broccoli with Hollandaise

Hollandaise is eggzakly like mayonnaise, and I mean zakly ... 'cept differ'nt. Melted butter instead of oil, heated instead of raw. It's totally fun to do with a whisk. Put all the stuff in a bowl except for the melted butter. Until today, I thought you had to add the butter while heating the mixture, but that is not the case.

If you melt the butter in a microwave, it's already fairly warm. This gives you a jump start on heating the mixture in a double boiler. Go ahead and whisk the egg, mustard, lime juice, s/p and cayenne in this case, together. Drizzle butter painfully slowly at first then reasonably slowly to finish, then lift it over the double boiler, whisking throughout. The mixture will magically thicken further at precisely 140℉/60℃, and proceed to thicken further to attractive glop a few degrees beyond. It is so fun! It makes you feel like an alchemist right there!

One note of caution: lift the bowl off the double boiler at the first sign of trouble. That is, while whisking, and never stop whisking, the egg that rides up the sides in a thin film tends to cook faster than the bulk. Whisk that into the mixture as rapidly as reasonably possible, turning the bowl continuously. Remove from heat if necessary to get back on track. If you do that, then making extraordinarily rich sauce is a snap.

Teach your kids! They'll love you for it.

Served on my amazing 100% whole wheat bread, this vegetable dish is a feast fit for royalty. Wait, screw royalty. It's a meal fit even for a precinct chief!

whole-wheat bread

My fear has been realized. This bread is stuck to the cloche and won't come out. I hope that changes as it cools, but I'm not counting on it. If it pops out later, I'll show it.

The thing that made me think it might work is that I regularly put exceedingly wet dough into screaming hot cloches and they pop right out. The difference here is this dough was proofed in the cloche and it was brought up to temperature with the oven. That meant as it proofed it had time to become one with the cloche. Even the lid was stuck. It eventually pried off with a bit of leverage and that gives me hope of salvaging the loaf. I do hope so because that would be awesome.

I did not check the loaf after it's last proof of ten hours. I just turned on the oven and let 'er rip, so I have no way of knowing if the cloche worked to produce oven rise. As you can see, it did not produce a customary dome. It smells fantastic.

Yay! It came out. *glees* Boy, I'm sure not going to ever do that again. Whew.

Ya know, the cloche does wonders for regular loaves made the normal way and for sourdoughs with customary percentage of all-purpose flour, up to 75%, but they really do not help at all with 100% whole wheat loaves. They do not create oven rise, and crisper crust is not an advantage with heavy all-wheat loaves. That's my new opinion I just now made up. I'm not going to use them any more for 100% of whole-wheat unless I get another idea I want to try. How's that for resolution with complete wiggle room?

Here's the deal I've been saving for this moment:

This batch began life as the remnant dregs of a previous batch. A teaspoon was salvaged, approximately. That teaspoon contained 50/50 whole wheat/all purpose flour along with salt from the bread and trace olive oil from the bowl. It was doubled with w-w flour and water, its bulk not even filling the bottom of a mason jar, proofed, then doubled again, proofed, doubled again, and so on until the mass was built up to a serviceable bulk.

The starter for the batch of bread that was the origin of this starter had its own genesis, of course, already shown in a previous post. Interesting in itself, I believe, it is the same technique used throughout history since the beginning of wheat cultivation through millennia right up to the present era whereupon the powerful, virile, and fast single-organism yeast cell, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, was isolated and cloned at the time of second world war. The same technique used including those periods when bread was associated with beer, as the barm skimmed from beer that was used for bread also developed directly from grain. (Ultimately from the air, but that's a whole 'nuther argument and a different demonstration.)