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Kalua pork (unrelated to Kahlua, the coffee liqueur) is one of the best ways to roast pork.  It’s Hawaiian, and this is the type of roast pork you can get at a luau, if you’re lucky enough to be invited to a luau.  It’s a very good pulled pork, and it’s versatile enough to be used for pretty much any recipes calling for pulled or roasted pork.

The real, original kalua pork is cooked in a Polynesian earthen pit called an imu.  Basically you soak a dressed pig in brine (or toss it in a tide pool) for a few hours, then wrap it in banana leaves, lay it in the pit on hot rocks and coals, then throw dirt on it and let it smolder and cook for half a day.  Then you dig it up, and eat!  The pork takes on a subtle smoky flavor, similar to ham or bacon, and the banana leaves impart an amazing perfume, fruity and floral.  Typically, Polynesians would surround the meat with yams, coconuts, and banana leaf packets of fish and whatever else they had.  Chicken and mangos in coconut milk, that sort of thing.  Mmm.

Unfortunately, earthen pits are rarely found in modern kitchens, probably due to timid, unimaginative architects.  So nowadays, most Hawaiians and the rest of us have adopted an oven method that closely replicates the bona fide taste of true kalua pork.  It involves this stuff:

Hey, wait a minute, that’s liquid smoke!  Isn’t that cheating? Yes, it is.  Wouldn’t any Michelin chef worth their gravy fricassee me if they caught me using liquid smoke? Yes, they would.  A lot of gourmets and especially barbecue purists would turn up their nose at the thought of using liquid smoke, and then they would chase you with a sharp object.

What’s worse, the recipe I’m going to drop on you calls for a whole bottle of liquid smoke.  That’s insane.  And it works.

The reddish Hawaiian sea salt is red because the sea water has been evaporated on a red clay salt pan.  You can use kosher salt or curing salt, such as Morton’s Tender-Quick.  Or regular old salt.

A Filipino chef once gave me a tour of his kitchen, and his cooks were just pulling this out of the oven, so I got to taste it.  It blew my mind when he explained how much liquid smoke was used.  The magic of this recipe is that the smoke flavor permeates the meat and mellows during the long cooking time, so that the end result is bacon-like, and not overpowering in the least.

Kalua Pork

1 pork butt (5-8 lbs)

about 1/4 cup kosher salt or sea salt

1 3-oz. bottle liquid smoke

1 package banana leaves

If one side of the pork butt still has the fat cap, you should trim it down a bit.  Wash it and pat dry with paper towels.  Now, get a big kitchen knife, and go psycho on it, just like Anthony Perkins in the Hitchcock film.  Stab the pork butt all over, about 12 or 15 times, making gashes 3 or 4 inches deep.  I like to make my own sound effects when I do this because I think it helps the flavor, but if you don’t remember the soundtrack from the movie, just do the best you can.

Lay out two 3 foot lengths of banana leaf on your counter, crisscrossing each other, and place the stabbed pork butt in the middle.  Now slowly pour the whole bottle of liquid smoke over the meat, massaging it into the holes and all over.  Wear kitchen gloves if you don’t like your hands to smell like smoke.  Next, do the same with the salt; you may need more salt for a larger pork butt.

Fold the banana leaves up around the meat.  It doesn’t matter if they split or break, just try to keep them together the best you can.  Next, seal the whole package tightly in foil. Unless you have a really wide roll of foil, you will probably want to join two lengths by triple folding the edges together.  Set the whole package in a pan or pot big enough to hold it…when it cooks it’s going to leak out an inch or two of liquid.

You can bake it for 5-6 hours at 325°F, or cook it for about 12 hours or all night at 200°F.  The meat should be falling-apart tender when done.

Then you can make pulled pork sandwiches, pasta, tacos & nachos, quiche with broccoli or asparagus, hash with fried potatoes, onions and cabbage, stir-fry, etc.

- Derrick Snyder

I’m not making this up.  They are for sale at Thinkgeek.

