Thanksgiving bread

Happy Thanksgiving!  And look at that!  It's almost one month after my last post!  How time does fly...

Really, it's been crazy, crazy busy.  This past weekend Ryan and I performed in the school's fall opera production, which means the previous week was filled with daily rehearsals.  We had one day "off" on Sunday to recover and prepare for coming week.  Monday was a busy day of classes (and a happy meeting with a friend from college, in town to look at schools).  Tuesday was class and the New Music Ensemble concert at the Canadian Opera Company, also filmed for a TV broadcast, which thankfully went very well!  Yesterday was a meeting with the man coming in to asses the school for the Canadian Heritage Fund, who then also observed my lesson.  And then finally I had the afternoon off!  Holy mackerel!  It feels like it has been ages since that happened (and let's not even think about the rest of the week...).  So Ryan and I made vegetarian stuffing for dinner (homemade sourdough with mushrooms, celery, leeks, chestnuts, and apples--recipe below) along with a salad with pomegranate seeds (the pomegranate was given to me by Rubana at Economy Fruit).  I also put together another batch of bread to retard in the fridge overnight and to bake today.  Per the request of one of my classmates, I measured the ingredients in volume in addition to weight so that I could make a version of the recipe for people who don't have a scale (though investing in a kitchen scale is probably a good idea if you're going to be doing a lot of bread baking because it makes measuring really easy and largely reduces the large margin of error found in volume measurements).

One loaf made last week.

So here is Susan's recipe for Norwich Sourdough from her blog Wild Yeast, adapted for volume measurements and with my little addenda.

Yield:
Two big loaves, or 10 mini loaves (which is what I made today), or one loaf plus a pizza, or... you get the picture.  It's a lot.

Time:
Mixing -- 5 minutes
Autolyse -- 30 minutes
First fermentation -- 2.5 hours

If you're baking that day, then you divide/rest/shape
And then you proof -- 2.5 hours
And then you bake -- 30 minutes max

If you're not baking that day, I've been (in a probably incredibly unorthodox move) just transferring the dough directly to a container, usually a big tupperware, to retard for up to two days.  Then I form the loaves as quickly as possible before throwing them in the oven.  I've found that the sour flavor really improves after the two days in the fridge.

Ingredients:
900 g white flour  -- or 6 cups

120 g whole wheat flour -- or 1 cup

600 g water at about 74F -- or 3 cups

360 g mature starter -- or 1 3/4 cups (which in my case is about half white and half wheat)

--later--

23 g salt -- or 2 tbsp

cornmeal for dusting

Method (for a completely handmade, no mixer 'cause I don't have one, bread):
Mix the flours, water, and starter until just combined, which usually I'm not quite strong enough to do with a big wooden spoon, so usually I just use my hands.
Let the dough rest (autolyse) for 30 minutes.
Add the salt and mix until the dough reaches a medium level of gluten development.  (Her pictures are really nice, so check them out.)  I usually wind up sort of pulling the dough between my hands until it actually stretches.  In the beginning it sort of breaks and won't stretch very well, but then as the gluten develops you can stretch it farther apart.
Transfer the dough to an oiled container (I usually just oil the bowl I mixed it in).
Ferment at room temperature (72F – 76F) for 2.5 hours, with folds (again nice instructions here, but basically you just stretch and then fold up) at approximately 50 and 100 minutes.

At this point I sort of deviate from Susan's instructions.  If I'm baking that day, I might shape one half of the bread into a ball, which I'll place on a piece of parchment paper dusted with cornmeal.  Otherwise I'll take my nicely oiled ball, find a big tupperware container, and dump the whole thing inside.  Make sure there's some room for it to expand because it will keep growing.  And then I put it in the fridge and wait a day or two.  I've found that 48 hours in the fridge results in a really nice and sour bread.

When I'm about ready to bake, I preheat the oven to 475 and put in the vessel I'm using for a cloche along with a baking tray (I don't own a bread stone, but I hear those are great).  Thanks to Susan's website, I recently started using this technique instead of trying to make steam in the whole oven.  First of all it's a lot safer.  Second of all it basically doesn't require any equipment (except the cloche).  Third of all it actually works. 

