Purple Zucchini Bread?

It's been a crazy couple of weeks at Chez Boeckman-Walker, and we haven't had much time for posting. Here's the husband to reassure you that we haven't disappeared.

--The Faudie

Angela recently gifted me with a subscription to The Baking Sheet, King Arthur Flower's bimonthly newsletter for all things carb-related. As a nifty bonus with that subscription, we received a CD-ROM containing PDF versions of their 1990 - 1999 newsletters. I cannot describe to you how much fun it is to peruse a full decade of this company's early desktop publishing efforts--just look at all the lame clip art!

Of course, in addition to the painfully dated design work, these newsletters have recipes. And even though I've only skimmed through a few years' worth of issues, I've already flagged several recipes that have caught my interest. Here's the one I tried last weekend:

Zucchini Spice Bread

1/2 C water
2 t vanilla extract
3/4 C cottage cheese
3/4 C grated raw zucchini, lightly packed
3 T butter
2 T sugar
1 t cinnamon
1 1/2 t salt
3 T chopped walnut pieces
1 C 100% white whole wheat flour
2 C unbleached bread flour
2 t instant yeast

1. Place ingredients into bread machine in the order suggested by the machine's manufacturer.
2. Select the Basic and Light options on the machine, then start the cycle.
3. Check the dough's consistency about 7 minutes after the kneading cycle begins, adding water or flour to form a smooth, soft ball of dough.

Yield: One 1 1/2-pound loaf

Nutritional Info
Calories: 1411
Fat: 4.2 g
Protein: 5 g
Carbs: 21 g
Cholesterol: 8 mg
Sodium: 241 mg

The Husband's Futzings
I didn't mess with this recipe, other than adding vital gluten.

I don't think we've used zucchini in a bread recipe since Angela made chocolate chip zucchini bread way back in our pre-bread machine days. What struck me most about this recipe, though, was the odd assortment of ingredients in addition to the zucchini--what exactly was this bread going to taste like? I needed to find out.

The aroma coming from the bread machine as the ingredients began mixing was promising, with the scents of vanilla and cinnamon combining quite appetizingly. By the time the loaf finished baking, however, it didn't smell much like either of those ingredients any more. And it didn't taste like vanilla and cinnamon, either. In fact, the finished bread has a rather indistinct taste, with only the walnuts really having any flavor. Don't get me wrong--the bread isn't bad at all. Despite the fact that the loaf fell about 30 minutes from the end of the bread machine's cycle, it has a nice texture and a good chew. (And I do like a bread with a good chew.) It's just that the taste is surprisingly plain. Unremarkable, even. Maybe all of the flavors are just canceling each other out.

Ummm...should zucchini bread be purple?

As for its color--what can I say? Neither Angela nor I can figure out what combination of ingredients might have turned the bread purple. This bread is so confused, it doesn't even know what color it should be.

Wild Thing, You Make My Heart Sing

Here's the husband with the second part of his sourdough story.

--The Faudie

So we'd made ourselves some starters--now all we needed to do was leave them out long enough to catch some wild yeast and become suitable for making sourdough.

King Arthur Flour's sourdough primer notes that "keeping a sourdough starter is somewhat like having a pet because it needs to be fed and cared for." Well, I have three cats (plus several freeloaders), and I can tell you with absolute certainty that the reason felines are higher up on the evolutionary chain than yeast is that when a cat needs something, it will tell you so. Our yeast, on the other hand, was not so communicative. By day two, any activity in the starters had ceased.

Science factoid! The brownish liquid that had appeared by that point on the starter to the right (the one that was made with molasses) is called hooch--it's the alcoholic byproduct of the fermentation process. You're supposed to stir the hooch back in or drain it off, depending on whether the starter is looking to dry or too wet. I'm not sure why the starter on the left (the one made with sugar) never developed any hooch. Maybe it was the molasses in the one starter that did the trick, or maybe it was because that starter had more surface area exposed, or maybe it just managed to catch more wild yeast than the other one. Heck if I know.

Anyway, back to the conundrum of the inactive starters. Most websites I checked regarding sourdough starters call for you to "feed" the starter one cup of flour and one cup of water each day, but King Arthur's site only instructs you to feed the starter after you've removed some of it to make a loaf of bread. Concerned about my inactive starters, I decided to go ahead and feed them--and sure enough, they both bubbled and grew again...only to go inactive once more the following day.

Understand that this was about mid-week, and I wasn't looking to bake any bread until the weekend. Realizing that I didn't want to keep feeding two starters each a cup of flour a day, I decided to refrigerate the starters instead. I would have preferred to leave them out to continue catching wild yeast, but we can't afford to go through that much flour. Remember, I have cats to feed!

