Here’s a quick video of Peter Reinhart talking about bread. For those who aren’t familiar with Peter Reinhart, he wrote the book The Bread Maker’s Apprentice which brilliantly teaches the art of bread making. (All of the breads I have made on this blog are from his book.)
My weekend started with a wonderfully fresh slice of cinnamon raisin bread. I had the butter at the ready, but the bread was so tasty that slathering butter on it would have smothered its wonderful flavor. Where did this delicious bread come from?
Well, thanks to Peter Reinhart’s brilliant book, The Bread Bakers Apprentice, I was inspired to bake the previous day. Although this bread could be made without a swirl of cinnamon through the center, I chose to go all the way and add that yummy swirl of cinnamon and sugar. And then, to top that up, I added a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar to the top crust as well.
As the warm, cinnamon smells wafted out of the oven, I could not wait for the following morning when I would allow myself a taste of this bread.
There is nothing like waking up to fresh cinnamon raisin bread. Talk about good motivation for getting out of bed!
I am not going to reproduce the recipe here, but if you’re interested in making it, check out Peter Reinhart’s book. It is truly a magnificent piece of work. Below are some pictures of the bread in process (aka dough).
The olives are well underway. I decided to water-cure one batch and brine-cure the other. The water-cure is definitely further along than the brine-cured batch, so I’ll go ahead and focus on those for this post.
I started by sorting the olives and slitting the keepers from end to end before submerging them in cool water. I then weighted them down with a plate to be sure that they stayed under water. Soon, the olives began to discolor around the cut marks, and while this wasn’t unexpected, they certainly didn’t look at all appetizing. I must admit I was rather worried about them. Nonetheless, I continued to drain the water from them daily, replacing it with a fresh batch of clean, cool water before replacing the plate and sealing them off again.
A week later, and this soaking period was over. It was time for the finishing brine. I made the brine out of a combo of water, salt, vinegar and various seasonings for flavor. I decided to dose them with lemon, thyme and garlic. I’ll let you know whether that flavor combo worked. I completely winged this, so my fingers are crossed. You can see a picture of them in their briny bath. Now I need to source some jars to put them away in. I think they should be ready to eat in another 2-4 weeks. The brine-cured olives are another story… but that’s for another day!
I had a partial post written about this new bell pepper soup that I was planning to attempt to make, but after making it, I discovered that it was a very lackluster recipe. It used a potato base which basically contributed the blandness that so defined the soup. The few bell peppers that were added after roasting and peeling contributed color and the tiniest amount of flavor. In short, it was a time consuming and not very tasty recipe.
Instead, I’m going to start blogging about my latest adventure in the food world: home cured olives! That’s right, a group friends and I decided to try our hands at curing raw olives. This experiment will culminate in a grand olive tasting event (which hopefully won’t kill or sicken any of us).
I little bit about olive curing; raw olives are essentially inedible when they are picked off the tree. They contain a compound called oleuropein that makes them taste very bitter. The curing process removes this bitterness by leaching out the water-soluble oleuropein. Different curing processes will generate different textures and flavors.
I’ve been researching the different curing methods, but I haven’t decided on one yet. These methods range from soaking the olives in water, soaking them in brine, packing them in salt, or soaking them in a lye solution. Given the scary poisonous aspect of the lye, I think we’ll all be staying away from that method, but as for the others, I hope we’ll have at least of couple of them featured when we get to our tasting party.
Given that our shipment of 20 pounds of raw olives arrived today, I need to get busy with my research and decide on a strategy!
Raw Olives Before Curing
A great resource for more information about curing is publication 8267 from the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources
Here’s a quick peek at what I made my house guests for breakfast this morning. Sorry no time to post more details with the wedding looming next Saturday! Yikes!
