Well done, Macrina!

My dear, dear Macrina Bakery just made Bon Appetit Magazine's "Top Ten Bread Bakeries in the US" list. I have never worked there myself, but on top of feeling proud that I have been smart enough to eat there for the past seven years, I went to pastry school with, and still currently know, quite a few people who work there.

Macrina deserves all the recognition that it gets. Leslie Mackey runs a fabulous business and the baked goods are just plain delicious.

From Bon Appetit:

"Especially worth your dough here are the Macrina Casera ("of this house" bread made with a natural wild starter created from organic grapes) and the oatmeal buttermilk bread (ideal for sandwich making)."

Married to the Baker

Hello, I thought I would take this opportunity to stow away an entry on this blog. It's something I've been thinking about for quite a while, but just didn't get around to it.

You see, I have been reading my wife's entries in this blog for the past few years and like you have enjoyed reading about her forays into all different types of dishes and deserts. However, I thought you all wouldn't mind a break, and hopefully a bit of humor...

So what is it like being married to a baker and general food lover? Well, here is what Naka's adventures in cooking have meant to me:

Culinary School:

The baking assignments in school always resulted in a box full of pastries, bread, cookies, fill in the blank coming home on one or more nights each week. This seemed great at first, but after gaining 20 lbs. I decided that taking the "assignments" to work to share was the best strategy.

Planting a Garden:

Great idea, and aesthetically pleasing. What is less understood is how physically taxing it is to get all of the soil for a 2' by 8' from a local hardware store into our trunk and then out and up the hill to our back yard.

Baking for things like wedding showers and brunches:

This usually produces reject baking items or scraps that a spouse can munch on. However, the prime stuff is left in plain sight to tempt you while at the same time you know you can't have any of the good stuff. Bittersweet :)

Experimenting with new recipes

9 times out of 10, this is pure goodness. Being able to come home to a variety of dinners keeps a hungry spouse like me happy. I also like variety in food and enjoy almost every type of food, so this is a real benefit.

Having a wife understand what good food is and wanting to buy the best quality:

Special cheeses
Organic, free range, grass fed, etc.

=EXPENSIVE

Well, that's it for me. Enjoy the blog...

Book review: Baby Cakes

I try....I try very hard. Baby Cakes was the first of my first experiments with gluten free, dairy free baking. Here is what has stood out to me so far:

~ I had to spend $50 on various flours, and other new baking ingredients. I thought this would keep me stocked for a long time, but no. I have already run out of many pantry items and need to restock. This is an expensive endeavor.

~The first recipe I tried was the chocolate chip blondies. I was pleasantly surprised that it was pretty good. The next recipe I tried was for chocolate chip cookies. They tasted just like the blondies. As did the vanilla cake....

~I realized that all the recipes taste the same because the author uses predominantly coconut oil in every recipe. She then tries to mask it by several tablespoons of vanilla extract (which is also expensive, and I have used it all up as well).

~I then noticed that all the recipes- from cookies to brownies to scones- have the same texture. I'm assuming this is because these treats are lacking in what is supposed to give baked goods texture- gluten. Everything is very light, and slightly fall apart-y. This is great for a cake, but not for a cookie.

~Even though everything came out of the oven fairly the same, they did not all go in that way. I find this odd, because each recipe has very different ingredients. This brings me to my next point. In pastry school, we learned how to develop our own recipes based on basic quantities and ratios. For example, a cookie or cake usually has X amount of flour, Y amount of leavener, and Z amount of liquid. Even an avid baker can begin to recognize patterns in recipes, such as cookies commonly having two eggs and a teaspoon of baking soda. I noticed no pattern whatsoever in this book. One muffin recipe might use brown rice flour and potato starch, while another calls for spelt and 2 tablespoons of hot water. Even the sweeteners varied from evaporated cain juice to agave nectar to regular sugar. I can only guess that each recipe must have been developed by sheer trial and error. It felt more like chemistry to me than baking.

~All in all, the one recipe so far that I would make even if I didn't have to was the raspberry scones (I used blueberries). They were the closest to the texture of what I'm used to, and the coconut oil flavor actually worked with it

~Oh, one more thing: I noticed that if I freeze the cookies they almost taste normal.