Friday morning I removed the hoochier starter from the fridge to let the yeast get warm and active again, then I gave it a good feeding before going to bed. That's a picture of the starter post-feeding at the left. See how bubbly it is? From everything I've read, that's the look of a happy, healthy starter. Which meant that the next day it was (finally) time to make some sourdough. I'd planned on using a King Arthur recipe since I'd followed their instructions to make the starter, but since they didn't seem to have any recipes that use a bread machine, I had to look elsewhere.

Sourdough Bread

3/4 C starter
1 T margarine or butter
1 1/2 T sugar
1 t salt
2 C bread flour
1 t yeast
2 T to 1/3 C milk

1. Place ingredients into bread machine in the order suggested by the machine's manufacturer.
2. Select the Basic option on the machine, then start the cycle.
3. Adjust the consistency with the milk while the dough is kneading.

Yield: One 1-pound loaf

Nutritional Info
This recipe came from one of Donna Rathmell German's books, so no, it was not provided.

I have to admit, it was a little odd to be baking with something that had been sitting out in the kitchen, bubbling away for the better part of the week. But hey, if it's good enough for the early pioneers, it's good enough for me! (Does anyone know what model of bread machine the early pioneers used?)

Want to know how it turned out?

It turned out freaking fantastically!

Isn't that a great-looking loaf of bread? I think that may be the single most attractive loaf we've produced. I've got many more pictures in addition to the ones I've posted here, just because that loaf was so darn photogenic.

It gets even better though: the bread actually tastes like sourdough, and a decent sourdough at that! Which is good, as we now have two starters taking up space in the refrigerator, and there's nothing to do with them but bake more bread. Good thing our cookbooks have plenty of variations on sourdough to try.

I Too Get Inspiration From Julia Child

So, Gentle Reader, have you viewed Julie & Julia? Read--or suffered through, in my opinion--one or both of the books the movie used as source material? Okay, I'll confess that initially I enjoyed Julia's My Life in France, but once the narrative moved past the time when she and her husband were living in France full time and came to focus on when she was largely engrossed in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I grew disenchanted. I mean, it takes a lot of gall (Gaul!) to lament one's inability to drop everything and escape from the demanding world of public television production and book tours to hide away in one's cozy little hideaway in Provence. What a hard life that must have been!

(As for Julie & Julia the book...well, I pray to the FSM that I don't come across as that petulant and immature in my writings here on this blog. Granted, maybe the authoress' own blog posts don't suffer this problem and I wouldn't know since I have not read the blog itself. But her retelling of her culinary misadventures--and other life happenings during that time--in novel form are just...taxing.)

While I haven't yet watched the movie and may not ever unless I get a freebie rental from Redbox (because yes, Gentle Reader, I am that cheap and won't pay a buck to watch a movie), I've read enough about Julia Child to (1) be just about full-up with her and her life and her metamorphosis and (2) actually get one useful culinary thing from it all.

And here it is!

"Here is what, exactly?" you ask, Gentle Reader? Well, isn't it obvious?

No, it's not her fashion sense. And no, it's not in those books before her. It's certainly not in her coiffure.

Here, maybe this'll make it more obvious:

D'you see it now?

Okay, let me make it painfully obvious:

Voilà!

That's right, Gentle Reader. Julia Child--along with her husband, Paul--inspired me to hang some of my pots. My cabinets are crammed and simply too full to accommodate the All-Clad sauté pan and sauce pan I scored two weekends ago at Marshall's. Since the kitchen's crappy fluorescent lighting is recessed in the slightly drop ceiling, I thought, Hell, why not remove part of that cracked light panel and make use of that wall space in the recessed lighting...thing!

A trip to Home Despot, then to (B)Lowe's and finally to IKEA later, I have nifty hanging pan storage. I may never get the kitchen of my dreams, but I've got more storage space--and what more can a faudie want?

Really? These Are the Best of the Decade?

Today I got yet another email from MyRecipes.com, but instead of a recipe I'd probably never make, it heralded the top 10 food trends of the previous decade. With the demise of Gourmet, there's sort of a wide-open field for the leading voice in food journalism, so why shouldn't the "editors" of Food Channel (not to be confused with Food Network) take a stab at proclaiming the best things to happen to food from 2000 to 2009?

Since I'm an amateur food anthropologist/historian, I clicked the email's link just for shits and giggles.

Sadly, there were no giggles to be had. Shits? Yes. Groans? Oh yes. Eye rolls galore? Indeed!

I mean, do you think a list that spotlights bacon as one of the top 10 food trends of the first decade of the 21st century is really
worth the bandwidth it takes up? Bacon, Gentle Reader! What's so revolutionary about cured pork belly or fatback? It's...atherosclerosis in convenient, red and white, greasy strips. And it's highlighted in the same list as healthful whole grains and oils. If that's not some type of irony (even if it is Alanis Morissette's brand of irony), then I don't know what is.

If you need a good guffaw, Gentle Reader, check out the list for yourself. I guess it's proof that just about any monkey with a computer connected to the Internet these days can be a food journalist.