The weather in Minneapolis has been a bit off-and-on lately. That is, spring is definitely on its way in, but after a couple of amazing 70 and 80 degree days, 50 starts to seem chilly! That just means it’s time for a little chili! We first tried this Vegetarian Chili on a Friday during Lent and really liked it. If you’re looking for some spice on a cold spring day, it’s worth a try.

As you can see my preparation was not vegan, but it could easily be made so. We topped our bowls with plain yogurt, cheese, and scallions. The trick for this meal was to attempt eating an entire bowl without using silverware. I’m not sure the “Fritos Scoops Challenge” is a healthy choice, but they were just the salty-crunch we needed (I lost… I gave in an used a spoon).

The recipe (via Whole Foods’ website)

• 2 tablespoons olive or canola oil 
• 1 medium yellow onion, chopped 
• 1 large carrot, chopped 
• 1 stalk celery, chopped 
• 1 medium green bell pepper, cored, seeded and chopped 
• 1 medium red bell pepper, cored, seeded and chopped 
• 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped 
• 1 to 3 tablespoons finely chopped chipotles in adobo 1 tablespoon dried oregano 
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin 
• 1 tablespoon chili powder 
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 
• 1 (28-ounce) can diced tomatoes, with their liquid 
• 3 cups cooked red kidney beans, drained 
• 1 1/2 cups cooked black beans, drained

Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add onions, carrots, celery, peppers and garlic and cook for 10 to 12 minutes, until vegetables are softened but not browned. Add chipotles, oregano, cumin, chili powder and salt. Stir to blend. Add tomatoes and 4 cups water. Gently simmer over low heat, uncovered, for 45 minutes. Add beans and simmer an additional 30 minutes. Garnish individual bowls with green onions or sour cream [we used yogurt], if desired.

As winter slowly releases its icy grip on the north, I get pretty desperate for any vegetable that isn’t a root. It is pretty exciting when green things start to reappear in the grocery, even if they have to be trucked in from California in late April. So it is with fresh fava beans, a clear indication that it’s spring somewhere.

And at only $2.99/lb, they’re a steal. Well, not quite. Most vegetables entail some amount of waste, and in the case of fava beans it’s a whole lot. The beans are encased in pods, like peas, and then each bean has a thick shell around it that also needs to be removed. 

How much waste is this? The total weight of everything was 9 3/8 oz (although the Wedge charged me for 10 1/4 oz—I wonder whose scale is wrong). The weight of the edible beanswas 1 5/8 oz, while the weight of the pods and shells was 7 7/8 oz (slight discrepancy here due to my scale being accurate only to somewhere more than 1/8 oz). Only 17% of what you buy is edible. $2.99/lb? In terms of food you can actually eat, it’s more like $17.50/lb. Yikes! Such is desperation for at the end of a long winter.

This wouldn’t seem so bad if you could come up with a useful way to employ the pods and shells. Anybody have any ideas?

At the risk of being un-of the moment, I’d like to share some pictures from our February weekend in Duluth, MN. Allow me to set the record straight… this was the site of our first first picnic, attempted on the shores of Lake Superior and finished with gloved hands inside of a state park shelter with beautiful views of the lake.

If not for the snow, doesn’t this look like a lovely day for a picnic?

I thought it was a nice enough spot, and there were picnic tables. Tom reluctantly unloaded the (unnecessary) cooler.

In the end we got a little too cold and sought refuge. But as I said, we still had a lovely view of the lake. And with our teeth not so chattery and our hands not so cold, we were able to enjoy Tom’s creations a little more: lamb liver and pork terrine, baguette, Trader Joe’s dijon (too dijon for me, just dijon enough for Tom), olive oil, and parsley sprigs. It’s true that I continued eating with my leather gloves on. Tom found his fleece gloves didn’t take well to dipping bread in olive oil; he went bare-handed and was rather cold.

Finally, here’s the view from the shelter along with a few pictures from our stay in Duluth, MN. All images from the picnic were taken at Gooseberry Falls State Park. I’d like to return to Gooseberry Falls in the summertime, if we have a chance, to see the falls in their unfrozen state. Despite the cold, if you like to walk or hike, Duluth and the surrounding areas are a great place to visit. I’m sure it’s even better above freezing.

Yesterday Martha and I had the pleasure of attending Urban Bean’s Patio Party (Martha heard about it on Facebook). Most days, Urban Bean is an unassuming coffeehouse located on the corner of Bryant Ave S and W 33rd st that, I’ve been told, makes great coffee. But with temperatures peaking over 80 in the Twin Cities yesterday the gloves came off and we had a party on our hands. A party featuring a carnival trailer serving up hot dogs, bison burgers, pulled pork sandwiches, french fries and a really broad condiment station. And free beer. Yes, free beer.