So what is this cloche thing?  Basically it's a heat-proof vessel like a big ceramic casserole or something that you can turn upside down and create a seal with a baking sheet.  You can also purchase a real one, or apparently make one out of a flower pot (instructions on her website), but really a deep ceramic baking dish seems to work perfectly.  The cloche traps the moisture that's already inside of the bread, allowing the dough to rise much more and ultimately creating a better crust.  You bake for 12 minutes or so with the cloche over the bread and then remove it for the last part of the baking.  Easy peasy.  No trays of boiling hot water or squirt guns or whatever.  No giant steam cloud threatening to cook you to death like a squishy lobster.  

So, you set the oven to 475, put in your big ceramic pot and your tray for baking the bread.  When the oven reaches the proper temperature, take a piece of parchment paper and dust it with your cornmeal.  Take your dough out of the fridge and quickly and gently shape (pat, coax) it into a size that will fit underneath your cloche.  Using a sharp knife, cut two long slashes into the dough.  It sometimes helps me to oil the knife blade a little first.  Then, I usually take the baking tray out of the oven and put it on the stove; transfer my dough to the baking tray using the parchment paper; and then take the cloche out of the oven and invert it over my piece of dough.  Then the whole thing goes back in the oven and you set the timer for 12 minutes and turn down the oven to 450.  After 12 minutes, carefully remove the cloche.  Mine's a little hard to grip, so yours might be too.  Just don't burn yourself.  And then keep baking until the bread is brown and done looking.  Depending on the size of the loaf and the temperature of the oven, this might be another 10-20 minutes.  And it's as easy as that!

And what will I be doing with my 10 mini loaves of bread?  I'm bringing them to a few of the people I'm really thankful for here in Toronto, including Rubana at Economy Fruit and my teachers and administrators at school.  It is sad not to be able to take the day to celebrate with my friends and family the way I have growing up, and I would especially like to be able to personally contribute to the storm clean up effort in New York, but I figure that I can at least do this small thing to give thanks for my innumerable blessings and the bounty that is in my life.

Giving Thanks

Sometimes it feels hard to believe that I've already been in Toronto for more than a year, yet here I am passing milestones for the second time: labour day, the first day of school, Nuit Blanche, and now Canadian Thanksgiving.  I still find that this latter event (celebrated this weekend, with the official holiday falling today) comes at an odd time in the calendar year, being used to American Thanksgiving, but after the past week it seemed like the stars had aligned to remind me to be grateful for my many blessings.

It's not that the past few days have really been horrible; in fact, many wonderful things happened to counterbalance the bad.  And even the negatives, when viewed contextually, have a bright side.  Two family members took ill, but thankfully--though the mishaps or diseases are serious--they seem like they will recover fully.  Some of the other misadventures seem perplexing, but even these frustrations have been assuaged by opportunities which may turn out to be more beneficial in the end, both in terms of career and also in terms of my personal growth, than what I had originally hoped might transpire.  Funny how our desires may indeed be less salubrious than our response when we feel they are thwarted...  Finally, it's just good to remember how blessed I am to have such friends and family and music in my life, and that even when some of these things seem to have gone awry, the reason I notice is because I am lucky to have them there in the first place.  It's hard to complain about that.

The festive dining room.

Comrade M cooked and baked an excellent Thanksgiving dinner, per usual.  The turkey was divine, the stuffing scrumptious, the kale salad refreshing, the sweet potatoes creamy, the vegetarian option ironically to-die-for, and the mashed potatoes fluffed to a T.  And the desserts... all I can say is that the pumpkin pie should become a standard.  It's amazing!  And the apple and cherry rustic tart, baked in a cast iron pan and with a ginger cookie topping, was as delicious as it was beautiful.

