Chocolate Eclairs

So I go through all the trouble of making amazing prime rib last week, and what do my guests say after they devour the roast beast?  "What's for dessert?"  What ungracious....

Now I'm put on the spot.  I sarcastically jab back, "What do you want?  Creme brulee?"  They say, "Yes."

Well now I'm up a creek...  Julia Child, don't fail me now...  So I turn to Julia's quintessential work on French cooking and lo and behold, there's a recipe, however it calls for heavy cream and all I have is whole milk.  I figure I'll give it a shot.  We ate sweet scrambled eggs.  They didn't taste ba'ad (that's bad with two syllables, which means it wasn't good either).

A week later, while my lovely wife was at work, I asked her if she would like me to have dinner ready for her when she got home.  She quaintly replies, "No thanks, I packed a dinner, but dessert would be lovely.  Why don't you try creme brulee again?"  Pfft... the nerve.

I turn back to Julia and try to decipher where I went wrong.  I start scratching my head and my brain doesn't like where things are headed, so I turn the page and see the recipe for "creme patissiere", also known as custard filling.  I look at it and it actually involves boiling the sauce... like you want this to happen.   Note:  If you boil what is supposed to become creme brulee, you get sweet scrambled eggs.  I figure I'm pro at this.

Custard filling, what has custard filling?  Eclairs.  Deal.  How do I make the pastry?  A quick google search finds me a recipe involving boiling water and adding flour to that.  I figure this must be ridiculous, so I turn to the book entitled Ratio by Michael Ruhlman.  It calls for a similar tactic.  Boiling, right.  I'm good at that.  We can do this.

The last step is the chocolate sauce on top.  Do I need gnoche?  sauce?  hershey squirts?  Wait... that's gross...  I decide to modify a recipe I used for iced Christmas cookies this winter which would harden slightly as the cookies dried.  Alright.  I think I'm ready.

The pastry:  Pate a Choux
(you must say this with a terrible Americanized-French accent)

According to Mr. Ruhlman, 2 parts water : 1 part butter : 1 part flour : 2 parts egg.

Preheat the oven to 450°F

Combine the following and bring to a boil

one cup water
half cup butter
half tsp salt

Over low heat, add one cup flour while rapidly stirring to form a batter-like substance.  This should take about a minute.

Remove from heat and cool for two minutes, then transfer this mess to the food processor.

Add one egg at a time while pulsing the food processor until incorporated for a total of four eggs.

Transfer this mess to a ziploc bag and cut off a corner to turn it into a pastry bag.  Or use a pastry bag if you have one.

On parchment paper, pipe out whatever size pastry you would like.  I did about 3" across pastries, which seemed to work well enough.  Place this in the oven and bake for ten minutes.  After ten minutes, reduce the heat to 350°F and cook for another twenty minutes.  Pastry complete.  On to the filling.

Creme Patissiere a la Julia Child
(This must be said in the soft-pallet high-sigh for which Julia is so famous)

Rinse out the food processor, it's getting some work done.

Blend five egg yolks and one cup of sugar until "the ribbons" form - it turns pale yellow...

Add in a half cup of flour and blend until incorporated

Heat up two cups of milk in the microwave to boiling in a pour-able vessel - whenever I heat milk in a pan, I get skin on the bottom unless I stir it constantly - too much work...

With the processor running, slowly pour the hot milk into the egg mixture.  You don't want to scramble the eggs...

Get out a heavy bottomed, non-teflon pan and put it over medium heat.  Pour in the mixture and begin whisking.  You must continue to whisk, and whisk, and whisk.  This will go on until it begins to boil, and then you must whisk for two minutes more.  All in all, it's a lot of whisking.

One this is complete, add one Tbs of butter and one and a half Tbs of vanilla extract and whisk until smooth.  Many other flavors can be added at this point, but I kept it simple.

Let it cool for twenty minutes in the freezer before trying to put it in the pastry.  It will thicken a little.

Now to get it into the pastry.  I don't know how the pros do it, but I put the custard in a small ziploc bag, inserted a straw in one corner, and taped around the opening.

It worked fairly well, though I'm guessing there's a better way to accomplish it.  This is how I did it, so go fly a kite if you don't like it.

Fill up a pastry with custard.  Enough Said.

The Chocolate Icing by Tim
(this must be said in a very low voice, trust me)

I don't have exact amounts for you, so I'll guess.

