So, just out of curiosity, is there anyone reading this right now that isn't subscribed and seeing themselves in a little box to the right hand side of this message listed as a Follower? It'd be great to have you sign in if you are, just so's I know who I'm writing at, if not just myself. ;) Plus, you dogs out there who have nothing but gray outlines for their profile pic, shame on you! Fix that immediately!

Just came in from the coop after giving the chickens some leftover cereal and milk from the kids breakfasts.. they snapped that right up, quick. There's two egs in the box right now, and the kids pulled in three large ones this morning already. That makes my second 5 egg day. 100% chicken efficiency! 

The Kombucha project seems to be functioning well, too. Geoff came over last night for a beer session and Kombucha initial tasting. I washed up good and then just reached into the jar with the Kombucha in it and just picked up the whole floating jellyfish thing that had formed. It came right out with no problem in one piece, and I put it down on a small plate with a little of the liquid over the top to keep it hydrated. I mixed up a new batch of the sweet tea, which I neglected to post a recipe for last time.. and then sunk the new mother culture pancake thingy back into the jar with the new tea mixture in it. Easy as cake! The recipe I used for this tea is half and half black tea and green tea, at a ratio of 3.5 grams per 250 mL, which is how I make my regular tea, strength wise. I swirled into the tea 100 grams of white table sugar per 1,000 mL of water for the Kombucha to feed on. Pretty simple stuff. This morning, I went to take a look at how the new culture is doing, and it's already formed a abit of a funk across the top of the tea.. much, much faster than the first pitch.. which was way underpitched, really.

Me and Geoff had a small taste of the Kombucha tea itself as well, and both of us easily detected some sourness and acidic twang to the mix, but also noted it was still fairly sweet. Seems like the culture hadn't had quite enough time to do it's job.. so, since it's bottled in a swing top jar, I'll have to let the pressure off the top every day or so to keep the bottle from exploding. Sorry, no pictures of this thing.. I totally forgot in the excitement of a new "thing".. I'll get some pics of it on the next batch.

While Geoff was here, we had a few commercial beers.. this one included;

That's Captain Lawrence's Imperial Pale Ale. It's pretty good, but seemed to me to taste a bit too much like a pine tree. Like, seriously like a pine tree. I failed to take notes on this and it was one of the last beers we had of the night, so my memory is lacking other than that one major sticking point.

The other beer was this one:

That's Harpoon's Ginger Wheat, from the 100 barrel series. We had this one first, and took some notes on it. We noted a very clear beer, straw in color. Didn't hold much head for any length of time.. but had a fairy serious lemon aroma and flavor, and a more subtle ginger note that got kicked around a bit by the powerful lemony-ness of this thing. It's a 7%abv brew, but drinks like a much smaller beer. At first, it's a bit much to take, but after a few sips, the taste grows on you and it becomes very enjoyable. We figured we'd reccomend it to someone if we thought they were a wheat beer fan. It was good.

And lastly, I picked up an external hard drive from Staples from their Cyber Monday deal, ust before Christmas. It's something me and The Boss have been kicking around for a while now, getting a backup program in place, and since OS X makes implementing that so easy, with the plugging in of another hard drive, we jumped on this one. It's a 2 TB Seagate something or other, and it clocked in at $139. Cheap! It's 4 times the size of our built in drive, so with incremental backups, it should be usable for a good long time before it starts kicking out the old backups.

I'm tired! See ya's..

Sourdough bread success, krappy Kaisers and a Kombucha update..

Some success! After a few defeats in the ring with sourdough breads, I went back to the drawing board. I was just not getting any luck with conventional recipes for sours and just not getting any rising action out of these things. I know my starter has the power to rise well in excess of twice it's original size.. so I was sort of at a loss as to what was going on. I came across a site with a different approach, this one Bakesourdough.com, which gave it's recipe for damn near anything you wanted to throw in it.. based on percentages. It was so different from the others, I gave it a try.. figured I had nothing to lose! Besides, they were advocating a *huge* increase in size of the starter percentage in the recipe than all the rest (typically 20-25% of the recipe, comared to the 66% of this site) that I figured it might even work.

So, I mmixed the stuff all together, shooting for a 500 gram (about one pound..) end result of dough. With that number, I used 250 grams of flour, and worked the percentages of the salt, starter and water from there, so my total was 500 grams, and let it be for a while. This was just a few hours before I had to leave for work at 1400 hours, so I wasn't sure how this timing was going to work out, but since The Boss was gonna be home for the day, I knew there'd be at least someone home to keep an eye on the thing in case of disaster.

