Sourdough Breakfast Bread

I keep a container of sourdough starter in the fridge as I use it to bake and I bake a lot. It looks pretty gross but it smells magnificent. Very very sour. You have to feed it on a regular basis to keep it alive but if you forget you can bring it back by simply losing most of it and then add the half flour, and half water.
I don't get all worked up about the origin of the starter. I usually use a piece of dough from a batch of lean bread and just keep feeding it.
The sourdough breakfast bread is very nice if you are looking for more fiber in your diet.
I work with ratios and for most of my bread and pizza recipes I use 60% water since it is very humid here and we are at sea level. Otherwise the dough becomes so wet it is hard to manage. The more water the more puff but you have to be able to manage it.
Basically that is 1000 grams of flour to 600 grams of water.

Ingredients
Flour 1000 grams
water 600 grams or ml.
24 grams salt
A nice blob of sourdough starter
Sugar 30 grams more or less to taste
yeast I add a sprinkle to help starter
This was a lean dough, no fat.
whole grain cereal
raisins
or dried cranberry

Sour dough starter

or dates or figs.

I mixed this batch by hand but you can use a mixer.
Mix it up, cover it up and let it sit for 20 minutes.
Using a little pot of water, dip your mixing hand in the water and give the dough a turn over and gently pull on the dough, it will still feel soft and awkward.
Do that about 3 times waiting 20 or 30 minutes between each mix. You will begin to notice the dough forming up as you go.
You can put in the cereal during initial mix or at the end. With this batch I did it at the end to give it a try and you get areas of cereal, not mixed in evenly. Add the fruit too.
Finally you are done mixing so let it sit for a few hours or an hour or put it in fridge for the next day.
Sprinkle some flour on the counter and let the dough fall out of the bowl on to it.
Sprinkle more flour at one edge and using a bench scraper lift the end with the flour and fold it over the mass. Your goal is to get the entire outside of the dough covered with flour but not too much. This is so it doesn't stick to your hands.
Next fold it again or split it in half or split it into bun size, I usually do 110 grams. Just cut the dough in half and in half again until you get 8, that is usually right.
Be real gentle with the dough, those bubble are the reason the dough gets puffy.
Fold the dough into the shape you want, I bake on a tray that has holes so it gets nicely done on all side but a bake tray will work. Place dough on tray, let it sit while the oven heats up.
You can use a loaf pan but for this kind of bread I like the whole outside to be crisp with plenty of crust. A loaf pan will keep the whole bottom soft, find for sandwich bread but not so much for this bread.
190C is what I use, 350F. If it is the entire dough the loaf will be pretty big and it will take 30 minutes to bake. I leave it in the dying oven to dry out more.
Once out of the oven let it sit for a while to cool, much easier to slice.
Sour dough bread has a not dried out look to the interior of the loaf. It is also chewy. Should have plenty of air pockets throughout the loaf.
Very good toasted.

Roasted Veg Assortment

We create this in the pizza oven but a regular oven would work too. Just make sure to spread the veggies out so they roast instead of steam. The original recipe came from a post on Instagram from NYT cooking but I could not find the recipe so I made up my own. There is no point including amounts, depends on how many you want to feed and what sort of veggies you like.

Ingredients
Veg
Onion combo sliced thin
sweeties, shallots red onion

Kale
Red cabbage or any cabbage sliced thin
Swiss Chard will dry too but takes longer

Cherry tomatoes left whole, look for really small ones.

Pepper sliced thin
Bell peppers or you could probably use some jalapenos or other varieties.

Eggplant

Garlic cut in half and more mashed garlic in oil

Chickpeas rinsed not other beans as they are not as strong and would fall apart

I would stick with dry vegetables, less water more roasting.

Dry Meat

Hard salami cut in small pieces

Pancetta or any dry pork like bacon

Maybe dried beef?

Marinate for an hour or so in this mix
olive oil
balsamic
dry herb blend, Italian or French

Put everything in a bowl with a cover mix and marinate.
Lay the veggies and meat out on a big baking tray or skillet if you do a small batch, it is so fast and easy that it would work great for any meal.

Bake at high temp, 450 or as high as you can go, our pizza oven gets up to 1200 but you have to watch it.
Our batch only took 15 minutes but a regular oven will take longer.
I thought it would be best served hot but I was wrong, hot, warm or cold it is all good.
They said serve with bread but since we were doing pizza I just put it out and people would grab up a bunch and nosh. Delightful. What a way to eat something most people avoid.

Unusual Flavours
I used these sprinkled on after roasting.

Note on Kale.
Kale is weird. Very dry. It is superb just raw but great roasted. I put some in the mix and the rest on a separate skillet and it becomes a dry crispy snack. Just spray it with oil and roast. Better than potato chips. Sprinkle with salt or some sort of seasoning that is powder.