Caffeinated Bacon Lollipop in Use

Sometimes too much of a good thing is too much!

- Derrick Snyder

I love to grill lamb.  I don’t much care for roasted lamb or mutton, but I think grilling or searing brings bold flavor to lamb, and really produces a nice product.  Lamb racks, lamb burgers, and the kind of seared rotisserie lamb that’s sliced off a dangerous-looking meat slab to make doner kebab, shawarma, gyros, and tacos al pastor…yum.

So I don’t like roast leg of lamb.  However, once I was working at a restaurant where the cooks were given a free leg of lamb, and one fellow trimmed and cleaned it instead of roasting the whole thing intact.  After quite a task, he reduced the leg down into 6-8 odd-sized chunks of meat.  The pieces were long, so he sliced them into medallions against the grain, and then marinated and grilled them.  They were fantastic.  He worked up a recipe and we put it on the menu.

If you’re going to cook a leg of lamb this way, you might want to start a day ahead of time.  Trimming it is an ordeal.  There are several long muscles in the cut of meat.  Working on the shortest side, open the leg up, trying not to slice between the pieces of meat.  Use a sharp knife, and keep steeling it while you work.

The job can take up to an hour.  With practice, you can almost halve that, but the first couple of times it’s best to take your time.  It’s a pretty complex operation.  When finished, you should end up with several longish pieces of meat, all trimmed of fat and silverish tendon.  You’re probably going to end up with between 2½-4 pounds of meat, which at 6-8 oz. per serving equals about 6 to 10 servings.  Slice the meat across the grain into 1/2” pieces.  You can butterfly the meat to make it longer, so it won’t fall through the grill.  You can butterfly the longer pieces back and forth to create steaks, as shown in the diagram below.  Then marinate and grill (or even saute).  If you like, you can cut the meat up into chunks, marinate and make shishkebabs.

You wont believe this, but I made this diagram myself.

Now you don’t have to cook it for hours like a roast; it will be done as soon as it’s finished on the grill.  The only reason you need to roast meats for a long time anyway is to break down the tendon and gristle…that stuff is stronger than meat, and needs to cook for a long time until the proteins denature and become soft.  Meat itself denatures pretty quickly, in the time it takes to cook a steak…though if you cook it well-done, the proteins curdle up again and toughen, and then you need to cook it for a long time to make it soften again (and you need to cook it in liquid or a moist environment…when the proteins do finally denature, the meat will soak up liquid as it softens).

When grilling or sauteing lamb, the target color is different than that for beef.  Lamb will finish with more red than beef of the same doneness.  The general rule is that lamb is one shade redder than beef when you cut into it:  medium lamb looks like it’s medium-rare, well-done lamb looks medium-well.

Here’s a marinade if you want to try it out:

Grilled Rosemary Lamb with Grilled Vegetables and Rice Pilaf

1 medium onion
2 bay leaves
1 c red wine
8 cloves garlic
about 1/2 c fresh rosemary leaves (a 1 oz.bunch or package)
1 Tb dijon mustard
2 lemons juice and zest
2 tsp fresh cracked black pepper
1/2 tsp curry powder
2 tsp salt, to taste
1 Tb sambal or Chinese chile paste, optional, to taste

1 leg of lamb, cleaned of all tendon and fat, separated into pieces, and butterflied

Puree the onion with the bay leaves and wine in a blender, until the bay leaves are pulverized.  Add garlic and rosemary, and pulse to mince.  Transfer to a large bowl and add the rest of the marinade ingredients.  Reserve 1/4 cup marinade for the glaze.  Marinate butterflied lamb in bowl for 4 hours or overnight.  Some people are concerned that marinating for a long time will draw water out of the meat and toughen it, but with lamb and this type of marinade, I’ve never had a problem refrigerating the lamb marinated for 1 day.

