Raisins, Part III

So, raisin names.  What's in a name?  That which we call a raisin by any other name would taste as sweet.  Let's start by going back to the bit about sultanas.

Sultana, Sultana, wherefore art thou Sultana?  ("wherefore" meaning "why," of course*).  Turns out that the name sultana, which can refer to either the grape or the raisin made from said grape, has origins in the Ottoman empire.  The grapes were supposedly favored by Sultans and were subsequently given a name of distinction.

Because of the early usage of "sultana," it's no wonder that much of the world still uses the name in addition to, or even instead of, the term "raisin."  For example, head down under and you'll find sultanas to be the mainstay of everyone's favorite Kellogg's cereal:

Sultana Bran!  Complete with awkward advertising campaign!

So if "Sultana" is so prevalent, where did the term raisin come from?  Seems that, amongst other roots, it's taken from the Latin racimus, meaning a cluster of grapes or berries.  But raisin, on it's own, can be vague in the U.S.  It's perfectly acceptable to call raisins sultanas in order to differentiate them from two other popular raisins: the red flame and the Zante currant.

The red flame raisin is simple to explain.  This is a raisin made from red flame grapes.  Adding sulfites to these won't create golden raisins because the grapes are dark to begin with; there is no color to preserve.

Zante Currants are typically just known as Currants.  That name is all fine and dandy in the U.S., where we don’t know much about red, black, or white currants.  However, the rest of the world is more culturally aware of the currant variety currently available, and so the name Zante is used to distinguish the fourth “currant.”

Zante Currants are really just small raisins derived from small grapes.  The grapes used for currants are sometimes known as “champagne grapes.”  This name is a bit dubious, however, because these grapes are never used to make champagne.  The name probably just refers to the grapes ability to explode out of a glass bottle when pointed at your face... or maybe just the similarity between the small grape and the fine carbonation of champagne.  Either way.

The word "currant" is derived from the root "Corinth."  This refers to the Black Corinth grape, originally hailing from Corinth, Greece.  "Currant" became used to refer to other types of similar small berries, which is why red, white, and black currants share the name.

(Incidentally, blackcurrant, also known by the French cassis, is my favorite fruit flavor ever.  It's a rare find in the U.S., because blackcurrant plants can harbor diseases that would destroy certain indigenous American trees.  It's too bad, really, because I hate having to pay an arm and a leg just for a bottle of Ribena squash.)

I had intended to conclude the raisin trilogy sooner by presenting a recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies.  However, I have yet to be satisfied with the recipe I've been tinkering with, so this shall have to wait.  Until then, thanks for reading!


*It's true.  Juliet's not asking where Romeo is, but why he is named Romeo.  The balcony scene context supports this, as well as other instances of the term "wherefore" throughout the play.  But this is not a blog on textual analysis ;)

Raisins, Part II

So what happens to a grape deferred?  Does it dry up, like a raisin in the sun?

Usually.  Why usually?  Because if you just let a grape sit there, it will more likely mold before anything else.  Mold spores and natural yeasts (hence wine) love grapes, but only when there is sufficient moisture for growth to happen.  If the grape dries out quickly enough, it won't rot because there is not enough moisture to support the food baddies.

Incidentally, this is why things like the 12 year old hamburger exist.  They remain preserved because they are too dry to "go bad," not because McDonald's is an evil mutant hamburger machine.  In fact, the instructions for creating your own self preserving burger specifically say that "The moisture needs to escape the food naturally."  Obviously.  This is after they claim that the burger needs to be obtained from "any place that serves hybridized, chemicalized, genetically altered, hormone/ pesticide-laden food."  This simply reveals their bias against cheap fast food; they have no conclusive evidence that the supposed chemicals inherent in the burger keep them from degrading.

Here's a thought: go get some organic burger buns and organic ground beef.  Prepare a burger with near identical properties to the McD's hamburger, and let it sit out.  I'd put good money on the homemade burger "self preserving" in the same way as the "pesticide-laden" burger.

/Rant.

I apologize for that, but I think you'll find this a bit more interesting: homemade raisins without the use of a food dehydrator or warm sun (which currently doesn't exist in Portland).

Experiment One:

An experiment was carried out to determine the possibility of making grapes by means other than air drying.  Two hygroscopic substrates were used, salt and sugar, to draw the water out the grapes and transform them into raisins.  Twelve Thompson seedless grapes were used, half of them peeled and half of them left whole.  Of these, three peeled grapes were placed into a bowl with 150g sugar, three into 150g salt, three unpeeled into 150g sugar, three unpeeled into 150g salt.

The goal is to get these grapes to turn to raisins through hygroscopically induced osmosis.  The hypothesis is that the peeled grapes in salt will reach this stage first, while the unpeeled grapes in sugar will take the longest.

Let’s define some things.  First of all, what’s this hygroscopic thing all about?  Hygroscopic simply refers to a compound’s tendency to absorb water.  If you’ve ever dumped sugar onto a bowl of strawberries, you’ll know that, after 30 minutes or so, you’ll have limp strawberries floating in delicious syrup.  This is because the sugar has drawn juices out of the strawberries and then dissolved to form a syrup.

Salt does the same thing, but to a greater degree, which is why salt was also used in the experiment.  (And remember our friend lye?  Good ol’ sodium hydroxide is so hygroscopic that it takes moisture straight out of the air around it!)  There is probably some sort of scale to measure hygroscopic tendencies, but I haven’t been able to find it.  Typically, one would just say that compound X can hold up to Y % of its weight in moisture.

Also, osmosis.  Who can tell me about osmosis?  You may need to reach back to ninth grade biology on this one.  Yes, you in the back!

“Wasn’t that a lame cartoon starring Will Smith?”

No.  You are wrong.  (It was Chris Rock, anyway.)

Osmosis has to do with semi-permeable membranes.  When you’ve got two solutions on each side of the membrane, and the solvent (usually water) passes through the membrane from the side of lower concentration to the side of higher concentration.  This happens to equalize the concentration on both sides of the membrane.  This is why you get prune fingers in the bath, and why brining a turkey for Thanksgiving is awesome.

Going back to the grapes, grape skins don’t seem very permeable, which is why some grapes were peeled.  The idea is that, inside a grape, you’ve got water and some sugars.  This forms a solution.  If you place the grape in something hygroscopic, it begins to attract water, from the solution, through the membrane.  A super saturated solution is formed outside the grape, and so more water begins to flow through the membrane to balance the solutions.  The grape’s internal solution begins to concentrate, making it taste sweeter.  The structure begins to collapse, making it small and wrinkled.  A raisin is formed!

