Bread Machine Baking: Breadsticks

Bread Machine Baking: Breadsticks

1 recipe Pizza Crust (pg 45)
1 egg lightly beaten with 1 Tbsp. water
3 Tbsp. sesame seeds

Pizza Crust recipe;

1 Tbsp yeast
1 tsp sugar
2 tsp salt
1/4 c. cornmeal
3 tbsp whole wheat flour
3 c. unbleached white flour
1-1/4 c. water (plus an additional 1 or 2 Tbsp. if the mixture looks dry and crumbly after the first 10 min. of kneading)
2 Tbsp. olive oil

Have all the ingredients at room temperature.  Place all the ingredients in the machine, program for Dough or manual and press start.  Remove the dough from the machine and let it rest for 10 min. at room temp., follow the baking instructions on page 47.

We are not going to page 47 as that is the pizza dough baking instructions, go back to pg 52 for breadstick instructions.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees, grease 2 heavy duty baking sheets or line them with foil, shiny side up.  Divide the dough into 12 pieces (large machines) or 8 pcs. (small machines).  On a lightly floured board, roll each piece to a 4 x 2-1/2" rectangle.  Cut each rectangle lengthwise into four 4" sticks. Transfer the sticks to the prepared sheets leaving 1/2" between the sticks.  Brush the top with the egg glaze and sprinkle with sesame seeds.  Bake for 10 minutes or until golden brown.  When the breadsticks are completely cool, store them in an airtight container.

Again, putting the ingredients in the machine is super easy.  I did not cut the breadsticks down to their measurements as I wanted larger breadsticks, more like what Olive Garden serves.  Working with the dough was quite easy and shaping them into the size I wanted was easy as well.  Baking them for 10 minutes was perfect.  These were delicious and I would make them again, but I would probably add a flavored glaze or cheese to bring out more flavor, such as italian seasoning or garlic depending on the meal I was serving them with.

Bread Machine Baking: Garlic French Bread

Having a bread machine, one should use it to bake bread. Throwing all the ingredients into a pan and having someone (or something) throw it all together, knead it gently, watching it rise and baking it all in one fell swoop and then calling it your own is a dream come true! However, my favorite recipe and almost the only one I use for my bread machine is Pizza Dough.  I have tried several recipes for bread in my machine and not been impressed with most of them. So, I decided to try a bread machine cookbook, "Bread Machine Baking".  The cover says perfect every time, 75 foolproof recipes for every bread machine on the markiet including yours. Well, this is almost an uncertain challenge, isn't it? The first recipe I tried was Garlic French Bread. My family loves french bread and garlic bread, so this recipe has the garlic baked right in.

Garlic French Bread

1 Tbsp Yeast
3 c. unbleached white flour (plus an additional 1/4 c. if the dough looks very wet after the first 10 min. of kneading
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1-1/2 to 2 tsp chopped garlic
2 tbsp butter
1 c. warm wter
2 egg whites, stiffly beaten

Have all the ingredients at room temperature.  Place all the ingredients except the egg whites in the machine. Program fro French bread or if you want to form a baguette, then program for Manual. Press Start and follow baking instructions on pg 39.
Baking instructions; After all the ingredients are incorporated by the kneading blade, add the beaten egg whites.  Bake bread in the machine or if programmed for Manual, remove dough, then lightly grease a baking sheet and sprinkle it with cornmeal.  Shape the dough into a baguette about 10-12" long.  Place the dough on the prepared baking sheet, cover with a clean towel and set in a warm place to let it rise and  double in size. Preheat oven to 425 degrees, brush with egg glaze and bake for 10 min in center of oven, lower temperature to 350 and bake another 10 to 15 min. Bake until top is light brown and the bottom sounds hollow when tapped.

 Very easy to throw everything in the machine, and I did have all my ingredients at room temperature.  I added 1-1/2 tsp. of chopped garlic as I wasn't sure how "garlicky" it would be. The baking instructions said to brush with egg glaze, but it also had already said to put the egg whites in the machine.  I assume adding the egg whites was only for baking the bread in the machine but recipe did not make that clear.

  I baked mine in the bread machine, so as you can imagine it turned out like bread and not the fancy baguette in the store.  I could hardly taste any garlic, so next time I would add more garlic.  I wasn't that impressed with the bread recipe as I thought it would be much softer inside, while it was quite condensed.  It was too stiff for sandwiches the next day, while it was stored well, but it did make great paninis!  Not a bad recipe, just not the greatest.  Definitely needed more garlic and I am not sure 1/2 tsp. more would have done the trick.  

Perfect Italian

Perfect Italian: Spaghetti and Meatballs

Perfect Italian: White Bean Soup

Perfect Italian: Spaghetti Alla Carbonara

Perfect Italian: Spaghetti Alla Carbonara

On any given day I love a big bowl of pasta. It’s warm, buttery, salty and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like pasta. So when I saw this recipe for pasta in a cream sauce with bacon and then topped with parmesan cheese, it practically screamed to be made. But poor directions or “methods” as the book so lovingly refers to it led to a not so tasty result.