Glaze

1/4 c reserved marinade
1/4 c honey
1 Tb dijon mustard
1 tsp sesame oil

Mix all together.  Grill the lamb, then baste with this glaze when almost done.  The reason I do it this way is because sugar (in this case, honey) in a marinade makes things stick to the grill, and the sugar burns.  You can still turn the meat a couple times quickly at the end, and baste twice…that will burn the glaze just a little bit, which is good.  If you are a die-hard mint & lamb fan, you can slice some fresh mint and garnish the finished lamb with it, but I don’t think that’s necessary.  I’ve cooked lamb in at least five different world cuisines, Chinese to South American to Persian, and there’s always someone who asks for mint jelly (shudder).

Grilled Vegetables

turnips, celery root, rutabaga, carrots (cut carrots lengthwise so they don’t fall through the grill)
asparagus, zucchini

Use a combination of one or more root vegetables and one or more green vegetables.  Peel root vegetables, slice ~1/3” and blanche in heavily salted boiling water for about 4 minutes…they should still be underdone.  Drain, then stop the cooking process by throwing them into very cold water for 5 minutes, drain.  Toss with olive oil, salt and pepper, and grill right along with the lamb.

Rice Pilaf serves 8-10

1/4 c diced pancetta or bacon
1 c onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 c rice, long grain, basmati, Texmati
1/2 tsp salt
4½ c chicken stock
2 medium tomatoes (or 4 romas), diced

Render pancetta or bacon over medium heat until almost crisp.  Add onions and rice and saute, stirring constantly, until onions soften.  Some of the rice grains will become white and opaque, then they will begin to darken and brown.  When half the rice is brown, add the rest of the ingredients.  Bring to a simmer, cap, and reduce heat to low.  Cook 15 minutes, move pot off heat and turn off heat, don’t open lid.  Wait 5 minutes, then remove lid and fluff.

- Derrick Snyder

From The Washington Post:

The Food and Drug Administration is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans, saying that less sodium in everything from soup to nuts would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease. The initiative, to be launched this year, would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products.

Considering this would involve tens of thousands of different products, this is a huge undertaking.  I think it’s amusing to read the reactions from the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association (“We’re working on it voluntarily already.”) and the Salt Institute (“[It] would be a disaster for the public.”).  I didn’t know there was a Salt Institute.  Basically, then, the response from industry is that no regulation is needed because everything is under control, and also, regulation would only amount to a public catastrophe.  I picture riots and mayhem.  And anyway, who is this so-called “government” to tell us what to do?

But the truth is, as almost everyone knows, our diets are too high in salt.  If you want to eat lots of salt, that’s your choice, but with today’s food, there isn’t much choice.  I mean, there are a billion different food products to choose from, sure, but the way we eat today, most of our food is processed.  Our lifestyle, with regard to the amount of time spent cooking and eating has changed dramatically over the past generation.  Even if you try to make health-conscious choices, you might still be getting too much salt.  It’s an epidemic with our kids…they are growing up into a world where they don’t need to learn how to cook, and many aren’t learning the value of fresh or unprocessed food.

As this chart indicates, by far the majority of our salt intake comes from processed foods.

Historically, the primary value of salt was as a preservative, not as a flavor enhancer.  Salt was precious because it extended the time food could be stored, and so it increased the value of food.  Yeah, sodium is a necessary nutrient, and we’re predisposed to prefer the taste, but it’s also poisonous to a host of microbes.

And salt is still used today to preserve foods, along with a host of other sodium-based preservatives such as sodium nitrate.  But now there are lots of ways to preserve food.  When canning foods, the food is cooked first and then sealed, and when processed food is frozen, it’s cooked first also.  Both these methods of preservation require little if any additional salt.

So why all the salt?  Food manufacturers include lots of salt in their products because it sells more products.  There are lots of low sodium products offered now (though caution is warranted, since many products low in sodium may be high in fat or sugar, or may have achieved their low sodium rating by setting unrealistic serving sizes), but in the past, low sodium products have failed dismally, and manufacturers are wary.  Also, manufacturers have determined that customers are dissatisfied if the first bite of food tastes under-salted.  Heavens forbid we should have to add our own salt at the table, but apparently that’s enough to make people not buy the product again.