This type of raisin is not exactly sun dried, like the famous California raisin brand, nor is it air dried, like many other brands.  It would be more accurate to call this a “cured” raisin!  Pretty neat, eh?

Anyway, observations from the experiment:

Beginning grape weights ranged from 3g to 7g, with the average being 4.75g.

Grapes were placed in 150g sugar or salt.

After 24 hours, the salt and sugar in the peeled grape bowls had solidified.  The assumption here is that sufficient water had been drawn out (and equalized throughout the entire volume of sugar / salt) to cause a very slight amount of dissolution and bonding of the individual granules.  Neat!

Here is a picture of the bowl of sugar.  You can see the sugar collapsing over the grapes due to this dissolution.

After chipping away at the sugar and salt, I removed the grapes for visual observations.  You can see that the unpeeled grapes show no visible change, nor did they show any change in weight.  However, the peeled grapes are visibly smaller, and now all average 2g each.

 A responsible scientist would take down observations like these at systematic intervals, but this experiment was conducted by a slightly irresponsible layman who chose not to check the grapes again until seven days after the initial burying.

But after one week, the peeled grapes had turned to raisins!  They weighed in at 2g total for both batches, so no more than .66g each, indicating a roughly 4g water loss!

The unpeeled grapes were left in for two weeks, after which they weighed in at an average of 1.33g each.  They were much more plump, but, unfortunately, also moldy.  They did not dry quickly enough to prevent mold from forming.  Sad :(

So there you have it: homemade raisins!  I’d recommend the sugar cured method, as salty grapes are weird.  You could rinse them a few times, like with salt cured capers, but still.  Blech.

Any questions?  Stay tuned, I’ve got more raisin rambling up my sleeve!

Raisins, Part I

The more you ignore them, the drier they get.

Raisins.

Sweet, plump, and wrinkled, just how I like my wo--  Um, that is to say…

Raisins.

Sweet, plump, and wrinkled, raisins have been touted as nature’s candy for millennia.  They can be found in sweet applications, such as scones and cookies, or savory applications, such as pilafs and tagines.  As long as people have been leaving grapes out in the sun to shrivel, they have been finding delicious uses for the end result.

But what exactly is a raisin? 

One could ask the same thing about water.  What exactly is water?

We just don’t know.

What we do know is that, in the U.S., we are most familiar with two types of raisins: the brown ones, and the not brown ones.  One might assume that the brown raisins began their unsuspecting lives and red grapes, whilst the not brown raisins (for sake of simplicity, we shall henceforth refer to them as “golden” raisins) began as green grapes.  This would be a foolish assumption, based solely on ignorance, and is therefore unacceptable.  In a moment, we will come to the true origin of these raisin brothers from other mothers.

Let us first, however, bring another raisin name into play: the Sultana.  This is a term not widely used in the U.S., found mostly in Commonwealth nations as a strange remnant of British Imperialism.  When asked about the difference between Sultanas and raisins, a dear friend of mine from the motherland explained that “sultanas come from green grapes and raisins come from red grapes.”  Taking this explanation at face value would lead to the conclusion that “Sultana” is simply a different, some would say “more correct,” name for the golden raisin.  However, this conclusion, as well as the explanation about Sultanic origin, is grievously false.

As it turns out, raisins, golden raisins, and Sultanas are all the withered descendants of just one grape: good old Thompson Seedless.  Thompsons are green grapes no matter which way you look at them, and rarely as sweet as a raisin.  Bearing this in mind, the path from one grape to a triune raisinhood may be a difficult route to understand, but the reward is a head full of useless trivia and a fist full of dried fruit.

As a grape dries, a few things happen.  Primarily, it loses the mass and volume that the bit of moisture provided.  This affects not just the physical properties of the raisin, but the resulting flavor.

Raisins are sweeter than grapes because the proportion of sugar to moisture is much higher.  A teaspoon of sugar mixed with a teaspoon of water will taste sweeter than a teaspoon of sugar in a cup of water.  By this example, a raisin may be thought of as a concentrated grape.

A secondary effect of the drying process is that the grape undergoes oxidation.  This is the same process that causes things such as apples, avocados, potatoes and tea leaves to darken.  And so a green grape, dried and oxidized, becomes a brown raisin.

A "golden raisin" is simply a green grape that has been treated with sulfur dioxide, an anti-oxidant, to preserve its color.  Sulfur dioxide may sound nasty, but it is used in many dried fruits to retain color.  Think of dried apricots, for instance, or even sun dried tomatoes.  You can get sulfur free versions of both of these, but they will be brownish due to oxidation.

Some would say that oxidation affects the flavor of the fruit, those this could be disputed.  Certainly the raisin companies will say that a golden raisin has a different flavor profile than a brown raisin, but that may just be an excuse to double their product line.

So what's this "sultana" thing all about?  We shall come to this in due course, but first, join me in a few days for some raisin science.  Raiscience!

Some Cakes are Figgier than Others, Part Two

Figs!  Yes, they are creepy; yes, they are delicious.

Since a fig is not exactly a fruit, it tastes not exactly like a fruit.  Fruit flavors certainly cover a wide spectrum, but they usually contain sweet flavors and some type of acidic flavor (some stronger than others).  Figs are one of those flavors that is hard to pin down.  They're sweet, but not too sweet.  They've got no hint of acidic tartness.  The flavor is very... floral.  Fitting, no?

Now of course there are different varieties of figs to be eaten.  The ones we are probably most familiar with are the black mission figs.  Mission figs are probably the sweetest figs out there, in an almost too much kind of way.  Their texture is not my favorite; sort of syrupy and mushy and gyuh gyuh gyuh as you try to swallow.   Then there are the other dark figs, brown turkish figs.  These guys are sweet like the black missions, but not so cloying, and the texture is a little bit more substantial.

Then there are a few green figs.  Even though their skin is green, their insides are still rosy red, which makes a great color contrast.  My favorite light skinned figs are kadotas. These are a delight; they taste like honey itself, and when straight off the tree are filled with a refreshing nectar.  Yumm!