Chorizo, garlic and mushroom soup

Easy soup if you have left over chorizo, the kind that comes in a tube and is soft.
I had half a tube leftover.
This was going to be lunch so I did not have a lot of time. Still it was delightful starting at 9am and by 11am it was done.

Ingredients:
Soft chorizo
garlic sliced or crushed
mushrooms
puree tomatoes
chicken stock
paprika
salt and pepper
thyme
oregano
olive oil

I like this chorizo. Comes from Sunset Farms.

Put soup pot on the stove and turn up the heat. Add olive oil. Add chorizo and mix around a bit.
Add garlic slices, mix some more it should sizzle.
Add mushrooms. Mine were frozen leftover mushrooms so they were soggy. That was fine it will be a soup. I chopped them up before adding to pot.
More stirring.
Add chicken stock. Mine was frozen so I just added a bit at a time as it thawed. Once I had enough liquid I just put the rest in the fridge.
Add the herbs. Stir. Should be boiling by now. Turn the heat down.
Let it sit and simmer or turn it off and heat it up later.

Note:
There are no amounts here. I use what I have and I know what we like. If you like more mushrooms add them. Rather use veg. broth that will work. Want a thinner broth add more water or stock.
Prefer a soup that is not spicy, add another kind of sausage.

In the end you will have a delightful soup. Best part is you can add a small can of tomato paste to thicken it and use it as pasta sauce. I put the remainder in containers and freeze them for another day.

This soup is all about using left-overs and items that would normally go bad in fridge and have to be thrown away.

Homemade Flat Pancetta

I have no interest in rolled pancetta. I simply want a product that I can use on pizza and pasta. When you stop thinking about rolling you can easily create a perfect pancetta in about 2 weeks. All of that is just waiting for it to cure.

Porkbelly- This recipe calls for 3 to 5 lbs. But if you have less just measure accordingly.

Pork belly from Merchants.

The Cure Rub

4 garlic cloves, chopped and minced

¼ cup sea salt or kosher salt

2 tablespoons Dominican sugar I used a bit more

4 tablespoons cracked black pepper

4 bay leaves, crumbled

1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

4 or 5 sprigs fresh thyme

Optional, chose 1 or none:

1 teaspoon whole allspice, smashed

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

1 cinnamon stick broken

2 tablespoons juniper berries, smashed

mini food processor

Note: Since this is all an experiment to me, I tried this rub with Tamarind paste added. I found it did not change the flavor but I thought I would try it.

So blend this mix using a mini food processor or a mortar pestle, anything to grind everything together, it will be a crumbly mix but not a paste.

Pork belly comes with skin. It must be removed before you can make pancetta. You can use it for other things.
A really sharp knife works great, leave as much fat as possible. It takes time to do this but it is the only part of the process that is not pleasant.

Rub all over the pork belly.

Place in a plastic bag or a vacuum bag try to get air out. Place in fridge for 5 days turning it a couple of times during that time.

You will know when it is ready to come out of the bag. If you feel it before you start you will notice the fat is soft and so is the meat. Once it has been in the cure it will get firm.

Wash all the cure off but if it doesn't come off it doesn't hurt it. If you can eat it you can leave it on.

I use a bread cooling rack but anything where air can pass all around and place it back in fridge for 5 more days. The pork belly must be exposed to the cold air of the fridge.

Before putting it in the fridge sprinkle with black pepper. I just bought a big container of course ground black pepper, works great.

Once again you will notice when it is done. The meat changes color to dark red like bacon. the fat will be very firm like there is no more water in it. The fridge has sucked all the moisture out of the meat and fat. Now it is pancetta.

You can at this point use it. It will slice very easily. It will be dry and firm. It even smells good.

bag sucker

I have this device that sucks the air out of a bag. That is what I do to store it in the freezer. I also cut it into usable sizes. It also keeps better in fridge if the air is sucked out of the bag.

Note: The reason I do not roll it is because I don't see the point. We use the pancetta for pizza, pasta, this last batch I was able to slice like bacon but it tastes better. So for me the roll gets in the way.
Since this process is so easy and is just a matter of less than 2 weeks, I don't buy bacon anymore I just use this.
Buying pork belly. That is really the major issue with this product. I was buying the frozen porkbelly from BB but it is in small pieces. So I bought a porkbelly from Merchants. I bought it because I wanted to render lard. Aside from the fact that the people that produce it cut off all the fat, the actual pork belly is lovely. I did get some fat for lard but it is gigantic so I cut it is half, stored some in freezer and made two nice big pieces of pancetta.

One more thing. Most recipes call for the curing salt. It as nitrates. Many say that nitrates cause cancer but studies have proved that they don't they are actually in lots of food we eat. I did not use curing salt because it never leaves the fridge. Also I used the flaked salt from Anguilla Sand and Salt, it is nice salt.
Any salt will work and you can use the curing salt.

I scoured the internet for recipes and tips, I was looking for a simple way to make this without a bunch of stuff I don't have.