Boiling potatoes

Kale for the salad 

Pumpkin pie

Apple and cherry tart

With fewer people this year (i.e. just one extra) there was less to prepare and thus less for me to do--except, of course, borrow Comrade M's nice work camera and take pictures of everything!  Comrade M used some of my homemade bread for the stuffing, something I baked last weekend with spent grain from Ryan's brewing, but I hadn't even been planning to cook anything myself until I found an email from Smitten Kitchen in my inbox with a recipe for pumpkin cinnamon rolls.  Now with something like a recipe for pumpkin cinnamon rolls, you'd think there would be little to improve upon--and of course since I only made the recipe once, it's hard to tell if I improved anything.  So instead we will say that I did some characteristic fiddling and made the following adjustments:

• Rather than using active dry yeast, I substituted my very own wild yeast sourdough starter.  (I've been growing it for the past week and this was my first experiment.)  I wound up using 1/2 cup of sourdough starter to replace the yeast called for in the recipe.  Consequently (and also due to the oven being occupied by the bird) I also allowed the buns to rise for several hours rather than the time she calls for.  I can't really tell if the sourdough starter influenced the flavor, especially due to the following point...
• ... which is that rather than using brown sugar (since I had run out) I replaced the 1/4 c brown sugar in the dough with 1/4 c molasses.  This yields a strong molasses flavor, which I like but which perhaps overpowers the pumpkin and other flavors.  Ryan likes it, though.  I might stick to brown sugar next time to see how it compares.
• Rather than just brushing the rolled-out dough with the butter (these are by no means healthy), I also added a layer of pumpkin puree.  Ryan and I roasted our own pumpkin (he had an extra one lying around after making a pumpkin beer a few weeks ago) and we had/have a lot left over.
• I also added a few tablespoons of pumpkin puree to the cream cheese frosting rather than adding milk to change the consistency (and ultimately used two times the amount of cream cheese because I found it too sweet with two cups of powdered sugar).  In retrospect I would have just halved the amount of sugar since the recipe yields a ton of frosting no matter how much cream cheese you include.  I guess I'll have to freeze the leftovers for the next several time I make these cinnamon buns...
• I also sprinkled the buns with pepitas before baking, though if/when I make these again I'd also include the seeds inside of the rolls.  I just didn't think of it until I had finished.

Rising rolls

Finished rolls with some glaze

And some without

Now it's Monday and Comrade M and I are embarking on a painting project.  First up?  The dining room, in "semolina" yellow.  It already looks beautifully bright and sunny!  I'm so excited.  

In the works...

Meanwhile, Ryan was concentrating on his latest batch of beer (this time with a holiday twist).

A pianist, a bassoonist, and a soprano take Georg Friedrich Haas to Niagara Falls...

(An image of the Toronto Christmas parade a few weeks ago.)

Oh oh oh. (Ho ho ho?) It sure has been a while. I vacillate between wanting to update this blog every few days and forgetting about it for weeks. I think many things have happened recently, though I typically have forgotten most of them. We celebrated American Thanksgiving here a few weeks ago, on the Sunday after normal Thanksgiving. It was strange to be here and to know that everyone in the States was gathering for big meals and family while we were in classes, as usual. Luckily--thankfully--the Comrades upstairs joined us in a feast a few days later. I bought a free-ranged, Mennonite-raised chicken from Gasparro's meat market and made a dizzying array of dishes including: the roasted chicken (simple, with herbs), polenta stuffing (both vegetarian and with meat), a warm cabbage salad with pomegranate, a mushroom bread pudding (for the vegetarian entree), and two kinds of desserts (an apple-pear pie with a cheddar cheese crust and almond/chocolate macarons). Ryan made some mashed potatoes and Comrade MM made a delicious "sexy squash soup" and really fantastic Brussels sprouts, both from recipes in the New York Times. My recipes came from Gourmet magazine; though I changed most of them heavily I think they're all very interesting and you may enjoy clicking the links above to see them for yourselves. The bread I used in the bread pudding was also home-made and has been quite a hit recently--it's the one from a few posts back that we ate with soup. This is my third time making this recipe, and I've been changing it up with a few other additions/substitutions including wheat berries, sunflower seeds, oats, molasses, yogurt, lower-fat milk, etc., as well as making loaves instead of rolls.