Let's talk recipes. I really wanted to find a great baking recipe that utilized fresh figs, but those are hard to come by.  Most fig breads or cakes call for chopped dried figs, used like raisins.  This is great and all, but I want a fresh fig recipe!  Three cliche fresh fig recipes sprang to mind: grilled figs, grilled figs wrapped in prosciutto, and figs simmered in port (and then possibly grilled and wrapped in prosciutto).  Lame.  These are overdone, people.  Come up with something new.

That's exactly what I did!  I made up a recipe.  This particular recipe may not be super original, but i didn't get it from anywhere, so it's original for me.

I give you: honey lemon fig cake!

It utilizes fresh fig puree as a main ingredient (similar to how banana bread uses banana puree).  It's also got honey, which complements the flavor of figs, and lemon juice / zest, which offset the sweetness.  I'm also throwing in some yogurt, for flavor and softness in the cake.  Also, the combo of honey, lemon, figs, and yogurt sounded exotic to me.  A bit mediterranean maybe?  I don't know, but I like to think of this cake as paying tribute to the figs of yesteryear.

Speaking of paying tribute to things, this recipe pays tribute to the Summer with those flavors, and adds a hit of nutmeg to ring in the fall.  Perfect, because today is the first day of Fall!

Wait, are figs still in season?  Some of them, yes.  Kadota figs are a late season fig, beginning in mid August or so and lasting until mid October, if you're lucky.  I was still able to find some mission (left) and turkey figs (right), too, so they're still around.  Just as figs overlap the seasons, this cake recipe does the same thing!

I used these figs for the puree.  The kadota figs featured in the previous post were all eaten fresh :D

The Recipe:

Liquids:
Honey -- 4oz
Yogurt -- 8 oz (I used full fat, but not the Greek kind.  You want more liquid than that will offer.)
Veg Oil -- 4 oz
Eggs -- 2 ea
Vanilla Extract -- a little bit
Zest of two lemons
Juice of one lemon
Pureed Figs -- 12 oz  (Just take the stems off, dump the whole figs in a food processor, and let 'er go)

Fig Puree!  Everyone needs a Cuisinart.

Lemon zest!  Everyone needs a Microplane.


Dries:
AP Flour -- 12 oz (really, pastry or even cake flour might be better.  I only had AP.  Cakes came out more like muffins.)
Baking Powder -- 1.25 tsp
Baking Soda -- .25 tsp
Salt -- 1 tsp
Nutmeg -- .5 tsp


Procedure:  Super simple.  Ready?  Whisk all your liquids together, ending with the fig puree.  Sift or whisk all your dries together.  Fold dry into liquid.  Portion out, I used a Wilton mini-bundt pan with enough left over for a thin 6" layer.  Bake at 350f for 18ish minutes.



Done!  I also made a glaze with lemon juice and powdered sugar, but I forgot to take picture until the day after they were fresh, so the glaze just got absorbed into the cake  :[

Conculsions:  They're pretty good, but I may have discovered why dried figs are usually used in baking: the delicate flavor of fresh figs is easily lost during the baking process.  The flavor is still there, but more as a backdrop.  If anything, the rosy fig color is more apparent than the flavor.

This recipe could use some tweaking, I'm aware of that.  But figs are expensive, and I won't be able to make it again until next fig season rolls around.  But you can bet I will :]

Some Cakes are Figgier than Others, Part One

Part One being the nerdy info post.  Part two will contain culinary info and a recipe!  Also, I'm just going to throw this out there: there's a lot of smut in this post; there was really no way around it.

I've been wanting to write about figs for a while now.  In fact, this post was set to go up about a week ago, when my friend put an article on my wall that basically said everything I was hoping to say.  Bah!  It seems I'm not the only person in the world.  After coming up with a recipe to add to this post to make everything a bit more original, here we are.

But first thing's first.  Why was I planning to write about figs?  Simply because I am pretty fascinated by them.  Figs have a lot of interesting secrets, ones that I try to tell people (but they never believe me!).

Let's start off with an easy one:  Figs are not (technically) a fruit.  Think about this: every fruit tree goes into blossom before it bears fruit, right?  Well, go check out a fig tree next time summer rolls around and wait for the blossoms.

There are none!
That's because the blossoms are the figs!

It's true.  If you open up a fig, you'll see all these soft threads and things.  These are the bits that make up the blossom, essentially.  They're like the fig equivalent of a flower's pistel and stamen, depending on whether or not you've got a male fig or a female fig.  You'll see seeds in there, too, which are part of the technical fruits of the fig, but the big plump thing you eat is more like an inside out flower.  Neat, huh?

So let's talk about flowers and plant sex for a bit.  Plants reproduce when a mommy flower and a daddy flower fall in love and pollen goes from one of them to the other (I'm not sure which one, I forget how that whole thing works).  In nature, flowers are often pollinated by insects, such as bees.  Happy Bee Child walks around on the flower, because this is a nice thing for a Happy Bee to do, and unknowingly gets covered in pollen.  You know the rest.  Bee visits flower #2 and carries on the plant's dirty hedonistic business.

So if a fig is an inside out flower, and the flowery reproductive bits are on the inside, how does this pollination happen?  This is the fun part.  Don't let it gross you out, it's just nature, folks.

There's an insect called a fig wasp.  It doesn't really look like a scary bitey type wasp.  It's much smaller and probably doesn't bite.  Let's say there's a female fig wasp flying around looking for a safe place to lay its cache of eggs.  (I'm not sure where the pregnant wasp came from; it's a chicken / egg situation.)  Luckily for Ms. Wasp ("Ms.", because she's on her own but doesn't need the world to know), there is a ficus tree that needs her.  This tree has a plump little pocket of nectar with a hole on the bottom.  The hole is big enough for Ms. Wasp to crawl into, where she'll find a moist, sheltered environment for her eggs.  But alas!  Crawling through the tiny hole has ripped off her wings!  She will die inside the nectar pocket and get digested by its juices, but not before she gets a chance to lay her eggs.

So the eggs hatch, poppin' out male and female wasps.  The baby wasps are quick to get busy with their own reproductive business ("Life is short, can't waste time with all this dating nonsense."  Heathens!).  All that rolling around inside their home means some pollen is going to shake loose.  After they're done doing their thing, the females escape, with buns in the oven and pollen on their wet, naked insect bodies, only to seek out another nectar pocket.  Then they all go dancing till it all starts over again.  Right?  Something like that.

Here's the point: those nectar pockets are figs.  The things human kind have been eating for millenia.  Tree sex organs and combination wasp love nest and sarcophagus, all rolled into one.  The essence of the fig is one madcap romp through Mother Nature's blatantly excessive fecundity.