Let's try
one cup of powdered sugar
half a cup of powdered chocolate
two Tbs of milk

Whisk this all together... you're favorite

Add a quarter Tsp of vanilla extract
one Tbs of light corn syrup

Whisk some more

Taste and adjust

Drizzle on top of your custard filled pastry and enjoy.

Eat well.

Maybe Hershey squirts weren't so far off...

Prime Rib

To those of you who bemoan my ability to syndicate my thoughts and culinary forays, you shouldn't be reading this, so you only have yourself to blame.

To those of you who checked back frequently for my latest kitchen adventure, you shouldn't have.  There must be something else more productive you can do with your time.  

Now if you're my wife, and are referring to this because I am absent and would like to make a delicious piece of meat that the chefs at Ruth's Chris would drool over, you've come to the right place.

Condensed Recipe

• Preheat oven to 250° F
• Place standing rib roast on wire rack on a pan
• Brush canola oil to cover the meat
• Salt and pepper to cover the meat.
• Place meat in the oven. Check temp every hour.  Heat until internal temp is 120° F.
• Remove meat from oven and cover with foil.  Reset oven temp to 500° F.  
• Wait 15 minutes and put the meat back in the oven for 10 minutes to make a crispy crust.
• Remove meat and cover with foil.  Wait 20 minutes, carve and serve.

My senseless ramblings

I started using Alton Brown's recipe for Dry-Aged Standing Rib Roast.  After reviewing it and seeing things about terracotta pots, I decided to dial back the complexity of the recipe.  Also, the only real issue I have with the recipe is that it produces almost no drippings.  If you are hoping to eat it with the au-jus described in the recipe, good luck. Maybe the size of my roast didn't lend itself to creating enough fond?  I just used some beef boullion and red wine.  That being said, the issue of not having drippings may be moot.  (if you are concerned that I may have misspelled the word "mute", please see moot vs. mute)  The meat didn't need any juice added back to it, as it all stayed in the roast.

So here goes my version.

Get yourself a standing rib roast -- the best cut of beef out there.  I'm right, don't argue.  (I'll probably contradict myself some day in the future, but that's part of the fun)  If you're going for prime rib as the main focus of your meal, I would plan on about 16 oz per person.  My roast was 4 pounds and that fed myself, my wife, my son and my friend (who I think ended up with a 24 oz cut - he said he was hungry).  

I "dry-aged" mine for a day, because I wasn't really thinking ahead.  I'm not sure exactly what this does.  I just googled "dry aging beef" and it came up with this.  Something about enzymes and moisture -- I'm sure that's all well and good, but I tried this recipe without the 24 hour age and with - both turned out awesome.  Maybe I will actually try the 72 hour aging process at some later date and redact this recipe.   

I turned the oven on to 250° F and while it warmed up, I prepared the meat.  For cooking and prepping I stuck a cooling rack in a cookie sheet.  I have used this in other recipes, and it seems to keep things nice and crisp instead of soggy.  I used a brush and some vegetable oil (Alton recommends canola as it has a higher smoke point) and coated all sides of the meat -- you'll need this as all the moisture on the surface will be gone and the salt and fresh cracked pepper will have nothing to stick to.  As you can see from the photo, the amount of salt and pepper depends upon the size of the roast.  You should use enough to produce a thick layer of crunchy, salty, peppery deliciousness.  Using the rack while you season it is also beneficial, as when you rotate the meat, you don't leave any on the plate/platter/cutting board you would have otherwise used.

Into the 250°F oven goes the beast.  At this low temperature, I believe Mr. Brown's use of a terracotta pot in order to evenly distribute the heat to be excessive.  However, later on I think it's merits may be shown.  I do not own a probe-thermometer, which can be left in the roast for the duration of cooking.  However, I have a regular meat thermometer and I checked the temperature of the meat every hour.  At this temperature, the 4lb beast seemed to rise about 50° per hour.  Once the internal temperature reached 120°F, I removed it from the oven and covered with foil. 

Now off the oven goes to 500°F.  It'll probably take about 10-15 minutes for the oven to sufficiently heat itself up.  I believe the pot apparatus would be useful at this point.  Upon reviewing the episode, when I pulled the beast from the oven, it did a fair amount of smoking, while Alton's did not.  Maybe that's Hollywood magic, maybe it was vegetable oil instead of canola, or maybe it was the pot keeping the heat evenly distributed.  I'm not really sure, but the smokiness subsided quickly and there seemed to be no off-tastes.  