Given those choices, I’m always going with pulled pork. The pork itself was a little dry and not super-flavorful, but the Urban Bean crew partially made up for it with the quantity and quality of toppings available. I was really impressed with the extent to which they home-made everything: the purple cabbage coleslaw with raisins, pickled cucumbers and carrots, and bacon ketchup. Ever since my elementary school cafeteria days a big jar full of free pickles gets me pretty excited, all the better if they’re homemade.

And the free beer? Well, it was PBR, but you don’t look a gift beer in the mouth. Much less a couple of gift beers.

Of course, free PBR can’t help but attract a certain crowd, and the whole time I was there the patio was awash in tight jeans, wife beaters, big sunglasses, and irony, oh so much irony. 

With this 80 degree afternoon coming out of nowhere from what has been a pretty dismal week, Urban Bean couldn’t have picked a better time.

Martha and I love picnics, probably because they combine some of our (at least, my) favorite things. Those being:

• Eating
• Being outside
• Drinking

As soon as the weather starts to turn to the right side of warm I am pushing to be eating food outside. Actually this year we tried at least one picnic on the wrong side of warm; generally speaking, a picnic in Duluth in February is not a good idea. But last weekend, with temperatures in the 60s here in the Twin Cities, it was time to brave the south shore of Lake Calhoun for the official start of the picnicking season.

Although eventually I’d like to get more adventurous with picnic food, long habit dictates that the focus of any picnic should be bread, cured meat and cheese. With Martha working we needed to have an evening picnic and since it still gets dark sooner than I’d like we needed something simple and fast, i.e. sandwiches. Inspired by countless bocadillos consumed in Spain, I went with Boar’s Head Virginia ham (jamón york rather than jamón), very generic white cheese, and butter, on my standard wild-yeast boule.

The first picnic of the year is a real celebration of spring, and no vegetable says spring more than asparagus. My favorite way to prepare asparagus (and almost any vegetable) is to roast it with olive oil, salt and pepper. I whipped together some mayonnaise to serve as dip. This was the first asparagus I have eaten all year (it’s still out of season here but there comes a point every year where I kind of give up on local produce) and it was everything I wanted it to be. I doubt I could articulate exactly what makes spring asparagus so awesome, but if you’ve had it you hardly need an explanation. 

It was a very simple picnic, but those are usually the best ones. As we set out on our bikes for the lake the all-day blue sky started to cloud up, and the wind sure can blow on the lake, making it was a little too cool to be comfortable. We did not linger after eating. But hey, less than perfect weather is just a part of being outside and what makes picnicking so fun.

And as for the last thing I like about picnics, drinking, it is illegal to consume alcohol in Minneapolis parks. We certainly did not conceal a bottle of wine between our stainless steel water bottles. That would be illegal.

As far as dips go, if it has raw garlic you can count me in. This started with guacamole and continued right on through to hummus and beyond. My most recent discovery is the Turkish dip tarator.

Tarator consists of almonds ground with olive oil, water or broth, lemon juice, salt, pepper and garlic. As with any dish featuring Allium sativum au naturel, the garlic is the strongest flavor, but the almonds also contribute a pretty strong flavor of their own: that mixture of cream and nuts that is almond. The key to bringing this flavor out is to use enough salt; add salt until you taste almonds. The almonds also give the sauce a surprising amount of body with a thick, whipped texture.  This sauce is strikingly white, so consider using white pepper to preserve that.

Apparently tarator is eaten with seafood in Turkey, particularly fried seafood. The recipe I used was intended to go with fried mussels. Instead, I served it with Moorish lamb meatballs, substituting it for a different almond-based sauce. Putting the tarator with food helps to mellow the strong garlic flavor which, tasted by itself, can be a little intimidating, even to diehard garlic fans.

Here’s the recipe, from Ana Sortun’s Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean:

• 1/4 c Olive Oil
• 1/2 c water or mussel poaching liquid or what have you
• 2 t minced garlic
• 1/2 c blanched whole almonds
• 1 t lemon juice
• Salt and Pepper

Put olive oil, water, garlic, almonds and lemon juice in blender or food processor (NB: Sortun says to add them in that order which I guess would make a difference if you use a blender, which she recommends, but not so much in a food processor, which I used). Puree for at least 3 minutes so the mixture is completely smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

When I painted our bathroom orange last summer we purchased a new shower curtain at IKEA for $8, pictured below center. I wanted something brighter than the brown one we’d been using from Tom’s old apartment (you can see this partially below) to match the crazy brightness of the walls I’d created. Perhaps too crazy…? I could go on about whether the choice to paint the bathroom orange was good or bad, but that would take a while. As Tom has said, at least it doesn’t look like a prison cell any longer:

I was reasonably happy with the orange and brown IKEA shower curtain… it seemed to tie the bathroom together, and I even learned that the plastic content is on the green side (via Apartment Therapy’s post). It seems IKEA is committed to using 100% PVC free plastics. So everything was great. That is, until the proximity of the plastic shower curtain to the radiator caused it to burn and melt mid-way through the winter. In the photo on the right below you can see just how much the shower curtain and the radiator rubbed elbows.