Now, I don't think there's any guarantee that this happens with every single fig you ever come across, but it certainly happens with enough frequency that any fig lover has most likely eaten one of these red light figs. 

I enjoy telling people this because I get a real kick out of it.  Symbiosis is fascinating, but most people would rather disbelieve or get sick, or both.  Until recently, I only had a Wikipedia article to back me up, and it's so easy for people to disregard Wikipedia when they disagree with it.

But!  Sweet vindication, I was at Powell's the other day reading through the summer issue of Gastronomica.  This is a quarterly journal of food and culture, published by the UC Press in Berkely, CA.  This is legit stuff, not some lame magazine with the top 63 summer grilling recipes.  Anyway, the summer issue had an article written by Gary Paul Nabhan titled "A Fig by Any Other Name."  It was very interesting, mainly comparing and contrasting figs and prickly pears, both of which have been historically and culturally important throughout humanity's life.  (Side note, the prickly pear was sometimes called an "Indian Fig").  He doesn't mention this part, but many cultures hold figs as a symbol of female fertility.  I'm not sure where they get that from.

Nabhan does mention, however, that one of the differences between the two is the whole false fruit thing, and the whole waspy sex thing!  Which is what I was trying to tell people!  And furthermore, here are some great links about the same issues to back me up!  They pretty much say the same thing, albeit much more concisely than my midnite banter will allow.  (Bonus, the first link has PBS videos!!)

Oscillator: Edible Symbiosis
The Kitchn: Strange Symbiosis

Humorous anecdote: I shared some figs and fig knowledge with a friend recently, saving the wasp bit till last, as is my custom (because would you eat a fig if someone told you about that first?).  She looked at me with a shock.  "You mean there were eggs inside here?"  "Well, there may have been.  Or maybe shells."  Still more shock.  that's when it occurred to me: my friend is vegan.  I felt horrible.  She shrugged it off and ate the rest of the fig anyway.  Oops!

Invader Puff

In the midst of my latest attempt at conquering earth, I was interrupted by screams from the courtyard:

--"We're having a potluck!  Everyone's making food!  You're going to make eclairs!"

"Filthy human worm babies!!  You dare insult my genius with such an impudent request as eclairs?!  The very concept that a superior baking race would participate in a... "pot luck" is sheer fantasy!  I will rule you all with an iron fist!"

--"Make a really huge eclair!  Like the size of the sheet pan!"

"YOU!  Obey the fist!"

"I want tacos!"

"Silence!"

"Tacos Tacos Tacos!!"

"Enough of this foolishness!  We will cater to their whims, and provide them with delicious treats the likes of which they have never knoooown!  They will live to regret this daaay!!"

"You gonna make biscuits? You gonna make biscuits? Youuu gonna make biiiscuits??"

"No.  I never want you to mention biscuits ever again.  We will make...  PROFITEROLES!"

"Isn't that really just a bite sized eclair?  Won't you still just be making eclairs like they asked?"

"Insolent cur!  You will not question my plans for Earth's Destruction!  Quickly now, gather these ingredients:"

Pâte à Choux:

• 4 oz Dihydrogen Monoxide
• 4 oz Bovine Mammary Extract
• 4 oz Solid emulsified BME fat
• 1 oz Crystalline Sucrose
  
• Pinch of Sodium Chloride
• Several drops of Soluble Green Tincture
• 6 oz Pulverised Triticum aestivum seed, sifted to remove bran
• 4 whole Gallus gallus domesticus ovae, unfertilised!!

1. Bring first six ingredients to full rolling boil!
2. Add full amount of T. aestivum.  Stir over high heat as if your miserable life depended on it!  It does!!
3. Remove from heat once the Sticky Skin Substance begins to form on the bottom of the pot.  Let it cool for a few minutes.
4. Beat in the G. gallus ovae, ONE AT A TIME!!
5. Pipe into bite sized circles.  Bake at 491 K for 15 minutes.  Then lower temperature to 463 K and continue to bake until dry, at least another 15 minutes.
6. Fill with Delicious Delicious Cream Filling!
7. Dip in prepared sauce derived from Theobroma cacao seeds!

 Delicious Delicious Cream Filling:

• 16 oz BME
• 1 Whole G. gallus ova, plus 2 yolks
• 1 oz Pulverised Zea mays Starch
• 4 oz Crystalline Sucrose
• .25 oz Vanilla planifolia extractive
• 1 oz BME fat
• Several drops Soluble Purple Tincture

"I was the turkey all along!  It was ME!!"

"Focus!  To make the filling:"

1.  Heat BME.  Meanwhile, combine ovae with Sucrose and starch.
2. Just before BME boils, gradually pour into eggy mixture, whisking constantly!
3. Return to heat.  Whisk over high heat as if your miserable life depended on it!  It does!!
4. Once thickened and bubbling, remove from heat.  Add remaining ingredients.  Cover and let cool.  Once cool, a pudding skin will have developed.  EAT THE SKIN!

"I'm gonna sing the dessert song now!"

"What follows will serve as visual documentation of this process: front row seats to the END of all MANKIND!!"

"I love this show!"

"Now to unleash Screaming Temporal DOOM!!"

"yay!  doom, doom doom doom dooooom, doomy doomy doom, doomy doooom!  The end!"

---

Today's post has been brought to you by the letters I, Z, and G.

Sizzling Blood and the Unholy Stench...

...Of Murder.

As some of you know, I currently work at a kitchen supply store.  We have all sorts of gadgets, from the mundane to the insane.  The other day, some of the kids in my baking class asked what might be the strangest gadget in our repertoire.  Our manager brought them to the duck press.

The duck press is something that I've noticed in the store since I began working there over two years ago.  However, I never knew what it was, nor did I even think of it as some sort of kitchen tool.  It sits up on a shelf, the only of its kind, as if it is merely a decorative knick knack.  When I learned that it is for sale, and that it retails for just under $2,000, I was filled with curiosity.

What does it do??  What is it for??  A DUCK press?  Do you press the whole duck in there?  What do you press?  Why does it have duck feet??

Well, the initial explanation I received involved pressing organs to make pate juices and au jus.  Duck juice extraction for sauces, essentially.

That was weird, but then I delved further and discovered a classic French dish that goes by a few different names.  If you're lucky, you'll get a canard a la presse, or pressed duck.  If you're some sort of pagan meat fiend, however, you'll order by another name: either canard a la rouennaise, or canard au sang.  Duck in blood sauce, or duck in blood, respectively.