10 minutes in the oven and a nice, crispy crust had developed.  I removed it, tented it with foil and then let it rest for 20 minutes, while I got the rest of the sides put together.

As far as the au-jus goes, I made 2 cups of beef stock and combined that with a cup of red wine and the bit of drippings I got from the pan.  Nothing to brag about, but it had a little bit of flavor and went well on top of the mashed potatoes.  It looked like Mr. Brown did a 10 pounds roast, perhaps enough fond was produced by that much meat to make a decent amount.

To the table it went with a bit of horseradish sauce, a glass of wine, glazed carrots and mashed potatoes.

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Chicken Soup For The Sick Person

So every now and again, folks get sick and need something simple to eat.  That may or may not have happened this week, so here was a quick soup I put together to salve the meager and delicate appetite.

This takes three burners, so clear off the stove.

Boil 8 cups of water for broth - add 4 chicken bouillon cubes
Boil 4 quarts of water with a little salt for spiral noodles
A heavy bottom pan / dutch oven to assemble the soup in

3 boneless, skinless chicken thigh pieces -- very cheap and full of fatty goodness

Season lightly with some kosher salt and brown in some butter in the final pan -- it's not necessary to cook the whole way through as you'll be putting it into boiling broth.  You just want to get a nice brown on the chicken, which will eventually dissolve and give a subtle flavor to the soup.

Once the broth is boiling add some carrots to it -- I used baby, mostly because it was easy.

Once the water is boiling add the noodles and cook per the package.

When the chicken is browned and the broth is boiled, remove the chicken and deglaze the pan with the boiling stock.  Make sure to get the good brown bits off the bottom of the pan.  Put this on med-low heat and allow to simmer.

Cut up the chicken into small pieces and add back to the pan.  Allow this mess to simmer until the chicken is cooked and the carrots are to your desired tenderness.  Add some green beans also or whatever other vegetables you like.  Remember, this is for sick folks - don't get crazy.

When the pasta is done, drain it and then add some butter to it to keep it from sticking.  I leave the soup and the noodles separate until I serve, so the noodles don't turn to complete mush.

When I ate it, I finished it with a little extra salt and cracked fresh pepper so mine had some semblance of flavor...

Hopefully it doesn't make you any sicker!

Apple Butter - the cheap, easy way

Who doesn't love pictures of a kid playing in a red wagon?  Especially on a beautiful fall day in a pumpkin patch?  I'm not sure if a question mark is appropriate there, but that's what is happening.  This picture is especially wonderful, because it shows the general lack of concern by the person taking the photo (me) for my child's safety as he stands up in the cute red wagon.  I'm a wonderful parent, really.

At said pumpkin farm, you're encouraged to pay money to let your kid play on bails of hay, run through a corn maze and/or pet goats.  You are also encouraged to buy gourds, toobers and canned fruit from the previous season.  Of course we gave in to buying a pumpkin and apple butter, duh.

Apparently I like to waste my time in the kitchen, so I got to wondering how to make apple butter.  Ironically, unlike rain on your wedding day, apple butter involves no butter.  If you disagree with my understanding of that as a case of irony, please consider the following:
i·ron·ic  (-rnk) also i·ron·i·cal (-rn-kl)

adj.

1. Characterized by or constituting irony.

2. Given to the use of irony. See Synonyms at sarcastic.

3. Poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended: madness, an ironic fate for such a clear thinker.

i·roni·cal·ly adv.

i·roni·cal·ness n.

Usage Note: The words ironic, irony, and ironically are sometimes used of events and circumstances that might better be described as simply "coincidental" or "improbable," in that they suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly. Thus 78 percent of the Usage Panel rejects the use of ironically in the sentenceIn 1969 Susie moved from Ithaca to California where she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came from upstate New York. Some Panelists noted that this particular usage might be acceptable if Susie had in fact moved to California in order to find a husband, in which case the story could be taken as exemplifying the folly of supposing that we can know what fate has in store for us. By contrast, 73 percent accepted the sentence Ironically, even as the government was fulminating against American policy, American jeans and videocassettes were the hottest items in the stalls of the market, where the incongruity can be seen as an example of human inconsistency.

If you still don't think I'm intelligent, you're probably right.

Apple butter has the consistency of butter due to some form of chemical something or other.  I read a lot of this stuff and it basically boils down to this:  if you boiled apples down long enough, you get a consistency similar to a butter-intense sauce.  Punn intended.  I like two n's better.