When it comes right down to it, it would be naive to expect food manufacturers to take responsibility for our own best interests.  Their concern for our health is limited to its relationship to their ability to sell us products.  I’m not trying to villainize the industry, we just need to look out for ourselves.

Okay, maybe I am out to villainize.  Here’s a store aisle in a Wall-Mart.   The chips and soda are conveniently located in the middle of the toys aisle.  That’s not just the store’s fault; the distributor has paid for the placement privilege.  Caveat emptor…

- Derrick Snyder

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Over at FX Cuisine, they have a elegant, yet simple recipe for French Garlic Soup, with great pictures showing a nice way to roast garlic.  This is a homemade soup you can whip up very easily.  It doesn’t require stock, though it might benefit from the addition if you have some on hand.

- Derrick Snyder

There is a variety of king salmon that has white flesh rather than reddish-pink.  King, or chinook salmon are anadromous fish, which means that although they are hatched and spawn in fresh water, they can also spend part of their lives in salt water.  King salmon range across the northern Pacific from San Francisco up to the Bering Sea  and into the Arctic, and over into Russia and as far south as southern Japan.  They have also been introduced in the southern hemisphere in Patagonia, Chile, and New Zealand, where they now have stable spawning runs.

However, the only known population of white kings is here in southeast Alaska.  The location of this population is south of Juneau, but north of Ketchikan.  If you want to know with any more accuracy, you might have to charter a fishing trip.  The charter captains know where to go.

Honestly, the first time I came across a white king, I didn’t know what to think.  You never know a king is a white king until you cut it open; they look the same from the outside.  I knew that trout and landlocked salmon (such as kokanee) have white meat as long as they don’t run to the saltwater, and that a diet of marine crustaceans is then responsible for turning their flesh pink.  But that didn’t explain the size of the white king I first encountered, which, because of its large size, was obviously a sea-run fish.

You never know until you look inside.

To this day there are lots of people who refuse to buy white king salmon, because they think there might be something wrong with it.  Restaurant owners used to be wary, because they thought they might have a hard time selling it.  Customers are accustomed to getting a piece of salmon that’s salmon-colored; try to serve them a piece of white fish (and tell them it’s just as good as red), and they think you’re telling a stretcher.  At least, I’ve encountered such problems cooking in the lower 48…in Alaska, where salmon is king, many people are familiar with white king, and it flies out of the kitchen.

For a long time people thought white kings must be eating a different diet than normal kings, a diet without crustaceans.  But research has shown that not to be the case; white kings and red kings live and swim together in the same schools, and eat the same exact food.  It turns out that white kings are white for reasons of genetics.  They lack a gene responsible for metabolizing a carotenoid pigment found in shrimp, crab and other crustaceans.  Regular salmon metabolize the pigment and store it in their flesh, but white kings don’t.  This is a stable recessive trait, like blue eyes in humans.  It’s not albinism, which would affect the color of the skin and eyes.

Taste-wise, many people say there is a difference, and that white kings have a lighter flavor.  Myself, I’m hard-pressed to tell the difference, even when tested side by side against red kings.  I’ve heard some people claim that white kings have a richer taste, and others that they don’t have as much flavor.  Some chefs claim white king holds together better than red king, that it’s firmer.  Nutritional analysis shows there’s no difference between the two, and most scientific people say there’s no difference besides the color.

Recently, fish sellers have begun marketing white king as “ivory king”, in an attempt to dress the image up a bit.  Marketers know from experience the name can have a big impact on sales.  Other similar recent name changes include marketing pollock as “snow cod”, chum or dog salmon as “keta” salmon (keta is the species name), and spider crab as “snow crab” or “opilio” (opilio is also the species name).

