Roasted Garlic Scones

I swear if it weren't for my culinarily inclined department I would have nothing to post on my food blog during this first year of grad school!  A grad-student club, the Plant Student Group hosted a Garlic Festival a few days ago. Considering I have a garlic plant tattooed on my back, I felt rather obligated so show up.

At the last minute, I decided to attempt some roasted garlic scones to contribute to the garlicy potluck, and they turned out to be a great success! I peeled two whole bulbs worth of garlic, submerged the cloves in canola oil, and roasted them in the oven for about an hour. By roasting garlic in oil, not only do you end up with roasted garlic, but also roasted garlic oil! 

I strained the roasted cloves out of the oil, mashed them up, and added them to my favorite scone recipe, which I've blogged about before (here). Below is the full recipe, which originally comes from Chef Jones, who taught pastry classes at the CIA:

20 oz. All Purpose Flour

1.25 oz. Baking Powder

6 oz. Butter

4 oz. Sugar

4 oz. Milk (maybe more)

2 Eggs (okay to use extra milk instead of eggs)

pinch salt

Start with cold butter and cut it into the flour and baking power - mix just until everything is evenly combined, you don't want the butter to melt! (see my previous post for my favorite method for cutting butter into flour).

In a separate bowl combine the sugar, milk, eggs, salt, and any other ingredients (i.e. roasted garlic, fruits, nuts, etc.). The original recipe says to mix these together until it has a "shiny" consistency... I've never quite figured out what this means, just thoroughly mix these ingredients together! Also, I sometimes add an extra splash of milk if all the dry bits are not getting moistened.

Then mix the wet stuff into the dry stuff, being careful to just combine these and not over-mix it. You want an even consistency without kneading the dough too much - the more you knead it, the tougher your end product will be. I like to rigorously mix everything together with a fork, then squeeze a handful of dough in my had to see how it holds together. If it falls apart easily, add another 2 oz. or so of milk and mix it in with the fork and do the squeeze test again. To avoid kneading, just press the entire dough together in the bowl, then flip the bowl over on a floured work surface so the dough falls out. Press the dough together in any places where it's crumbling apart, otherwise proceed with rolling out the dough!

As you roll out the dough, keep it moving to ensure it's not sticking to the surface. Roll it out to about 1/2inch thick and then cut out scones. The chef I got this recipe from always cut his into circles (using a circle cookie-cutter), but you can cut yours into whatever shape you want.

Bake at 350F until they are golden brown on the bottom (about 30 minutes?). 

After my garlicy scones came out of the oven, I tasted one and though it did not taste garlicy enough (or were my senses just saturated by garlic at that point?). Anyway, I brushed the top of each scone with garlic oil and sprinkled them with some Murray River Salt.

Poutine and Beer-Yeast-Sourdough Bread

We just had three snow-days in a row in here in Seattle.  Which means Alex and I have been spending a whole lot of time sledding down Capitol Hill, sleeping in, and eating ridiculous things.  First of all, poutine is now a breakfast food.  Especially when breakfast is at 1pm. Alex made gravy out of beef au jus and chicken demi-glace while I fried up some french fries and onions in bacon grease... we thought about topping everything with an egg, but that just seemed excessive and we opted for the more traditional cheese topping instead.

Last weekend, Alex bottled a pumpkin beer that he made.  We've often talked about cultivating the dormant yeast that end up at the bottom of the carboy as a method of saving a few dollars on beer brewing.  Though I got inspired to use the yeast for a sourdough starter. After just a few days of feeding the yeast, I had a pretty fragrant starter going, so I used one of our snow days to make bread.  I've never been very successful at bread making, but I'm happy to say this is my best attempt yet!  I loosely followed Julia Child's recipe, which called for violently kneading the crap out of the dough in a mixer with a dough hook.  When this first knead was done, the dough had an amazing smooth, moist, sticky texture.

I stuck it in the warmest room in our house to rise for a couple hours, then a light knead, second rise, and then it was ready to be shaped for the final rise immediately before baking. I used a technique that Julia suggested: put a pan on the bottom of the oven and just before you put the bread in, pour some water into the pan - it will immediately turn into steam and increase the humidity inside the oven.  A humid oven makes a crusty bread. I also periodically added water to the pan in the oven and used a spray bottle to spray water into the air in the oven. Here is my lovely loaf of bread!