Many of the recipes talk about starting with fresh apples, which I suppose you would do if you had an affinity for apple picking or an apple tree, but I have neither.  What I do have is access to unsweetened, natural applesauce from mott's at the grocery store.  Applesauce is what you get when you don't boil the apples as long.  Most of the recipes sought to make you feel like less of a person on the order of this article, if you chose to use store-bought apple sauce.  Please understand that the article uses a magical literary style called satire.  Though if you read the comments at the bottom of the article, you will find many individuals who have not grasped this particular style of humor.  Alas, it all comes down to what do you enjoy wasting your time on.  Processing fruit is not a favorite waste-time of mine.

The picking, peeling, coring, cooking for many hours and jarring involved to obtain a jar of apple butter almost justified me paying five dollars.  However, once I figured out I could start with a 3 lb jug of applesauce for $1.79, an empty salsa jar and make a batch in about an hour, I turned my nose up at the apple butter mafia and struck out on my own.

By the way, sanitizing the jar beyond washing it in the dishwasher is completely unnecessary.  If the stuff turns out well, and it will, it will be consumed in a day anyways.

I tried this starting with 2 and 4 cups of apple sauce.  It cooks down to about half that volume, though I found doubling the sauce doubles the time to cook and double the mess.  Proceed at your leisure.  I'll provide the 2 cup amounts here.  Soon, you too can have delicious apple butter and your house will smell like the little house on the prairie in the fall.

Here's my recipe:

In a cast iron pan combine the following:

2 cups applesauce
2 tbs white sugar
2 tbs brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp allspice
1 tsp ground cloves

Mess with the spices per your own desires -- I just throw stuff in until it looks right.

Mix well and place on med-low heat.  You want to maintain a nice slow simmer.  Don't turn the heat too high because it will splatter everywhere and burn.  Besides, leave it a little lower and drink a nice warm glass of brandy and relax.

Stir it occasionally to keep it from sticking and enjoy the aroma.  It's done when it has darkened and reduced in volume by about half.  It took about 30-45 min on my stove.

Put it on just about anything.  My favorites are graham crackers, fresh biscuits and the French Toast I posted earlier today.

Down with the Apple Butter Mafia!  Please attend my funeral if they knock me off.

French Toast

I may or may not be having a perfect fall Sunday.

The kid woke up at 500 and after being topped off he slept until 830.  Beautiful.  I finally dragged myself out of bed by about 8 and got to work in the kitchen.  This is my perfect day, don't judge.  I got to work preparing a pork shoulder for pulled pork later on in the day and then got to work on making a Sunday breakfast treat for the family.  It went over spectacularly. (I'm not conceited, really...)  After breakfast I warmed up my embouchure before taking a shower and heading to church.  The organist at our church is simply wonderful and it inspired me to dust off (literally) my trumpet for some accompaniment.  This next Sunday being Christmas for Lutherans, a.k.a. Reformation Sunday, we chose a piece for me to play for the Prelude to the service.  I have really forgotten how much I love making music.

After that, we dumped the kid in the church nursery.  I feel like I should break out a thesaurus to find a different way of saying "after that", but I'm no English major, so you'll just have to suffer my intolerable monotony.  Claire and I are new to the church and didn't realize that the whole nursery is carted into the church for the children's sermon.  While the procession of children processed, I noticed a woman carrying a pudgy red-headed kid, and I thought to myself, "that kid looks like Rowan."  My brain did a little of that new math and figured out that is was my kid.  It took me until the end of the Hymn of the Day to stop laughing at myself for my sheer stupidity.  It probably wasn't that funny, oh well.

Following the church service, I had a cup of coffee and chatted with the members as God intended for Lutherans.  We did purchase tickets to the church's Oktoberfest, which I'm pumped about.

Upon arriving home, I put the pork roast in the oven, hoping it emerges fall apart delicious pulled pork on kaiser rolls for after ultimate frisbee this afternoon.  The kid drank a bottle on the drive home and promptly fell asleep for his Sunday afternoon nap, also as God intended for Lutherans.  Now I am drinking coffee, eating a braunschweiger with dijon mustard sammich and writing this ridiculous blog.

Which brings me to my next point, don't smoke crack.
 
Apparently this post has something do to with French toast, so I might as well get after it.