Perhaps partially due to the name change in some markets, demand for white king has surged in the last couple of years, and it’s now a trendy, rare pedigree salmon.  Buyers and sellers use the term pedigree to describe marketed varieties.  Other pedigrees include Copper River king, Copper River red, Cook Inlet King and troll-caught king.  White king used to go for less than red king, now it’s pricier.  Chefs are using it in specials and signature dishes, and people love it.

Availability of fresh king salmon is limited, and availability of white king is even spottier.  King salmon are the first of five species of salmon to spawn, and come in to shore from the deep ocean in May and June, at which point they are caught and taken to market immediately.

- Derrick Snyder

Sunday and Monday were terrible days here in Juneau.  Apparently there was some kind of satellite malfunction over Alaskan airspace.  It was visible to the naked eye; I saw it, and many people commented on it.  I don’t know if it was one of ours or someone else’s, but it was leaking radiation, and there was a bright yellow light coming from it.  Worse yet, the entire sky was affected, and had changed to a frightening blue color.  The temperature shot up to a sweltering 50 degrees F, and some people started to lose their minds from the heat.  There were riots.  Okay, well, I saw a man forget to hold the door open for a woman, and later, I heard a driver honk the horn.  I even saw people running around aimlessly without coats on, dangerously shedding body heat directly into the air.  I think I speak for everyone when I say all we want now is to just pretend it never happened.  Hopefully it will snow today and put everything back to normal.

- Derrick Snyder

As suggested in the previous post, making a shooter’s sandwich, although rewarding, is a bit of an undertaking.  Here are a couple of links to series of pictures chronicling the construction.  Here’s one on Flickr.

And another attempt:  part 1 and part 2.

- Derrick Snyder

A pressed sandwich is pretty much just what it sounds like:  you make a sandwich with two slices of bread, then you weight it down with something heavy and squish everything flat.  Mmm!  Okay, it’s better than it sounds.

Ham and Cheese with Caramelized Onions

First of all, you’re better off using some good bread, by which I mean not the sort of pre-sliced stuff generally used for sandwiches…even if it’s 24-grain or some such thing.  You want to cut thick slices from some sort of rustic or artisan bread, something with a real crust.  Or depending on the type of sandwich, you can also use a sliced sandwich roll, or even an entire loaf.  If you use an entire loaf, you can later cut it into several servings; you shouldn’t attempt to eat the whole thing.

There are several different types of pressed sandwich.  Escoffier briefly mentions how to make one:  he suggests layering roast beef inside a split loaf of bread, then using an old printing press to compress it down, and then perhaps taking it on a picnic.  Since he worked in the late 19th century, it’s likely he had better access to old printing presses than we do today (do not try to substitute an old inkjet printer), but there are many other ways to press a sandwich.

In general, you want to use sliced meats that are just cooked and still hot, or else somehow heat the sandwich while it’s being pressed.  This allows the juices to soak into the bread while it’s pressing, yet because you press all the air out of the bread, it doesn’t become soggy.  If you cook the sandwich while it’s pressing, cheese is a nice addition, because as it melts, it tends to ‘glue’ the other ingredients together.  Some vegetables such as lettuce, tomato and avocado are best left out of a hot sandwich, at least in my opinion, but roasted peppers, olives, grilled zucchini, grilled asparagus, grilled sliced portabellos, spicy pickled cauliflower and jalapeños are all nice additions.

One of the most well-known pressed sandwiches is probably the panino.  The panino is Italian in origin, and is grilled while it is pressed.  Crusty ciabatta bread is excellent for panini, which are filled with, among other things, prosciutto, salami, sliced cheese, and sometimes roasted or pickled vegetables.  They traditionally aren’t made with sauce, but in the US they usually include some sort of sandwich sauce.  If you don’t want to fork over the dough for a sandwich press, you can use two cast iron skillets; get one hot, place a square of foil in it, lay down the sandwich, top with another square of foil, and another hot skillet.  Spray the foil with cooking spray to keep the sandwich from sticking.  Someone recently gave me a grill appliance associated with a retired boxer that makes great panini.  Or rather, it’s not so much the retired boxer that makes the panini as it is his grill.