(Ye olde Canadian Christmas tractor? It reminded me of Davis.)

Originally I'd thought I'd write a post about Christmas in Canada. It seems to come awfully early here, though perhaps I was largely sheltered from the holiday marketing in New Haven, Connecticut. There was is little in the way of big-box retail downtown, within student reach, and I was so busy that I guess I avoided it. Here, though, it smacks you in the face on November 1st. It felt a little forced in the beginning, but now that we're actually midway through December all of the lights and decorations are beautiful. There are a number of lit-up houses on our street and of course the department stores and malls all have lots of displays. Many of the corner groceries sell Christmas trees and wreathes, so the air is perfumed when you ride by. Ryan and I went to the Distillery District last weekend to have dinner and discovered that it is turned into a Weihnachts festival, complete with Weihnachtswurst and little wooden stands selling little gifts. It was rather lovely, though cold. In fact, winter seems to have finally arrived--today was positively (negatively?) frigid! It has also snowed a few times over the past few weeks, though nothing has stayed for long. My voice teacher, Monica Whicher, gave a beautiful recital last weekend of holiday music with harp (a bit like the album I recently recorded). It was wonderful (and instructive) to watch and hear her sing. She has a commanding stage presence in that she invites you into the space she creates and holds you rapt from beginning to end. I was very glad I had the opportunity to see her perform.

We've also had a smattering of excellent master class artists recently, most notably Sir Roger Norrington. Perhaps some more musings on him later, as what he had to say about period performance practice--particularly vibrato--was very interesting, but I think I would like to move on to the joke which I began in the title.

It is not so much a joke as real life, as Ryan, a bassoonist friend from The GGS, and I did take Mr. Haas to Niagara Falls. But it was a funny, somewhat surreal experience which I shall recount here:

After a few mishaps with the renting of the car (the bassoonist doesn't have a license but wanted to use his credit card, and the two names had to match; Ryan was to drive but doesn't have a credit card; and I arrived to help them out of the mess by officially renting the car myself) that put us a bit late to pick up Mr. Haas, we were on our way. He is extremely soft-spoken (and for those of you who don't know, he's an Austrian-born spectralist composer best known for the piece "in vain" which the New Music Ensemble performed a few days ago and which occurs, in parts, in complete darkness) and kind. His English is good, though he worries it is not good enough. He is always able to make himself understood, though, and I had fun talking to him a bit in German. He was happy to talk about his music and about his inspirations, though he seemed more animated when we started discussing Death Valley.

As a side note: when my dad and I were in the Southwest this summer we realized that about 80-90% of the people we encountered similarly exploring the Great Outdoors were either French or German. A bit of a mystery, I guess. How do you explain a bunch of Germans in southeastern Utah? Is it because the Euro is stronger than the dollar? Why aren't they in New York? Haas explained that it was his first time in a desert, ever. Perhaps we are too quick to dismiss the profound (and unique) natural beauty of our own country, even when we are enjoying it. Recalling the German landscape, and perhaps even the Romantic ideals of nature, it does make more sense that they would want to see our country. Anyway, I digress...

The day was overcast and cold and the trip relatively uneventful. We arrived in Niagara Falls City, a garish strip of blinking lights and towering hotels advertising breakfast specials. It's hard to imagine an uglier city, except maybe Las Vegas. They're rather similar. There are a lot of casinos and such. But, just as we passed an Alpine-themed restaurant advertising a $1.99 breakfast special and covered with murals of people in Lederhosen (closed, but up for sale!), I caught a glimpse of the falls. And they really are beautiful. I'm sure because we were there with a composer I was more attuned to the sounds they made than I might have been otherwise. Standing above the falls, the crashing sound of the water is not very strong. The sound of the river as it flows along is full of higher-pitched, gentle sloshings in counterpoint with the rumble from way down below. The volume of the water and depth and breadth of the falls is incredible. I know there are bigger ones out there (Victoria Falls, Iguazu Falls, probably others), but I haven't seen them. Haas pointed out that it is hard to train your eyes on one particular spot on the falls: you want to keep following the water, making that continuous glissando that appears in so many of his works. It was a little like being in a stationary car when a truck is pulling forward. Though you're immobile, you feel like you're going backward. In the same way, the water made you feel as if you were shrinking and the falls were growing. A little Alice-in-Wonderland-esque.