WiseGeek has a pretty good description.

In short, a live duck is strangled (so as to minimise blood loss), partially roasted, and then broken down.  Meaty hunks are removed for further roasting, and then the carcass is pressed to extract all sorts of blood and marrow.  This extraction is used as the basis for the sauce that is then poured over the roasted meat.  Oh yes, all this pressed business is done by the waiter AT YOUR TABLE.  So you get to watch (and presumably hear and smell) the duck get crushed, you sick, sick little man.

If you want to view pictures of the process from La Tour d'Argent, a Parisian restaurant that serves the dish for 130 €, head over to fxcuisine.com.  But I'm warning you, those pictures are nasty gross.

As a side note, La Tour d'Argent has every reason to be proud of their dish.  Canetons à la Rouennaise was on the menu of the "Dinner of the Three Emperors," an eight hour meal that "is reputed to have been the most magnificent ever to have occurred in any restaurant in the world." (yes, I just quoted Wikipedia.)  La Tour d'Argent is the restaurant descendant, so to speak, of Café Anglais, where the dinner took place.

Fancy pants aside, I'll never view that duck press the same way again.  This, friends, is why I stay away from the savory side of the kitchen.

Further Thoughts on Lye Pretzels

Here's a bit more to ponder:

Since lye is corrosive, it hates certain metals.  Take aluminum, for instance.  Lye wants to kick aluminum in the face.  And aluminum has no defenses; it's one of the most reactive metals on earth.  You can get aluminum to react with air if you just look at it the wrong way.

Keep in mind that most sheet pans are made out of aluminum, so spilling any amount of lye on them will cause the metal to have a molecular anxiety attack.  Atoms of aluminum freak out and combine with the sodium hydroxide to form weird aluminum salts, with the byproduct being pure hydrogen gas.

It's inevitable that some lye will jack up your pans.  But as a precaution, always bake pretzels on something like parchment paper or a Silpat to control this reaction and subsequent buildup of hydrogen gas in your oven.  (!!!)

What to do with leftover lye?  Easy.  Dump it down the drain followed by a hot water flush.  Is this safe?  Yup: in addition to making world class pretzels, sodium hydroxide is one of the chemicals most commonly used as a drain cleaner.  (According to the MSDS for Pro Strength Liquid Plumr, the concentration level is only HALF what I use for pretzels.  eek!)  Anyway, sodium hydroxide eats away at gunk and also uses the saponification trick to turn trapped grease into soap, essentially causing the drain gunk to clean itself.

If you really want to make pretzels but the lye thing freaks you out, you can simply use a weaker alkali found in the kitchen: baking soda.  Mix it up with water for the dip, but you will have to bring the mix to around 190 degrees (F) or so.  Essentially, the pretzels will be poached, just like making bagels!  Everyone is happy!

I should also say, bibliography style, that Joe Pastry has taught me a lot about lye pretzels.  While I hope to have added some to the discussion without directly plagiarising his work, I make no guarantees.  Check out his posts here.

That is all!

I Stole and I Lyed

just because you asked me to.

So I've been making pretzels on a fairly regular basis lately, for a few reasons.  They are fun to make, they impress people (which is always a priority for me, of course), and they involve dangerous chemicals.  What fun!

Wait, dangerous chemicals?  What's all this about?  Well, all pretzels have secrets, and in this case it is a magical white powder called sodium hydroxide, or lye.  My go to illustration for what lye is, and why it is bad, is that scene from Fight Club.  Tyler explains that lye is used to make soap and then uses a chemical burn to go on some sort of existential rant.  (The bit about soap is true; a metallic alkaline solution combined with fat causes saponification, the process of making soap!  This process can lead to soapy cookies if you have too much baking soda in the mix without enough acid to neutralise it.  Keep that in mind!)

What does this have to do with pretzels?  Well, just before pretzels are baked, they get dipped in lye.  The lye solution has a pH of 13 (so I gather; I have no litmus papers hanging around the kitchen).  The alkaline environment coating the pretzels aids in various browning reactions that create that deep crust color.  It also adds unique flavor and texture to the surface of the pretzel.

Is it safe to eat?  Well, throw back a shot of lye and you'll be feeling very sick and ill, indeed.  But in the oven, chemical reactions happen that make it safe to eat.  This specifically involves the Carbon Dioxide present in the dough, CO₂ being the waste product of yeast that is harnessed to make bread rise.  Lye, being NaOH, combines with the CO₂ and evaporating H₂O to create both Na₂CO₃ and Na₂HCO₃, being sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate, respectively.  Both of which are much safer to eat than NaOH!

All this aside, there are other applications for this crazy food science.  The Norwegian abomination delicacy known as Lutefisk involves soaking fish in lye to denature and "jelly" the proteins.  Soak dried corn in lye and you get hominy, the plump morsels of corn found in menudo and pozole.  Use lye to make pasta, and your noodles will turn out ramen-yellow.

---

Chemicals aside, let's make pretzels.  The back story: I made pretzels at a bakery for a while, but was always dissatisfied with them.  I've developed my own formula and technique that comes much closer to an authentic pretzel than the bakery's interpretation.  Theirs are dense and rich.  Good, but a bit..."much."  (My current boss, born and raised in Vienna, has given me awesome feedback along the way).

So here we are:

• 100% Bread Flour
• 52.5% Water
• 10% Butter (or a solid veg fat if you're veganomically inclined)
• 2ish% Salt
• 1.75ish% Dry Yeast

 (side note: I'll always give plain English measurements if you want them, but let's be honest: I don't expect anyone following this blog to make the stuff I write about.  But let me know.)

Mix the dough, knead till smooth and springy, shape into a ball and let rest for no more than 20 minutes.  This allows the gluten to relax without any real yeast activity happening.  We want most of the rising to happen after shaping; this controls the internal crumb of the pretzels somehow or another.  Roll out the dough into a squareish shape.  Do you like that little baby rolling pin?  Handmade out of teak by my friend and his dad.  Smooth as glass!

Scale out the dough to 45g pieces, keep under plastic wrap to prevent drying.  I scaled this batch to make 20 pretzels at 45g each, which is less than half the size that I usually make.  I'm experimenting with mini guys because my friend wants me to make mini pretzels for her engagement party.

For pretzel shaping, we first want to get these blobs of dough into a tight little cylinder.  We let the cylinder relax for a few minutes (really, just long enough to go through the whole batch and then come back around to the beginning again.)