Spaghetti Alla Carbonara

1 lb. dried spaghetti

1 tbsp. olive oil

8 oz. rindless pancetta or lean bacon. Chopped

4 eggs

5 tbsp. light cream

4 tbsp. freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Salt and pepper

Bring a large pan of salted water to a boil. Add spaghetti and cook for 8-10 minutes or until al dente. In the mean time, heat the olive oil in a large skillet. Add the chopped pancetta and cook over medium heat, stirring often, for 8-10 minutes. Beat the eggs with the cream in a small bowl and season to taste with salt and pepper. Drain the pasta and then return to pan, add bacon and then add the egg mixture and half the parmesan cheese. Stir well, and then transfer to a warmed serving dish. Sprinkle with remaining parmesan cheese.

I don’t typically carry cream on a regular basis in my house. It’s a treat so when I do I make every recipe I know that contains this ingredient so I don’t waste any. I definitely had a lot to work with after buying the smallest container I could find and I was surprised that this recipe only called for five tablespoons. The ratio of cream to eggs was completely off. To only have five tablespoons of cream to four eggs became an overwhelming amount of egg and I have never seen a carbonara sauce with the ratio so in favor of egg.

So here are the difficulties I encountered. The ingredients list calls for the bacon and the pasta to be by weight. Not everyone has a food scale to be able to work with this so it would’ve helped to have back up measurements. For most people spaghetti comes in 1 lb. boxes so it shouldn’t be too difficult there. But finding pancetta was not possible at any of my local grocery stores and bacon had to do. It would’ve been nice to have an estimated number of slices for the bacon. I ended up using about 8 thick cut slices of bacon which leads me to my next difficulty. Chopping bacon is not easy. Either chop it frozen or crumble it after cooking, but attempting to chop fresh bacon was a chore.

As I’m cooking and following directions I encounter where the recipe calls for me to season the sauce, before cooking it, with salt and pepper to taste. I put it a good amount of salt and pepper but I was not about to dip my finger in a bowl of cold cream and raw eggs to see if it was salty enough. I ended up adding more after cooking and serving, which was more than fine. My other problem was that the recipe wants me to drain the pasta and then return it to the same pot and pour the sauce in. They make it convenient that the pasta and bacon are done at the same time so the time transition was smooth but now they’re asking me to pour the sauce, dominated by raw eggs, into a hot pot with pasta and to simply “stir well”. In my mind I’m thinking, this is wrong, there isn’t enough cream and the eggs will scramble under that much heat so quickly, but I followed directions and did it anyway. Guess what? The eggs scrambled. I kept that mixture moving to try to keep the eggs from scrambling but the heat was too much.

I was left rather disappointed with my not so pretty result but I do have to say, even with the strange texture from the scrambled eggs, it was still really tasty. I would recommend heating the sauce separately and slowly before adding it to a hot pot of pasta. I would also recommend a different cream to egg ratio. This was my first time experiencing carbonara (I’ve always been more of an alfredo girl), but I think next time I’ll go for a different recipe.

Sandra Lee Semi-Homemade Cooking

If you have ever seen Sandra Lee Semi-Homemade’s tv show on Food Network, you would know what Sandra Lee is all about. Her cookbook is a definite extension of herself. Her point? Make delicious homemade food that looks like it took hours in a very short amount of time. Her shortcuts are to incorporate store bought items (like the pre-made sugar cookie dough I sprinkled over my berry cobbler). By buying particular items that would take a good amount of time to make you cut down your recipe time but achieve the same amazing result! I was initially fearful that having so many store bought items in a recipe would make it difficult to complete but everything sounded at least semi familiar to me and I think I could find all of these ingredients at my local grocery store. The amount of each ingredient was precise so I had no trouble determining the size of each item to purchase.

I adore looking at photos with a cookbook and I am proud to say this cookbook has gorgeous tantalizing full page color photos for most of the recipes. I need visualization to see how the recipe is going to look to judge whether I should take the time cooking it and these photos do the recipes justice!  The first 16 pages are discussing introductions and real basics in cooking. For most cooks you will bypass that.  An entire chapter is spent on breakfast, which for me, I would rarely use as breakfast in my house is always a quick fix.  Then the book carries on with typical chapters such as lunch, dinner, desserts, and appetizers and so on.  What did surprise me was the pet food recipes chapter at the end of the book. I rarely expect to see pet food recipes in a typical cookbook. Given how pets have become such a member of the family now, I would think it would be widely advertised or even given their own cookbook! Granted, this chapter is going to be subject matter that will not appeal to everyone. 

The layout of each recipe is extremely easy. Recipes are kept on a single page so there is no need to flip back and forth and possibly dirty up your cookbook! Also, each section is classically divided in a way that you just can’t go wrong! There are more than 100 recipes in this book and the ease of each recipe is enticing. Between that and the gorgeous pictures I hope to continue making recipes out of this book!

If you have seen Sandra Lee’s show, you know that presentation as in how you set your table, music and wine are part of the deal in making a meal entertaining and the book goes on to portray this.  A few pages on wine and music are also in the cookbook, but it wasn’t really much instruction.  However, the chapter on cocktails had some awesome simple recipes for delicious looking cocktails.  The book in its entirety was a good inspiring cookbook and picking out recipes from this is fun with the photos and ease of the recipe with store bought items added.