The burn in the shower curtain above happened about two months ago. It almost drove me to deciding that this was a sign to get rid of the orange paint (again, I go back and forth between hating/liking this), but instead I used the opportunity as an excuse to buy a new shower curtain. This one is by Dwell Studio, a company I’ve been a fan of for a long time. Dwell is best known for their colorful, contemporary bed linens, and their prints for home, kids, and baby are well worth a look. As you may have guessed by now, I am pretty smitten with this new shower curtain. I think Tom might actually like it, too. At the very least, it’s nice to return to a lightweight, cotton curtain that moves freely and won’t MELT on me. It doesn’t hurt that the colors are perfect. It’s even possible I might stop hating the orange…

I take pictures of the apartment periodically, usually because I’m planning on blogging about something and sometimes because I’d like to share the space via email or my Picasa gallery. Every so often, I go through these photos. What I enjoy about them is that they become this archive of our apartment… what it looked like before I got rid of my sister’s desk, what the wall looked like without such-and-such picture hanging there, etc.

This is a shot of our sink when we first moved in. Totally pristine.

Today I took down something I’d hung (I use the word hung loosely… in this case there was packing tape involved) in the kitchen and breathed a sigh of relief. Yes. It DID look better without that there. Tom’s take? “No comment.” This time, I could take it. I agreed.

A picture of the rice sack-like hanging in place…

Now for the sigh of relief…

As for the pot rack? So far I’m not looking back on that one. Hopefully I’ll have more to share about the sink soon… it was recently featured on Apartment Therapy Boston’s “Good Questions” as I’m working on a sink skirt and needed some advice. You’ll hear about it as soon as I find some suitable fabric!

Many factors affect the way bread turns out: what kind of flour is used, if and how long the bread gets kneaded, the amount of salt, natural yeast versus canned yeast, the ambient conditions, etc.  Of these, none is more influential than the ratio of water to flour. Bakers express this ratio as a baker’s percentage, which compares the mass of water in a dough to the mass of flour. For example, a dough consisting of 500 grams of flour and 300 grams of water has a baker’s percentage of 60%. The level of hydration of flour makes a big difference in terms of texture: dense bagels might be as low as 57% while chewy ciabatta with an open, airy crumb comes to 80% or more. A French-style baguette is around 65%. Although there are technical differences in how each of these breads are made, their varying water contents explain most of the difference in their texture.

Since water content has such a fundamental influence on bread, one of the most important ways to master bread making is to understand and manipulate the amount of water in your dough. With this in mind, I created a bread calculator as a tool for adjusting water content. One need only decide how much bread to make (the mass of the dough) and what percentage of water to use, which is where the fun experimentation comes in. Generally, the higher the percentage of water the bigger the crumb and the chewier the bread, but the dough will also be more difficult to work with and less shapeable. Going in the opposite direction makes denser breads that more easily hold their shape. I am always amazed at how varying the water even a little bit can make a dramatic difference.

Why a bread calculator, instead of say, a recipe? For most of my life, I have been told that while in cooking one can be fast and loose with measurements and improvisations, baking requires precision; slight variations in any ingredient amount could spell disaster. Taking this for truth, I dutifully made bread according to recipes in a few very good bread cookbooks. Sure, I noticed that most recipes were remarkably similar, but I assumed that there was some kind of alchemy at work and I should just follow the directions.

After working for three months in a professional kitchen and gaining a lot of confidence, I have come to rely on recipes less and less. This applied immediately to my cooking, where I had always assumed that improvisational ability would come with experience, but eventually spilled over into my bread baking. When I ran out of yeast and had to substitute some sourdough starter in a recipe, it began to dawn on me that there was also a lot of leeway in bread, if not quite as much as in a stir-fry. As long as I had water, flour, salt and some kind of leavener, bread would inevitably result. With this discovery came a new-found freedom: I knew what kind of bread I wanted to make, how its dough would feel when it was ready; I just needed to understand the influence of water content and experiment with it until I got what I was looking for. So I put the cookbooks away (I do not disparage cookbooks: they are what got me to this point) and got out a spreadsheet. After making many batches of bread based on ad-hoc calculations, I created this calculator to avoid having to remember the formulas I was using. And thus, bread math and the bread calculator were born. 