This is called a preshape.  This is necessary because gluten has a very good memory.  If you've ever taken a wad of bread dough and tried to roll it in your hands to form a ball, Play-Doh style, you know it doesn't work that way.  You have to give it an initial round shape to "program" the dough to accept the final shape.  In this case, our final shape is essentially a rope, so we make an initial version of the rope to tell the dough where it's headed.

But here, how about a video?  You know I hate making them, but I know you love watching them, so here you are.  Being without a Gorillapod, I have no convenient place for a camera, so my clunky hands get in the way of these small dough pieces.  Sorry about that, but I promise it might be interesting.  The first video covers preshape and final shape for the traditional pretzel.  The second video covers some other final shapes that I think are fun.

After shaping, we let them rise till just about doubled in size, and then pop them in the freezer.  This firms them up, which eases the lye dip.  Speaking of, here's the set up for the lye dip.  I use that bucket on the far left to mix the solution, using 75g of lye to 1.5kg water (5% solution).  Creating this solution gives off a lot of heat, so add lye to cold water only.  It also gives off some sort of gas for a short bit which makes me choke and feel this throat pain that I've never felt before, so that's fun.  Keep a loose lid on top for ten minutes or so to control this; after that it's fine.

Dip, sprinkle with salt (I use Maldon, because it's flaky and British), bake at 375 for 18ish minutes, cool, dip in mustard, nutella, jam, whatever you like.  There you have it!

The Mighty Bouche

 The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a pièce montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.  

Remember when I signed up for that daring baker thing?  Well the first challenge handed to me was to make a croquembouche.  But here's the thing: I do not like croquembouche.

Now what, you ask, is a croquembouche?  It's a type of classic French wedding dessert, though nothing at all like a cake.  In essence, it is a conical tower of profiteroles (cream puffs) held together with caramelised sugar.  Then it gets decorated with all sorts of things, usually including spun sugar.

The construction is a bit tedious, but is able to split into different components: pate a choux, pronounced "patty chokes*", which is the "batter" used to make the cream puffs; pastry cream, the filling; and the final caramel, which must be made immediately before assembly (although...  I suppose you could make it ahead, let it solidify, and carefully melt it back down.  But I digress).

I've made one before, with my school partner Shane.  Here is a picture of us in mid-build:
 
That croaky-ma-boosh took us four hours, start to finish, using some thousands** of profiteroles and gallons** of caramel and cream filling.

So wait, now I'm supposed to make one BY MYSELF, ON MY OWN FREE TIME??  Ridiculous.  The mere mention of this sent a wave of wanton rebellion through my mind.  Ever the maverick, I quickly ran through a number of ideas that, while still following the challenge rules, would give me a good outlet for creative steam.  A model of Stonehenge?  Possibly a Croquembouche version of the NCC-1701-D?

Wait a second, hold up.  Remember this: I am not a croquembouche fan.  Do I really want to put forth a good deal of effort on this thing?  No.  Not really.  My final croaked bush ended up using eclairs instead of profiteroles (the challenge didn't specify shape!!!  it only said use pate a choux filled with pastry cream!!  i think i'm safe!!).  The idea was to build a Jenga tower out of eclairs.

The problem with eclairs is that they are soft and roundy, rather than firm and squared off like Jenga blocks.  And so, even with the hardening caramel holding the pieces together, it didn't get very tall before threatening to topple.  I tried to get some good strands of spun caramel around it, but the tower just wasn't cooperating.  Whipped out the camera, took a picture, knocked it down, stuck it all in the fridge.  There's still some in there.  Whatevs.  On to the next challenge!

Oh, you can check out other entries here.






*not really.  come now.
**quantities approximated

Baker Meet Blogger

You don't know a thing about their lives
They live where you wouldn't dare to bake...

Or at least, some of us wouldn't dare.  But I did.  Today's obscure song reference pays tribute to The Daring Kitchen, a secret culinary society into which I was recently accepted and given the role of Daring Baker.

What is this Daring business all about?  Well, it's really just a group of food bloggers, both bakers and cooks, who make a secret recipe each month.  Someone gets selected to throw out a recipe challenge on the first of each month, and then everyone has until the 27th of that month to make the recipe and write up a blog about the whole thing.

The deal is, the challenge is a SECRET!!!  We're not allowed to release the blog post until the 27th!  If we do so before, our membership is revoked!  Membership may also be revoked if we DON'T PARTICIPATE in the challenge!  This is legit!

My membership wasn't approved until after the April challenge, which was to make a traditional English steamed pudding.  Flip.  I basically live for a good steamed pud, but whatever.  The May challenge was released today, and let me tell you this: it's a doozy.  It's something I've done before, which is a plus, but I've never done it on my own.

Perhaps I've said too much!  They police the member's blogs for this stuff (maybe).

Anyway, it all sounds so fancy, and it sort of is, but consider this: anybody can join, and there are hundreds of members.  I really don't understand the secrecy of it all, because the only people who care about the challenges are in the club anyway, and so they know the deal.  But I don't mind the formalities; I think they're what make it fun :]

Peter Take a Bow

Back at culinary school, one of our classes was all about bread.  At one point, the dean of the baking program came in and spoke for a while about his passion for bread, which really got me hooked on the whole idea.  He brought in a book titled The Bread Baker's Apprentice, written by a Johnson and Wales instructor named Peter Reinhart.  Chef mentioned that Reinhart is basically the man when it comes to bread, so I checked out a few of his books at the library.  Turns out that, in addition to being a baker and instructor, Chef Reinhart is also a member of an Eastern Orthodox service order, and likes to weave a taste of lay theology into his baking craft.

This intrigued me, so I eventually bought his book Bread Upon the Waters.  This is a memoir, of sorts, in which the author's process of self discovery and spiritual awakening is paralleled with the process of baking bread.  In fact, the whole reason Chef Reinhart got into baking in the first place is that he started preparing all the meals within his faith community.  He and his wife went on to open Brother Juniper's Cafe in 1987 as an outreach effort for the community.  His servant-like vision for the cafe was very close to what I have always wanted to do with food.  Combine this with the fact that Brother Juniper's was in my hometown of Santa Rosa, CA, and I was sold on this guy.

So when I heard that he would be in Portland, where I now live, doing a demo class at Sur La Table, where I work, I was pretty excited.  I teach baking classes there part time, and my boss asked if I would be willing to prep out Chef Reinhart's doughs the day ahead of the class.  I jumped on that opportunity, and then sat in on the class the next day.