A few months back, I got into making all of our bread at home.  One of my go-to bread recipes is one I adapted from my friend Penny -- it's a sounds-like version of Brownberry's oatmeal bread.  I will post that recipe later on today, but now I'm focusing on the French toast part of it.  If I make three loaves of the stuff on Sunday, I usually end up with half a loaf left by the following Sunday morning, which cuts into six, one inch slices, perfect for this recipe.

Possibly my favorite TV chef, whose recipes I generally adore, is Alton Brown.  My wife recalled eating French toast growing up, so she encouraged me to give it a shot and lo and behold, Alton had a recipe for it.  It seemed a bit involved at the outset, but it is most definitely worth the effort.  For the most part, I keep everything true to the original, save the thickness of the slice of bread.  The thickness just seems extravagant to me, plus it reduces the number of things I have to fry in a pan - less time cooking, more time eating and drinking coffee.

So here goes the recipe:

Preheat the oven to 375° F

Here's the goofy equipment you need:
two wire cooling racks
two cookie sheets
pie pan

In a bowl mix the following:

3 eggs
1 cup of at least whole milk, half and half even better
2 tbs of warm honey
1/4 tsp of salt (be sensible)

Once mixed place this all in a flat dish like a pie pan

Cut your bread 1 inch thick - seriously, it's great.

Put the cooling racks in the cookie sheets and set one next to the cook top and put one in the oven.

Get your pan nice and warm - I prefer a well seasoned cast iron for this.

Put a piece of bread in the pie dish and let it soak for about 30 seconds on each side and then move it to the cookie sheet on the counter for about 2 minutes to let egg mix soak through the bread - remember how thick you cut it?

Put a pad of butter in the pan so nothing sticks and then brown the bread evenly brown on both sides, being careful not to rip it - there's a lot of eggy-goodness in there.

Once it is browned on both sides, transfer to the wire rack in the oven and let it bake for 5 minutes to finish of the interior of the bread without burning the outside.

Plate it up and serve it with just about anything you like, however after picking up a jar of apple butter at a pumpkin farm, I definitely encourage going with apple butter.  PS - I'll be posting a really easy recipe for this in a little bit.

Here is to my perfect Sunday.  I'm trying to come up with something witty and/or sarcastic, but I'm in too good of a mood to act so foul.

Enjoy your Sunday afternoon and go listen to the re-broadcast of a Prairie Home Companion, as God intended for Lutherans on Sunday afternoons.

Margarita Chicken Sammiches

A limerick for Mike and Jaime
Our time was quite cockamamie
When Mike got hurt
He did not work
Thus, Big Bite with Guy Fieri

That was rather lame, but I do like limericks.  And if you do too, you should check out the The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form.  I much prefer their definition of chicken to my putrid attempt at artfully adulating the inspiration for this recipe.  There goes the alliteration again...

A chicken is someone who's not
Very brave, and who worries a lot,
Or a fowl like a duck,
That we slaughter and pluck.
We may cluck as it's chucked in a pot.

Back in the day, when my wife and I lived next door to our friends Mike and Jaime, we got in the habit of watching a lot of Food Network and subsequently, we tried making some recipes from said tv station.  Mike decided we should try this recipe from Guy, and though I am not usually a fan of his, this recipe serves as the basis for a wonderfully tasty sammich.

This time around, I didn't have jalapenos to use in the recipe, but after just returning from Wisconsin, my mother gave me some tabasco peppers from her garden.  I figured this was worth a shot.  In the past I have also done fresh jalapeno and pickled jalapeno, both tasted great.

The recipe calls for marinating red bell peppers, then dredging them in flour and frying them.  From my recollection, this turned into quite a debacle of smoke.  I'm sure if I was more proficient at frying this wouldn't happen, but it seemed like a lot of effort to add something that would be masked by the flavor of the chicken, red onions and spicy mayonnaise.

Speaking of the spicy mayonnaise, the recipe called for putting plain mayonnaise on the roll, but we had a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce screaming to be used, so I looked around for some recipes and came up with the following:

1 cup of mayonnaise
2 tbs of lime juice
3 peppers finely chopped
2 tbs of adobo sauce
salt and fresh pepper to taste

Later on when I ran out of chicken, I made a salad of spinach, red onion, tomatoes and the spicy mayo as a dressing.  It was rather delicious, however don't plan on kissing anyone for the rest of the night...

I also traded out cabbage for what I had in my fridge - spinach.  Something green and crunchy did the trick.  I also finished it with a couple tomatoes.

