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The most American cookie of them all

Discussion topic: What kind of cookie best represents the United States?

At work, the product managers have started taking turns bringing in baked goods every Wednesday. The lazier ones among us just buy something at the store, but for my first Wednesday fika I naturally wanted to bring a home-baked treat. One of my coworkers suggested I bring "something American", which got me pondering the above question.

So back to the question at hand. If you said chocolate chip cookies, come on. Be a little creative. My answer?

Oatmeal-peanut butter Breakfast Cookies based off this recipe. Unfortunately I didn't have my mom's recipe for these cookies; that one is much better. But the idea is the same. So what makes breakfast cookies the most American cookies? Several reasons:

• Peanut butter. In the U.S. we don't really consider PB to be typically American, but that's how the rest of the world sees it. In fact, more than one Swede has asked me why Americans like peanut butter so much. They just don't get it. Furthermore, it's in the international section of the grocery stores here. George Washington Carver would be proud.
• Mix-ins. While the linked recipe just calls for raisins, I also included M&Ms, and the real recipe throws in chocolate chips too for an all-out attack of texture and flavor. I don't have any strong argument for why mix-ins are American, but it just feels right, doesn't it?
• And of course the obvious one: Who else but Americans would have the audacity to suggest that cookies are a suitable breakfast food? And then this cookie goes and puts it right in its name!

To drive home the whole American thing, I made mine extra large. I will see how they go over with the Swedes tomorrow.

If at first you don’t succeed…

Image credit: someone from the internet

Following up on my previous bread post, I finally got around to making my first sourdough bread this weekend. Or should I say, trying to make my first sourdough. I was not expecting perfection; baking good bread takes a lifetime to master, and the sourdough recipe I was using is many times trickier than anything I've tried before. And since this was hands-down the worst loaf I've ever made, chances are pretty good that the next one will turn out better.

So what actually went wrong? I could explain it myself, but instead I will quote a former coworker with whom I've been corresponding about baking. He managed to predict the exact problems I would have, unfortunately just a little too late for me to do anything about it:

The basic Tartine bread looks easy, but is actually quite difficult to master (many, including me, really struggle with it). It has a very high hydration, and working with the dough is a challenge. Shaping it is almost impossible. American flour tends to absorb more water than European flour. If you used American quantities with European flour, you probably had a super-hydrated dough, which is even more difficult to work with.

In other words, my dough was about halfway to being batter. Trying to form a loaf with this goop was like trying to make a pile of water.

The "dough" formed into a "loaf." Note how it's bonded with the towel.

After a good deal of cursing I decided to just go with it and see what happens. But my problems were compounded: because I had put so much effort into forming this blob into a workable shape, I had driven out much of the carbon dioxide that had formed during the fermentation and initial rising. This would be one flat loaf. Perhaps as a consolation, I thought, I could get a rabbi to certify it kosher for Passover. (Sorry gentiles, I'll explain it to you later).

After one final rise overnight, I put the sad-looking mess into the oven, bracing myself for disappointment. And what came out was... about what I expected.

Brick o' bread

A good crumb would have more holes than bread

Yeah, there are some tiny holes, but this is one dense loaf. The combination of the overly-wet dough and the lack of dissolved gas meant this guy didn't really rise at all in the oven. I gnawed on a couple slices but the rest of it is just sitting on my counter, growing staler by the minute; an indestructible monument to crushed dreams.

But the next one will be better. That's how this sort of thing works: iteratively improve your technique, hone the recipe, and keep raising your standards. Until you get bored or develop a gluten sensitivity. This may have been a small setback in my quest for bread supremacy, but don't you worry, I will rise again.

Getting started with sourdough

Now that I've kind of settled in in Sweden, I decided to start a project that I'd been meaning to do for a while: make sourdough bread from scratch. In case you aren't aware of the process, sourdough bread does not use packaged yeast like most bread. Rather, you cultivate a sourdough starter: a culture of natural yeasts and bacteria which feeds on a flour/water mixture. Since the starter is a living thing, you need to feed it daily to keep it happy and in balance. So basically maintaining a sourdough starter is like having a pet that you can eat.

You can get started making sourdough by taking some of a pre-existing starter and continuing to feed it, but it turns out it's really easy to make starter spontaneously by letting some flour and water sit out for a couple days. The cooties naturally occurring in the flour and the air will begin to grow in the mixture, and it just takes a few days for the little ecosystem to get into balance. I used the basic guide in the Tartine Bread book: 50/50 mix of whole wheat and white flour, mixed with water to form a batter, put in a cool dark place for 2 or 3 days until it smells funny and bubbles. Then feed it daily by discarding 80% of it and adding fresh flour and water.

I just began this project 5 days ago, but my starter is already acting and smelling like a top-notch sourdough breed. I'm so proud of it. In case anyone is interested in jumping on the sourdough bandwagon, here's a rough timeline of how my starter developed so you can see if you're on the right track. The best way to detect changes in a fermentation process is by smell, so if you don't want to hear me describe what bacteria smells like, just skip over this part.

• Day 0: Create initial flour/water mixture.
• Day 1: No noticeable bubbles, not much smell
• Day 2: Some bubbles and a strong vinegar/jet fuel fermentation smell. Not pleasant but a sign of life. I did the first feeding then.
• Day 3: Less jet fuel, more vinegary and a little fuller bodied aroma. Before the feeding it looked kind of dead but bubbles started forming within 20 minutes or so of feeding.
• Day 4: Almost pleasant-smelling. Yeasty with some blue cheese notes. Even more bubbling/growing in the first couple hours after feeding than in previous days.
• Day 5: Much more mellow aromatically, for the first time it actually smells a bit like sourdough.

At this point it already seems trained to the healthy 24-hour feeding cycle, but I'll probably give it a few more days before trying to make bread with it.

Day 4

What if I'm not around for a few days, you ask? Will my starter starve to death, tragically unaware that it lives mere inches from a container with a lifetime supply of its food? Probably, but if I grow too attached to let that happen, Sweden's got my back. A bakery here in Stockholm has opened a "sourdough hotel" where they will care for your beloved microorganisms while you are out of town. But that's just a little too insane.