Listening to Peter Reinhart is inspiring.  He speaks about baking with the authoritative wisdom of a prophet, the overflowing knowledge of a professor, and the excited wonder of a child.  I didn't care much to hear about bread instruction that evening; I have already read about his techniques.  What I wanted to hear, first hand, was his passion.  In three short hours, Chef Reinhart's passion spilled out in an array of pithy bread wisdom.  I will attempt to paraphrase my favorite bit, something he said in regards to the symbolism of bread (or if you prefer, check out the embedded video at the bottom to hear this along with some other good stuff, beginning at around 7 minutes in).

Bread shows us the cycle of life and death, of rebirth, renewal, regeneration.  Bread starts as wheat, which grows like grass.  It is green, vibrant, alive.  In an effort to reproduce, this grass forms seeds.  These seeds carry within them all the potential to form new life and carry on the cycle.

But we pluck the seeds and crush them, forever destroying the life within.  This dust is mixed with water and a little salt, which only serves to form a lifeless lump of clay.  However, yeast is then added to the mix.  Yeast is the bread's leavening, which is derived from the word enliven.  Life is added to the formless clay-like mass.  The yeast gives off its gasses and breathes into the dough, strengthening and rejuvenating this thing that looks nothing like the grass in the fields.  

The baker forms the dough, instructs it to grow into a specific shape, and then bakes it.  The baking must occur, because raw dough is indigestible.  In the oven, many transformations happen, one of which is that the yeast is killed.  The only thing giving life to the dough has now been sacrificed so that we may have bread as an end result.  This bread is again dead, but it is nutritious, it gives life, thus completing the cycle when we eat it.

Isn't that neat?  I think so.  Chef went on to say that this would all just be meaningless poetry if the bread didn't actually taste good.  I would say that there's a lesson there, too.

After the class, everybody lined up to get their copy of BBA or Artisan Breads Everyday signed.  I had my copy of Bread Upon the Waters in hand, because those thoughts are more valuable to me than a few recipes.  During class clean up, I was able to pose a question to Chef Reinhart that has been heavy on my heart lately.  Is it truly possible to combine my love for baking with my desire to serve those around me (I was recently told that I would never find this)?  He told me of course it is possible, our passions will always find a way to intertwine in harmony.  We spoke for a few minutes, and he told me to email him sometime, to "share the journey."  I will certainly take him up on that offer.

And the short definition of baking?
Baking is a balancing act between time, temperature, and ingredients.  In using these, it is the baker's responsibility to evoke from the wheat the fullness of its potential. -Peter Reinhart

Crashed Down on the CrossBuns

Yesterday my friend Jessica and I made Hot Cross Buns (it being Easter and all). The recipe was a further step in the evolution of my trusty rich bread, which was the formula base for both the Christmas bread and the Saffron buns. However, for the HCB, I decreased the butter a bit, increased the sugar a bit (and switched it to brown sugar, or B-Sug as we say in the biz), changed the spices around... I think that's it.

We didn't have time to candy up some citrus peels, so we just used zest instead. Some would say this defies traditional HCB methodology, but there were still currants. Those are just small raisins, by the way.

And look, we used the KitchenAid, with the new and improved spiral dough hook!

For the crosses on top, we used the weird paste that you just make out of flour and water, because I hear that's more traditional.  The crosses came out dark in the bake though, so I don't know what's up with that.

What She Said*

The other day my friend Sara, a sausagetarian, gave me a shout out on her blog. I was right chuffed, as they say, because she's a legit food writer and all. (On a side note, if you're at all curious about culinary school, read her post and the NYTimes article that prompted it).

Sara does a few posts here and there titled "Why Do I Own This?" She'll pick something from her kitchen arsenal, a once-a-year type item, and write about it. I get a kick out of it, mainly because she's got a good collection of kitchen stuff.

I'd like to steal her thunder, just this once. Although, to avoid legal entanglements and things, I will call this post: "Why did I just buy that?"

After two years of swearing that I would never buy a silly Le Creuset baby spatula, I finally found the hole in my life that only it could fill. Why did I just buy that? This is why:

Because wasted Nutella is a travesty.

*Title taken from the Smiths song (duh, haven't you been paying attention?), not the Michael Scott thing.

Meat Is Murder

Or at least some would say so. In 2005, I went vegetarian for a few months. It wasn't because I thought animals shouldn't be eaten; I was persuaded by some of the environmental arguments, socio-cultural arguments, and anti-animal as commodity arguments. The main reason that this didn't last is that I went to Capernwray Hall for nine months, and their veg option consisted of a steady diet of Quorn. That got old.

The ideals have stuck with me though, and I do try to be more aware about how much meat I eat (because who can deny that we're a meat addicted country?) Anyway, these ideas were first presented to me in the liner notes of Moby's album "Play." (This is a great album, by the by. I think I listened to it every day in 2001.)

And speaking of Moby and his veganosity, he just co-edited a book titled "Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety (thinking twice about the meat we eat)." It's a collection of essays, really, and he'll be at Powell's this Saturday at 4:00 to do a little meat and greet (ha!). I'm going to try to make it in, but my brother and his family will be in town this weekend, so we'll see.

Now if you know much about Moby, you know that he's passionate, but also very accepting and tolerant. In an interview with FOODDay, Moby states:

"To change people's minds, you have to respect the people you're talking to. Part of that is presenting the facts available, and not being pedantic or judgmental."

The essays in the book are by all sorts of people, so some of them may be preachy, I don't know. But I anticipate that this will be a good eye opening read. Maybe enough to kick me back onto the vegwagon. (But I don't think I can do vegan... I just love dairy too much, in all it's glorious forms...)

All Ovens Have Secrets

And here is mine, so let it be known: we got a new oven!

Writing Frightening Verse

So, update on the oven situation. Our landlord says that he can no longer find replacement heating elements for our oven size (22"). He said the only option looks like to get a completely new oven, either a 24" or a 20". Now, a 24" oven won't fit in our lil' nooklet, so we may have to downsize the thing. Super bummer, by the by, because I don't think my baking stone will fit in a 20" oven :[ We'll see how it goes. There may still be the possibility of finding a 22" heating element, so we'll see. In the meantime, you can still read my sporadic musings on life over at Prisma Obscura.