I ended up with my numbers just about perfect, and after mixing the flour, starter and water, I let it rest. This is what they call the hydration rest.. I can't tell you how important this part is. Do it. It changes the flours and starches in ways so fantastic in only 20 minutes of hands off time, it makes the dough much more manageable. I thought this dough was a bit stiff, so I ended up adding a TOUCH of water, and left it at that. I proofed it in a bowl downstairs in the warm room for a bit, and after I ran out of time to wait, brought it upstairs to form the loaf. It didn't look all that risen for it's first rise, but when I squooze it on the table top, it surely did have co2 bubbles all through it. I gave it a bit of a knead, formed my loaf and put the thing in a greased pan to hang for the day. I was going to be gone for 10 hours at least, so I warned The Boss to watch out for it. When I called her later in the day, around 1900 hours, she said it hadn't done much.. but when I got home, it was pushing up against the plastic wrap I had sealed it with. I couldn't take a chance that it would deflate overnight, so I warmed up the oven at just prior to midnight and began to bake the thing. I also threw in the Kaiser rolls I had made the previous day that just didn't want to rise , just because they were in the way and they were gonna get tossed in the garbage if I didn't bake them. Well, when I opened the door, the "oven spring", as they call it, really did a great job on the breads and the loaf was just about an inch over the top of the pan! Awesome!

In this photo above, you can see both breads I'm describing.. me and The Boss cut the loaf up right then and there and had a few pieces. She said it was noticably different and better than a commercial yeast bread. Wile I thought it was quite good, I wasn't sure it was *that* much better. It's the longer storage times and less reliance on commercial yeasts that interest me in this project.

However, the real star of the show was the Kaisers. Tho they didn't turn out as planned, I learned something interesting. Without going into too much detail on the original recipe, it called for malt syrup, which I didn't have.. a Google search told me that malt syrup was.. well, syrup made from the malting process of grains. essentially, it's the beer brewing worlds liquid malt extract, with no hops added. That's common enough at a brewing store.. but I do all grain beer, so this didn't apply to me. I just don't use the stuff. A Google search for malt syrup replacements told me that you could take whole grains, steep them in water, begin the sprouting process and then grind the grains to a powder and add those for the flavor the recipe was calling for, in a pinch. While this sounds complicated for the normal household baker.. a lightbulb went off in my head. I didn't have to do a thing. I had many, many pounds of this stuff in my basement in the form of pale ale malt, chocolate malts, crystal malts etc. Now the gears were turning! A quick trip downstairs for 18 grams of crystal 40L, ground to a powder in the coffee mill, and I had my replacement. The color you see in the photo's above is a direct result of the crystal 40L addition.

The taste of this stuff, of those Kaiser rolls, is unbelievable! I've never had its equal in bread. It's so sweet, so powerful a flavor, and so pungent.. but let's the bread really shine. Oh, and The Boss won't go near it. Weird. This is a groundbreaking event for me, right here. This means I can color breads however I like, while still retainng the original flavor with certains grain additions, I can take lighter Lovibond malts and crystals and do fabulous things to a loafs flavor and not change the color at all. There's a whole lot of potential here for brewers/bakers that I think needs exploration. When I feel more comfortable in the area f sourdoughs, I'll definitely be experimenting with this. I'd encourage you to do the same. A zillion different grains are all as close as your nearest homebrew shop, conveniently packaged in nice, one pound bags. Do it!

This post is way too long.. but I should also mention that the Kombucha experiment is still under way and moving along slowly, still. There seems to be a thick film of goop on the top of the whole container now, but I can't get a really good picture at the moment.. gotta let it grow a bit more, still. This is day #10 for that thing.. we're still on track.

Smoked Wheat down, Orval taste test, and my chickens first 5 egg day...

Sad day, indeed. The Apple Smoked Wheat beer I brewed with Jody has been annihilated. That was a truly good beer. It has since been replaced with the IPA I made with Frank a few weeks ago. And yeah, I'm gonna call it an IPA.. I was thinking about demoting it to Pale Ale, cause it finished a bit high when I measured it last, but when I plugged it into the kegger, the thing had apparently dropped a few more points, carbed itself, and upped it's abv% just enough to properly squeak into IPA territory. Besides, it's got that Dogfish 90 Minute viscosity where it just doesn't feel like a Pale Ale anymore. It's quite good, and it's hopped entirely with Northern Brewer, so if you wanna know what that particular hop tastes like, this is a pretty good way to get that done.

I also tasted a bottle of this over the weekend:

..and it was good. The rumors are true, this is fermented with quite a bit of Brett in it, and it shows clearly. This was a hugely carbonated beer, and was pretty darned good.. if you like Brettanomyces. If not, I'd pass. If I wasn't going for just a straight sour beer in that fermenter downstairs, I'd have pitched these dregs right into it.. just because it's a fine strain and seemed like a good idea. But, my sour side won out, and I refrained. Hopefully, that thing sours right up..

Also, two days ago, our chickens had their first 5 eggs layed day. Evey chicken I have fired one out. Heck, I didn't even know they were all capable, let alone able to synchronize the operation! And here I thought I still had two lame-o's in the flock. Yesterday, we had 4 and we would have had four again today, but one broke in the nest box.. one of the new girls is still in the early 'soft shell' stages of gearing up.. too bad.

Otherwise, Turkey Day came and went yesterday as well, and that was a fine time.. my sourdough project was miserable and inedible, but I'm learning still. I'm trying to fire up some sourdough Kaiser rolls right now, but I'm not that optimistic. The dough just doesn't feel right for this..

The kombucha project is still going downstairs, but it's slow going.. we'll have some status updates on that when it get's more interesting. There's a little film on the surface, but not enough to take a picture of.

That's it for me.. carry on.