We walked around them for a while and eventually decided to try to make it to the other side of the gorge, America! So we walked to a bridge which had a little building with a funny little turnstile and a 50 cent toll. After collecting the proper change, we all pushed through and walked across the bridge. On the other side we passed through customs and I was finally in America after so many months! How exciting! I called home! On the other side of the gorge you can walk along the falls and the river, and over a series of bridges, to traverse the span of the island and falls. When we finished exploring it was almost nightfall (and very cold) so we looked for somewhere to eat. Nothing gave. There was a pitiful Christmas market, like in the Distillery, but on a Wednesday no one was out and about save ourselves and a few hardy vendors. Eventually we reached a giant casino, bedecked in stained glass and architecturally rather similar to a mega-church from the 1970s. Slightly creepy. Across the street: a TGI Fridays. Ryan and I had never been and Haas was hungry, so we went in. There literally wasn't a single vegetarian item on the menu, though they accommodated Ryan's request for a vegetarian pasta without question. Mr. Haas, luckily, seemed very happy with his steak (he is German, after all... and then I remembered the meals I had in Regensburg which, despite my efforts to the contrary while ordering, always seemed to result in a boiled hotdog floating forlornly in a soup tureen).

He very generously treated us to dinner in America and we traipsed back in the cold, over the bridge, through Canadian customs, and back along the river. By then the falls were illuminated in colored lights. Perhaps it was only in contrast to the beacons of consumerism--the giant guitar of the Hard Rock Cafe, the flashing signs and neon lights--but they were actually somewhat beautiful. It was nicer when, just as we were leaving, the lights became just white and the brilliance of the cascading water was illuminated further. In the huge plume of mist that results from the falling water in the Canadian falls the lights created circles of rainbows which seemed more like nebulae, images from the Hubble Space Telescope, than anything else.

The next night was the first performance of "in vain." I had heard slips and snatches, bits here and there, but not the whole piece. The effect was incredible. I haven't had an experience like that for a long time, probably not since hearing El Niño live at Carnegie Hall a few Decembers ago. There were moments of extreme beauty despite all the microtones grating against each other, something that usually gives me a headache. Because we often categorize those sounds as "noise" rather than music, parts of the piece were distinctly non-human and sounded more like machines than anything I'd heard in a concert hall. I had one strong mental image of an airplane flying happily through an Alpine meadow. Not a real airplane, but one which was native to that clime. I don't know why. The parts of the piece that were to be played in complete darkness were wonderful. I don't always like the dark. I'm not afraid of it, but with my bad eyes I think I value the light even more than I might otherwise. I especially love the sun now, when sunset comes so early. Anyway, I wasn't sure if the whole "pitch black" thing would come across as a gimmick. When the first period of blackness came, I was actually more frustrated that they hadn't achieved a true blackout. The exit signs were covered but light seeped around the edges, and the person controlling the light cues in the box was apparently inattentive and some light entered from there. I closed my eyes against the distractions and listened. In many ways it felt like a more true concert experience than what I normally enjoy. My mind often wanders, which I don't feel to be a detriment, but sometimes it wanders to inconsequential things and I begin to watch people. With a blackout, you are both alone with the orchestra and together with the other darkened bodies, but you are free to listen in a sort of stillness that comes from this sensory deprivation. The second blackout section is interrupted by flashes of light which become stronger and last longer as the piece progresses. These too were strangely powerful, another form of percussion. They were also very beautiful. You do not want the blackness to end, to be returned forcibly to the humdrum of people and clothing and faces and instruments and walls and chairs. I was so grateful for the opportunity to meet Mr. Haas, to see Niagara, and to experience his music.

Finally, here is a link to some beautiful pictures (and a little information) about one of my favorite types of squid.