To be honest, I created the calculator mainly for my own use and understanding (there are others online). But if it is useful to you, feel free to use it as well. You can always make bread by feel, but working out the numbers gives a greater feeling of control, not to mention better consistency.

For those of you interested in what’s going on inside the calculator, here’s the math behind bread (please keep in mind that I was a liberal arts major and this is the best I could do):

In a bread using a starter, there are four known quantities we can input: the amount (mass) of the starter to be used, the percentage of hydration of that starter, the amount (mass) of dough we want to end up with and the percentage of hydration for that dough. We want to find out the amount of flour and the amount of water we need to add.

All this information about the bread is contained in these two equations:

Mass of Flour in Starter + Mass of Flour Added + Mass of Water in Starter + Mass of Water Added = Mass of Final Dough

and

(Mass of Water in Starter + Mass of Water Added)/(Mass of Flour in Starter + Mass of Flour Added) = Percentage Hydr. of Dough

The first thing is to deal with the starter, so we know how much flour and how much water the starter is contributing. The starter is represented in the following equations:

Mass of Flour in Starter + Mass of Water in Starter = Mass of Starter  or F + W = MS

and

Mass of Water in Starter/Mass of Flour in Starter = Pct Hydration of Starter or W/F = PS

We’re interested in solving for the two variables F and W, and since there are two equations it’s very simple to substitute one in for the other. 

Solving the first for W gives us W = MS – F, which plugs into the second as (MS-F)/F = PS. 

Solving for F:

MS-F = FPS

MS = FPS + F

MS = F(PS+1)

MS/(PS+1) = F

So using the given values for MS and PS we can calculate the amount of flour in the starter, F. With F known it’s easy enough to return to the first equation and calculate W. That takes care of the starter.

Back to the final bread: we know the mass of bread we’d like to end up with (M), the hydration percentage of that dough (P), the amount of flour in the starter (F) and the amount of water in the starter (W). We’re interested in the amount of flour to add (f) and the amount of water to add (w). Returning to the first two equations with these symbols we have:

W + w + F + f = M

and

(W + w) / (F + f) = P

Two equations and two variables! Solving for f:

w = M – f – F – W

(W + M – f – F – W)/(F+f) = P

M – f – F  = PF + Pf

M – F – PF = Pf+f

M – F – PF = f(P+1)

(M-F-PF)/(P+1) = f

Since we already know M, F and P it is easy enough to calculate f. And w is just M-MS-f! And there you have it!

This form allows you to calculate the amount of flour and water needed to make bread doughs at various percentages you choose. Please refer to the bread math post for a detailed discussion of why and how I got here.

If you are planning to use a starter, for Starter Mass enter the amount of starter you want to use and for Starter % the percentage of water (refer to Bread Math for explanation of baker’s percentage). If you aren’t planning to use starter, leave Starter Mass blank or enter 0. The final dough mass is the amount of bread you want to have; most loaves of bread I have seen seem to fall between 1 and 2 pounds. Dough % is the percentage of hydration of the final dough. This is where the fun comes in!  Try playing with various amounts and see what a huge difference it makes on the crumb of your bread. Remember, there is  no magic bread ratio but rather the ratio is the key to determining the kind of bread.

Example: Here’s my standard loaf of bread, and how I used these calculations to arrive at it. Because of the size of my oven and my household’s bread needs, I know I want to bake three 1.5# loaves of bread. This means I will need 4.5# of Final Dough Mass, which is 72 oz (16oz/lb * 4.5lb = 72 oz). I also make bread with a natural yeast starter. Whenever I refresh my starter, I add equal masses of water and flour, so I know my starter’s percentage is 100%. The Starter Mass I use varies depending on how much starter I have around, but I usually pick 8 oz. I have yet to determine the effects of drastic variations in starter use. With my Starter Mass, Starter % and Final Dough Mass decided, it’s just a matter of deciding on the Dough %. Although I continue to tweak this, I have had a lot of success with dough at 68% hydration, so I’ll enter that and hit calculate. The calculator tells me that my final dough will require 38.86 oz of flour and 25.14 oz of water. My scale’s smallest unit is 1/8 oz so we’ll call that 38 7/8 oz and 25 1/8 oz. So, in the kitchen, I measure my starter into the bowl, then cover it with 39 oz of flour and 25 oz of water. I also add salt. Salt can be factored into this calculation as a percentage of flour (bakers do this) but my scale is not accurate enough to measure this little salt so I always just wing it. I usually add about a Tablespoon to 4.5# of dough. With the salt added, you’re ready to mix, knead and otherwise proceed as normal.

Note that this form is unit agnostic, you can use grams or ounces or metric tons. Percentages should be in the 0-100 format, although you can go above 100%. Don’t type in any units or symbols, it will confuse the calculator!

Have fun! Bake bread!