Panino Caprese with Pesto

The Cuban medianoche is another pressed sandwich.  There are variations, but usually it includes roast pork and ham, plus swiss cheese, pickles and mustard, and is made using a split roll of Cuban bread, similar to a baguette.  It is grilled in a sandwich press like a panino.

Cuban Medianoche

Another type is the shooter’s sandwich.  This is made with a whole round loaf of bread stuffed with seared steak.  Here’s a link from The Guardian to a quick slideshow illustrating the process.  The sandwich looks amazing.

Shooter's Sandwich

When I make a pressed sandwich, I like to start with a loaf of ciabatta or sourdough bread split lengthwise.  I make a quick spread using mayonnaise and dijon mustard, with maybe a little crushed garlic, some chile flakes and some chopped fresh rosemary.  I spread this on both halves, then layer on sliced meats, cheese and various vegetables.  Then I wrap the entire sandwich in foil, and crimp it tight against the sandwich.  If the foil is very thin, I’ll use a double layer, because I don’t want the foil to split under pressure.  Then I place the package on a cookie sheet, place another cookie sheet on top, and set a stack of plates on top or a couple of bricks.  The idea is to add enough weight to start the squishing process, but not so much that it’s crushed right away.  I then put it in the oven at 400°F for 20 to 40 minutes, depending on the size and weight of the sandwich.  I check it every few minutes to make sure the weight is balanced; as the sandwich warms up, it starts to compress more and more, and sometimes the weight shifts.  You don’t want one side compressed more than the other.  If 15 minutes goes by and the sandwich isn’t compressing, I’ll carefully add more plates.

It’s hard to know when it’s done.  if you have a thermometer, you can poke it in and take the sandwich out when the temperature reaches 140 in the middle.  The melting point of most cheese is between 105°F – 120°F.  If you don’t have a thermometer, take it out when it seems hot and well-compressed and solid, then take the plates and cookie sheet off and peel back part of the foil, and pry open the sandwich to see if the cheese is melted, or if everything is slightly steaming.

After you take it out, you need to let it cool.  I leave it out on the counter for a while, still weighted down, then transfer it to the fridge.  You can take the weight off at that point.  I leave the sandwich in overnight, and slice it and serve cold the next day.  And yes, this is a good sandwich for a picnic, because it’s compact and easy to transport, and it’s not messy to eat.

Vegetarian Panino

- Derrick Snyder

Sourdough can be used to leaven baked goods two different ways.  The first way is as a yeast culture in yeasted breads and pastries, the second is as an acidic ingredient in an acid-base reaction, as in pancakes, biscuits and soda breads.  If you think about it, this versatility goes a long way in explaining it’s popularity.

Sourdough is a simple flour and water culture of wild yeasts and bacteria.  Some sourdough cultures might contain hundreds of different microbial species; each sourdough culture is a unique mix.  If you’ll pardon me waxing technical for a moment, yeasts ingest sugar and produce CO2 and alcohol as by-products.  Wheat flour is mostly starch, not sugar, and yeasts aren’t very good at converting starch into sugar, but when flour gets wet, as in a dough, natural enzymes in the flour work to break some of the starch down into sugar, which the yeast can use.

The yeast gives off CO2 gas, which gets trapped in microscopic, sticky webs of wheat gluten.  This trapped gas can’t easily escape the dough, which makes the dough rise.  Wheat is the only grain that contains lots of gluten, so wheat flour is the only flour that can rise appreciably.   If you try to make a yeasted dough with corn or rice flour, there’s no gluten to trap the CO2 gas, so it quickly works it’s way out of the dough.

Once the yeast starts working, it “protects its own” by giving off waste products that inhibit the growth of other microbes.  So a yeast culture naturally inhibits the growth of most bacteria, but some bacteria, such as lactobacilli have evolved to ability to coexist symbiotically with yeasts.  Lactobacilli and some other bacteria live off the by-products of the yeasts, and as a group they form a community that inhibits the growth of other common food pathogens, such as blue and black bread molds.