Oscillate Wildly

Here is my new KitchenAid! I used it to make three huge batches of cookie dough to send out to folks, which is a good thing. But now here is the bad news. In the middle of baking said cookies, my oven died. It's not really the best oven to begin with, but this just really took the cake. Oh well. That's how the cookie crumbles. I'd get it fixed, but I just don't have the dough for that kind of thing. So, to those whom I promised cookies, please bear with me.

Reel Around the Fondant

 (shout out to Christian Gridelli for the title!)

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. Most of that is because work has been crazy busy lately. I've been training new hires, which always takes more energy than regular work, because you have to talk about everything you're doing the whole time and go slower than normal so they catch on. Fleh.

People said I was virtually dead, but they were so wrong; I've been baking up a storm.  Last weekend, I made petit fours for my friends for Valentine's day. How nice. I even made another video for it, because the process might be interesting to some people. They would have been posted sooner, except when all was said and done, I realised that I didn't film the actual fondant part. And what would a fondant titled post be without the fondant? Ridiculous. That's what it would be. So I made another batch of fondant today and filmed it.

Here's the deal though. I feel awkward making videos. It's just me talking to a camera, so I don't really know what to talk about to make it interesting. And my approach to baking is kind of nerdy, so I feel like it doesn't really appeal to a wide audience. Also, I noticed afterward that I say "alright" at the beginning of every clip. I'll work on that.

So, if you're interested, this first video is how to make a genoise sponge cake.  Some people see no worth in it, but I do.  It will be the base for my petit fours. My genoise consisted of only eggs, sugar, butter, flour, and cocoa powder.




So genoise is usually brushed / sprayed with some sort of flavored syrup to give it flavor and moisture. I used a rose syrup -- equal parts sugar and water flavored with rose water. I also filled the cake (after splitting it in three layers) with raspberry jam, and then punched out circles with a biscuit cutter. (see where this is leading? little chocolate raspberry rose cakes. how freaking adorable.)

This next video is all about fondant, and in my opinion it is far more interesting than the genoise video. Now I'll bet you're thinking about that weird sugary play-doh that you've seen Duff and the Charm City crew drape over their creations. Well, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm not really sure about the history of that stuff, but I'm pretty sure that it used to be called sugar paste.

Fondant, in this case, is a runny, sticky business. It's very versatile, and you've definitely had it before. I won't tell you about its many incarnations here, because I do that in the video, and I need to leave you with some reason to watch it.




So after I had this lump of sugaryness, I warmed it gently over a double boiler (you can't get it over like 100 degrees, because then the crystals that took you forever to make just melt away and it comes out lame). When it was pourable, I glazed the little cakes with it. Poured fondant is sort of transparent, so it looks brownish because my cake was chocolate.

Here are pictures of the cakes. The little pink design was just royal icing, a mix of egg white, lemon juice, and powdered sugar. Have you ever used that mixture to "glaze" a cake or cookie? It's fairly common, and essentially the cheater's version of poured fondant.

Coming soon -- Scott's KitchenAid debut!

With a Sponge and a Crusty Baguette

I made baguettes.  Sort of.  My oven is too small to make a loaf of bread that could rightfully be called a baguette, so I guess these technically fall under the definition of a batarde.  Aside from being the French for bastard, a batarde is also a stubbier version of a baguette.

Here's the deal, bread like this is incredibly simple.  Four ingredients: flour, water, yeast, salt.  I used 20% whole wheat flour for some extra flavor, although that did sacrifice the nice big crumb texture that baguette should have.  Also, the water was 67% of the total weight of the flour.  (This means my dough was at 67% hydration, which is a bready term that you don't really need to care about.  Hydration levels just help to illustrate how different breads happen is all.)

So the bit about the sponge.  Well, a sponge is a term people use to describe a preferment.  This means a portion of the dough that is fermented before the rest of the dough (fermentation is the yeasty bit.  Some people say the bread is rising; other, more accurate, people say that it is undergoing fermentation).  The spongey bit shown here is known as a poolish, so called because it's supposed to be a method from Poland.  It involves taking a portion of your flour, around 30% or so, mixing it with an equal portion of water and a bit of yeast, and letting it sit till it gets light and bubbly.  This first pic is right after mixing the sponge.

Preferments are good because they help to develop extra flavor.  When water and flour are combined, the water activates an amylase enzyme in the flour that breaks the starches down into simple sugars.  This is called autolysis, or self-digestion.  The longer you let this happen, the more complex your flavor will be. Mix it up and ignore it for a while.  Go for a walk where it's quiet and dry; talk about precious things.


Preferments also develop some extra yeasty goodness that wouldn't happen in a quicker method.  Once the yeast is in there, you can't really let the thing sit around forever, so you do have to keep an eye on the optimal timing of the thing, which is based on how much yeast you put in to begin with.  I used enough yeast to have my poolish ready in two hours.  (For the sake of comparison, the pizza dough recipe of which I am rather fond uses a sixteen hour poolish.  Sixteen!)  But here's how it looks after two hours.

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Then you just mix the poolish in with the rest of the flour and water, plus a bit of salt for flavor and yesty crowd control.  Mix, knead, ferment, punch, scale, round, bench, (you don't need to know about all these words, I'm just making them up), shape, proof, and here we are:

Whoops, forgot to cut the slashes in it to make it look official:

That's better.

Bake them in a freakin' hot oven (seriously, 450f or more.  But my lame oven only got to about 375f after 30 minutes of preheating!  And it was set at 500f!  Curious to know if your oven is lying?  Buy an oven thermometer.)  Also, you need to get steam in your oven.  Just put a pan underneath your preheated baking stone (you already have one, correct?).  Pour some hot water in the pan just after you toss the bread onto the stone.

The steam delays the formation of the exterior crust, which gives extra volume to the loaves.  Essentially, the heat makes them blow up as much as possible before the crust hardens and prevents further expansion.  Also, steam causes partial starch gelatinization on the surface of the bread, which gives the crispy baguette crust we all know and love (though it kills my jaw.  Any other TMJ friends out there?)

Here is the bread.  If my oven had been hot enough, those slashes would have blown open into ear-like flaps called grigne.  Ah well.

Smallish holes, due to the extra weight and water absorption of the whole wheat flour.  Still awesome with oil and vinegar, roasted garlic, etc etc.

And the best thing about baguettes?  They have this crackly sound right when you take them out of the oven.  Some people say the baguette is singing, but that's nothing; you should hear them play piano.