So here goes my recipe:

3 boneless skinless chicken breasts, butterflied and cut into pieces the size of a deck of cards.  I think I got about 9-10 pieces of chicken out of that

Marinate the pieces in the following for 4-8 hours:
2 tbs of chopped peppers (in my case tobasco)
1/4 cup of chopped fresh cilantro
4 tbs of tequila (rot gut works just fine)
1 tbs of minced garlic
1 tsp of cumin
1 tsp of oregano
juice of two limes

When it times come to cook, I would imagine you could do them in the broiler or a pan, though I prefer charcoal grill.  I cook my chicken indirect, because otherwise I end up burning the hell out of them and end up with dry chicken.

Cook the chicken until done -- should be firm to the touch.  It took about 10 minutes a side indirect.

Build up your sammich with some spicy mayo on the bun, a piece of chicken, a slice of jack cheese, spinach, red onion and tomato.

As you can see I served it with tortillas and some guacamole.

Work has been done.  Oh, fond memories of Meridian.

Kaiser Rolls

Tonight's menu includes grilled chicken sandwiches done in the style of Guy Fieri's Margarita Chicken Sandwich.  I made a few changes and will report them and the results later on, but it calls for kaiser rolls, so I figured I would try and make them.

My wife found a wonderful website called The Fresh Loaf, and upon googling for kaiser roll recipe, it pulled up a recipe from the site, so I figured that would be a good start.  The initial list of ingredients looked do-able, though I have no idea what "malt powder" is, and I wasn't feeling particularly motivated to find out, so I decided to do the recipe without it.  I made one batch last night to see what would happen and today my wife made a batch with a few suggestions from my mistakes.  We found out a couple of things:

The basic recipe works fine.  Here are my modifications:

I prefer to start the yeast with the water, sugar and yeast before I add things like salt and oil.  Somewhere I heard those items inhibit the yeast's growth, so I let I start the yeast to make sure it's alive and happy.

Like I said, I left out the "malt powder".

I had no poppy or sesame seeds, so I just did extra flour on the outside.  This turned out to be an important step.  You need to let the formed roll rise for about an hour and if you don't supply the seemingly superfluous flour, alliteration aside, the rolls will collapse if they stick and you try and move them to the stone.

I had to bake in two halves as my stone isn't large enough.  The first half of the first batch, I used 450° in the oven and set the time for 22 minutes.  At 20 minutes they came out pretty dark, but the the decorative folds turned out very nice.

The second half of the first batch, I used 450° and did 18 minutes.  They had better color, but because of the extra rise time, the decoration was much more muted.

The second batch was put together by my wife while I was at work.  I told her to change the temperature to 425°, and while I had noticed the flour did I nice job of keeping the the risen roll from sticking and subsequently deflating, I didn't mention the utilitarian purpose of the flour on top.  She didn't care for the excess flour so she didn't use a whole lot and the rolls ended up sticking and deflating...  Sad face.

As far as the decoration goes, it got about 2 hours of rising in roll form so the decoration wasn't that pronounced, but I'm sure they'll taste fine.  They were baked at 425° for 15 minutes which produced a much lighter brown on the roll, though I think I may go back to the 450° and use 15 minutes.  The lower heat didn't make as intense of a crust.

So here goes my recipe:

Combine the following and let rest for 10 min:
1.5 tsp yeast
1 tbs sugar
1.25 cup water tepid water

Once the yeast is happy whisk in the following:
1 tsp salt
1 egg
1 egg white (save the yolk to fry up and put on the finished roll with some butter and a slice of cheese)
1 tbs vegetable oil

Add flour until it's right.  In my French Bread recipe I explain what that means.

Knead until it is mixed, let it rise in an oven with the light on for an hour.

Knead for a few minutes and rise for an hour again.  Maybe it develops flavor?  I don't know.

Let it rise for another hour.

Take a look at the Kaiser Roll recipe from fresh loaf for how to form the roll.

Place the formed roll on a heavily floured (or poppy/sesame seeded) surface to rise for an hour.

40 minutes in to the rise, preheat the oven to 450°F with the stone on the middle rack and a cast iron pan on the bottom rack.

Once everything is hot, transfer the rolls to the stone and then pour a cup of water into the cast iron pan to make some steam to help develop the crust.  Leave it in there for 15 minutes and then assess how the crust looks.  It would also be worth turning the remaining rolls over so the decoration doesn't get flattened.

Here is a photo of the different batches in the order in which I made them so you can see what I mean about browning and decoration.


Make it so number one.  Engage.