Lactobacilli themselves give off acids as waste products, which gives sourdough its distinctive tangy flavor.  But it’s this acid that allows for the other method of leavening.  If you throw a little bit of baking soda in a sourdough dough or batter, the alkaline soda will react with the acid, creating C02 gas just like in the classic classroom volcano experiment.  Okay, it happens a bit more slowly.

To make sourdough pancakes, pretty much all you have to do is make a big batch of sourdough starter, then throw in a pinch of baking soda, plus salt and sugar.  That’s it.  You can add an egg, or some milk, but that’s not strictly necessary.

To make sourdough bread, all you have to do is make a big batch of sourdough starter, then add a pinch of salt, and enough additional flour to make bread dough.  You can add a little oil or other ingredients, but you don’t have to.

Okay, down to the hints.

#1.  First off, always remember to reserve a cup or so starter to make the next batch.  This may obvious, but if you use all your starter to make pancakes or bread, you won’t have any left.  The standard procedure is to leave the original culture in the fridge, where it will ferment slowly.  If you take it out and leave it on your counter, it will start fermenting quickly once it warms up.

So when I’m going to make bread, I take about 2 cups from the original culture and dump it in a big bowl, then add 1 cup flour and 1 cup water to the original culture and stick it back in the fridge.  Then I add about 2 cups flour and 2 cups lukewarm water to the big bowl, and cover overnight.  All night long, those yeast cells and bacteria are multiplying wildly on my kitchen counter while I sleep.  The next day, that culture is bubbling like mad, and it’s ready to use.

#2.  Use unbleached bread flour.  Even the fastest-rising sourdough cultures aren’t as strong as commercial bread yeasts.  Over the past century, commercial bread yeast makers have been developing faster and more robust yeast products.  They’ve gone from yeast cakes to active dry yeast to rapid-rise yeast.  Rapid-rise, the latest model, works so fast you don’t even need to proof it; you can just toss the dry yeast directly in your bread mix with excellent results.

Anyway, because sourdough bread dough doesn’t rise as quickly as regular bread dough, sourdough bread tends to be more dense than regular bread.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing of course, up to a point, but it’s helpful to know how to maximize your dough loft.  The most important thing is to use flour with a high gluten content.  Bread flour has more gluten than all-purpose flour, and unbleached bread flour has the most gluten of all.  Whole wheat flour has lots of gluten, but the extra bran and fiber inhibits the gluten, and a good loaf of sourdough whole wheat can come in handy in home defense situations if your firearm jams.

As it turns out, when flour is chemically bleached to make it sparkling white, the chemicals break down a bit of the gluten.  Some fancy bakers even add powdered gluten, which you can find in the specialty flours section of the supermarket.

#3.  Let the bread rise for a long time, maybe twice as long as for normal bread.  Sourdough works slowly, so it takes longer to achieve a decent loft.

#4.  Add some commercial yeast.  When I first saw a recipe for sourdough that included active dry yeast as an ingredient, I was dismayed.  That’s cheating!  Then as I looked around I discovered more and more recipes calling for added yeast.  What’s the point of making sourdough if you’re going to add regular yeast anyway?

I guess it is cheating, in a way, but it works.  If you want to have good-tasting, tangy sourdough bread that is also light and with a soft crumb inside, this is a good way to go.  The thought process here is that the sourdough starter provides the traditional flavor, but the extra yeast speeds up the process.  If you are results-oriented in your approach to baking, this is completely acceptable.  If baking is more of a philosophical process for you, you may want to stick with the old method.  But I’ll tell you, I’ve tried this new method of adding yeast, and it works great.  There’s no difference in flavor or in crust texture that I can detect; the only difference in the resultant bread is that it’s higher and lighter.

- Derrick Snyder