This bread has a fantastic texture! Fluffy, soft, and moist with a thin, crisp crust.  The flavor however will need some work, it has a wonderful earthiness, but then it also definitely has a strong essence of bottom-of-the-carboy sludge from which it's yeast was born.  It does make fantastic french toast though!

What Pate a Choux can do for you!

Pate a Choux (pat uh shoe) might be my favorite dough to make.  It's unlike any other dough, and almost feels like your making a roux, rather than a dough. It's the doughy part of a cream puff or an eclair and I always assumed it was a dough intended for sweet things, until I got roped into making Gougeres at my friend, Joe's birthday party.  Gougeres are Pate a Choux with grated Gruyere and black pepper added to the dough before it gets piped out onto baking sheets and baked in the oven.  Gougeres are so simple to make and pretty addictively delicious!  What more could you want than buttery bread with cheese and a hint of pepper?! I'm hoping this is just the beginning of Pate a Choux experiments to make all sorts of delicious fluffy savory pastries!

These are a few of my favorite things...

My morning meditation:

Few things are better than "cutting" butter into flour by hand. I start with frozen unsalted butter and cut it into roughly cubic-centimeters. Then I mix it into the flour by squishing each cube of butter between my fingers until the mixture has a sort of flaky consistency.

SNOW!!!! (and biscuits)

I started following the recipe for the scones served at A Spot of Tea in Rhinebeck, NY (which is apparently and unfortunately now out-of-business!). But we were all out of eggs, so on a whim I decided to just substitute extra milk for the egg. They turned out to be the best biscuits I've ever had with this incredible fresh milk flavor that was absolutely captivating. And if you were wondering (because I was), there is really no difference between a scone and a biscuit in the US, they are both simply a soft leavened quick bread. Though what you use them for might define whether it's a biscuit or a scone; if you eat it with jam and cream it's a scone, if you smother it in gravy, it's a biscuit. Also, shortcake is just a large cake-sized scone or biscuit or whatever you want to call it. Anyway, we smothered these in bacon gravy and ate it with sausage and coffee, so I'm calling them biscuits. Oh, and I did mention the snow, that's the best part!!

After breakfast we decided to go for stroll in the snow to get more milk and eggs, but first we needed a warm beverage to keep us company on our cold walk.

Behold, the makings of The Snowball:

This is a concoction we developed with a previous house-mate during the 2008 snow storm. It's Valrhona hot chocolate, Stumptown coffee, Bailey's Irish cream, Jameson whiskey, and Rumpleminze peppermint schnapps. It gives you the power to conquer the world in the comfort of the best warm fuzzy blanket. It's the perfect beverage.

Bread!

With nearby Essential Bakery moving far, far away to South Seattle in search of cheaper rent, Alex mentioned that we should start making bread. My first reaction was excitement at the possibility of Alex learning to make bread, then I realized maybe I could make bread too. I haven't had much luck making bread in the past several years, but I did have 48 hours with nothing but studying to do and Baking With Julia. This is roughly the Country Loaf recipe, the big change is all the flour I used is equal parts white flour and whole wheat flour.

Yesterday I made the "sponge" (basically a starter) and let it sit on the counter covered with a cloth for about 8 hours:
Then I put it in the fridge to ferment over night and pulled it out in the morning to warm up before adding the rest of the ingredients and making the bread dough. Here it is, in a lightly oiled bowl, ready for it's first rise:


I let it sit for several hours while I ran some errands and it rose a lot!:


Next I shaped it and let it rise a second time for about an hour before putting it in the oven:


Finished Product:


Delicious!

Mushrooms and the Fish

Since I've deemed this blog an "appreciation of all things edible", I must mention the fantastically edible mushroom growing on our plum tree outside! May I introduce, Laetiporus conifericola:

Unfortunately I was too greedy and waited too long, hoping it would get bigger and I would have more to eat. But alas, it died quick and mold conquered it.

I taught Alex to make bread using the sourdough starter that I started a while ago because he accidentally opened a packet of our friends beer-brewing yeast. I showed him how to kneed it and then said he could make whatever shape he wanted, perhaps a baguette or a round. He decided a fish-shape was best:


And here is an awesome stir fry with rice underneath that Alex whipped up. Notice the lobster mushroom slices sauteed with brioche crumbs! Also, he stir fried slices of cucumber, I had no idea you could do that to cucumbers, but it was delicious!