It is delightful, come over anytime to give it a try.

on the rack

A leftover lunch

This is it!

Today I have leftovers I hate to waste.
Roast Greek chicken thighs
little tomatoes that need to be eaten
mushrooms
leftover chicken fat and chicken jello from the chicken thighs
I made French bread from leftover pizza dough
that should be enough but I will add a pack of brie cheese baked because we are piggies.

I started with melted oil in skillet, added chopped garlic and basil and added whole tomatoes, don't cut them up.
When skins started to wrinkle they were done. I added shredded chicken to the mix and some paprika sprinkled on that.
Next sliced mushrooms to a new pan. Butter in pan, add mushrooms and fresh thyme and let them go until brown. Don't have to stir them, just tip them over a bit to brown.
Next using the chicken jello and additional mushrooms made soup. The chicken jello was loaded with garlic and lemon. I added a piece of hot pepper and called it hot and sour mushroom soup.
Brie, stuck some rosemary and garlic in the top and baked it until soft.
So all of it could go on the bread or get dipped in bread and eaten separately. It's really nice to have leftovers.

What was left.

Pizza on the Road

Fresh mozzarella is best!

Can't make pizza without a pizza oven, don't like most pizza in restaurants, I am from New York so I gots to have pizza... what's a girl to do?
We are in Dominica on a job. We are housed in the currently closed university housing and they just so happened to have a kitchen on the grounds we can use.
It has a big commercial stove and a couple of inexpensive counter top ovens electric.
But until I found a recipe for really quick dough and a very cheap Chinese made flat steel pan I had to go without.
The pizza dough recipe is so simple and so fast I am kicking myself for not knowing about it sooner. It came from www.ricardocuisine.com. It is called homemade pizza dough. It is fabulous.
Dough
1 cup warm water
1 tea yeast
1 tea sugar
1 tea salt
2 cups flour

Don't judge my stove.

Mix the yeast the water and the sugar and let sit to proof 5 minutes.
add the flour and the salt.
I mix by hand, no mixer here.
Let it sit for an hour, Ricardo says a half hour so that works if you run out of time. You can also store in fridge till ready to use that day or freeze it, I did that, it works too.
Note: I would not double this recipe. Flour gets funny when you add more. So either cut back on the water and add till you are happy or do them in batches.

simple but effective

Flour board or table and spread your dough gently as usual. Oh, you should have already heated your counter top oven that has an exposed element and put your dry steel skillet on the stove and cranked it up but not too much, commercial stove gets really hot really quick. This might work on a regular range I will give it a go.
Have some corn meal ready and sprinkle on skillet.
Pick up your spread dough and gingerly place it on the already hot skillet.
Use a squirty bottle to add olive oil to the top. This keeps the sauce from wetting the dough.
Then spread sauce. Don't put too much. That is really for any pizza, don't add too much sauce.
Add cheese and toppings. Once again don't get carried away. Overloaded pizza becomes something else. Pizza is a delicate balance of flavours, if you load it up it is more like an open faced sandwich.
Have a spatula handy and shove it under the dough which is already well on its way to being done. You can see it bubbling on the top.
Move the pan around on the stove, shake it and look underneath. If the dough is getting brown in spots it is ready to transfer to oven. The oven is hot, make sure the top element is red.
Get the pizza as close as possible to the top even if you have to put an additional pan to lift it a bit.

make sure it has exposed elements to brown dough

It will not take long keep a watch. Move the pan with the pizza on top to the oven. Shift it if your oven gets hotter in some places.
It is done. It will have the nice brown spots, the crust will be chewy inside crusty outside. Perfect.
A word about sauce...
If you have nice fresh tomatoes and a blender or food processor there is no need to struggle with sauce that takes hours or something out of a jar or can. Just cut up tomatoes, dump in blender and blend. Add a small can of tomato paste. Add seasoning such as garlic, basil, oregano, make it your sauce. You don't need to cook it. Just put it in a jar and store in fridge. It works great and gives pizza nice fresh taste, not heavy or greasy. It is also vegetarian for all your vegetarian friends. If you want meat you can add it to the toppings.

Goat Water

I found organic mutton and lamb at Proctors so I made the goat water with that.

Goat water Montserrat style

PUT
Frozen cubes of mutton or goat 2 packs it has bones
enough water to cover the frozen cubes in a pot
put on stove and cook on high until the meat thaws and starts to cook and cook for a while
add more water if needed
keep pot open
skim off foam my organic lamb did not have foam. I think that is good

ADD
3 large cloves of garlic that have been mashed up
chop half large onion
chop 3 potatoes or you could use tania
chop 3 carrots
fresh thyme
a little hot pepper
pepper and salt

COOK
covered until the lamb is soft.
everything will be soft at this point

ADD
half cup bisto or flour with half cup cold water mixed in
stir

at this point turn it off and let it sit on the stove until ready to eat.
then reheat and eat.
very good with garlic bread