Cornmeal Bread

Back to sandwich bread this week, and another week where we start out making a cornmeal-based sludge. So, put 1/2 a cup of cornmeal (medium ground) and 1 teaspoon of salt into 1 cup of boiling water. But watch out! Boiling cornmeal sludge, as it turns out, splatters all over the place. And it hurts.

Well, once the cornmeal has thickened take it off the burner and let it cool. In the meantime, proof 4 1/2 teaspoons of yeast in 1/2 a cup of warm water mixed with 1 tablespoon of sugar. Add the yeast mixture, along with 3/4 of a cup of warm milk, 1 scant tablespoon of salt, and 1/4 of a cup of dark brown sugar, to the cornmeal, and stir well. Start mixing in all-purpose flour, a cup or so at a time, until the dough is workable (for me, about 4 cups). Time to get to the kneading. While not as tough as some of our earlier doughs, this dough needs lots of extra flour worked into it before it stops being so sticky. So, if not a sprint, prepare for a marathon of kneading. Anyway, as always, put the dough in a buttered bowl, cover, and set aside in a warm spot (and really, since summer has more than certainly arrived, that probably means jsut about anywhere) for the


First rising (1 hour)
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For all of you who are laboring under the impression that I'm any good at math, this one's for you: and installment of "Daniel is Baffeled by Basic Arithmetic," the "cooking dinner" edition.

To set the stage, let me first explain that I enjoy cooking dinner for myself. Quite a bit, actually, since it means that I almost never have to eat foods that I'm even mildly uninterested in (except, of course, for those pesky green vegetables. Which I make myself eat). However, it's also true that sometimes, especially on those days that I get home late from work, I'm in more of a "Me hungry now!" than an "Oh! Why don't I spend a while cooking before eating anything!" sort of mood. So, my compromise is the standard one of cooking for more than one person, and then having leftovers. And, I've decided that the ideal amount of leftovers is to have enough for dinner the next night. Or, if I'm making something either extra elaborate or extra tasty, enough for two leftover meals. So far, nothing too out of the ordinary, right? Well, for the purposes of this note, just remember that my ideal dinner-units worth of food (and thus, the number I am always aiming for) when cooking for myself is two, or three on the outside.

So, the, what to make of my last dinner-cooking experiment, conducted almost a week ago this past Monday? The one in which I was thinking I would make enough food for three nights total, counting that night's dinner. You remember, it was that pasta dish...the one where I started out with about four meals worth of rotini. It had that sauce whose first step involved pouring almost two pounds worth of diced tomatoes into a sauce pan. And, since I was feeling like a bit adventuresome, the sauce that I proceeded to add about two meals worth of cut up, seasoned, pan-grilled meat to. Well, I'm happy to say that the pasta did at least end up being rather tasty, but also painfully plentiful. Because, you see, it turns out that 4 meals plus sauce pluse two meals doesn not equal two or three meals. Inevitable conclusion: I can't add. Life Lesson Learned: "sauce: is not a negative integer. Punishment Assigned to Atone for Mistake: let's just say I've eaten a lot of pasta recently.
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Punch the dough down, and divide it in two. Shape into loaves, and put in buttered 8x4 and -x5 bread tins (so chosen, of course, not out of design but because those are still my only two pans to bake bread in). Re-cover, and set aside for the


Second rising (35 minutes)
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Well, terribly sorry, but nothing else really to report just at the moment. Last week I was just catching up on work, so nothing overwhelmingly exciting happened. And let's see...this coming week, other than keeping up with the work (an extra boatload of journal reading for the next little while), I just have an assortment of miscellaneous stuff: get the car fixed, keep looking for a new apartment, look into getting my car registration/insurance switched over the Illinois...all those fun details!
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Set the oven for 425 degrees, and bake for 10 minutes. Then, lower the temperature to 350, and bake for another 22 minutes. The recipe rather endearingly hints at how imperative it is to ignore the delicious aromas of this bread and resist the temptation to cut off a slice before it has thoroughly cooled. Well, I'm sure we all know how well I followed that advice.

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Tasting notes: First, speaking of delicious aromas, this loaf really did have one of the best fill-up-the-apartment-while-baking smells of any bread I've made in a good long while. Quite the added bonus because, you see, this is also a very good, solid-tasting sort of bread... in a way, it reminds me of the anadama, albeit a bit richer and a bit less flavorful. All told, I think I have a week or so of better-than-my-average sandwiches to look forward to. And really, that's all I ask.

Currently reading: East of Eden (or, rather, just starting it).