Hamburger, homemade buns, orange lentils, fried napa cabbage

Masoor dal. Here is a recipe I pulled off the internet:

* onion
* margarine
* cumin
* turmeric
* clove
* cayenne
* salt
* pepper


No to margarine. What is the point? I am amazed they still make that. Anyway, do you recognize what this recipe needs?

Guess.

* Fenugreek! Of course.

I did not want all that stuff to darken the handsome orange color so originally I kept all that separate from the orange lentils but then I caved and combined them.

When these lentils soaked they looked like they have a little root that is trying to come out and you know what that makes me want to do. Plant them. 

The lentils were combined with the butter and spice mixture which could as easily been all cooked together. The lentils never actually boiled. The water boiled but not the lentils. They soaked covered while I mucked about with other things. I never even tested to see if they were done. Apparently there is a wide margin for goofing around.  

Red bean hamburger bun.

This is third portion of the dough prepared earlier for the pizza and for the baguette. The dough was one day old then, it is three days old now. It looked to me to be enough for two hamburger buns but after they were baked I saw there could have been at least three. So that is quite a lot of utility for one simple batch  of careless dough. Two cups of water and three rounded packed cups of unsifted flour and a very loose scraping together. No real mixing involved starting out.

The dough was hardly kneaded at all back then and that showed in the baguette's crumb. Tsk. They wouldn't like that at the bakery college but it did make very nice sandwiches. So I kneaded this last portion now to make up for my sloven past, and to prove I mean it I gave this third and last portion a boost of flavorful and nutritious bean sludge. I discovered that yeast likes beans and that beans perform very well in bread. I learned this by adding leftover bean dip to bread dough expecting the worst but getting very good results by surprise. These beans here were processed to powder and added to hot water and then boiled for seconds which formed a paste that was spread over the dough then rolled and then thoroughly mixed in and kneaded. It is a very soft dough.

Apologies for the huge file size, but it is nineteen photos in a stack.

1. cold aged dough

2. red beans

3. red bean to powder

4. powder mixed with hot water

5. powder water zapped again to boiling

6. aged dough turned out

7. dough covered with bean paste

8. flattened dough rolled up

9. dough roll stretched

10. dough roll folded

11. dough roll compressed

12 dough roll stretched again

13. dough roll folded again

14. dough roll compressed again

15. dough kneaded

16. dough divided

17. dough transferred to baking tray and covered (not shown)

18. hamburger buns risen

19. hamburger buns baked. 

Would you prefer better pictures? 

That is it for the hamburger bun. The hamburger is 95% lean which is way way WAY too lean for me but it was on sale, so I added as much olive oil as the ground beef would hold. 

Does that sound odd? 

The thing is, I just experienced a sudden weight loss. Three belt notches, if that means anything. My pants are hanging by the cuffs arranged by waist size on a pole running the length of a walk-in closet. There are a lot of pants hanging in there and more on the shelf above. If the pants were piano keys then the last month would be like playing the scales down the line of waist sizes to the very end. Plink plink ... plink.  Last week I weighed at college-level weight, which is the time when I stopped growing in height and where my present-day pants waists end hanging on the closet pole.  Yesterday I dropped to just above High School weight which is alarming because I grew two inches after High School. And that was weighing myself yesterday sopping wet, I just stepped out of the bath. I do not have any High School weight level pants around here. I wear the smallest waist pants sold in men's shops and tuck in two layers of shirt. It sounds insane when I say it but I am down to size 30 waist /36 length. Soon it will be 29/36. Do you realize what that looks like? When I sit on my wallet I tip to one side as if sitting with one side on a brick. The backside is gone as far as I can tell. Now it is just loose baggy pants seat back there. I kept wondering what all that folded fabric is that I am sitting on. It was so annoying. Now it's pathetic. So something has got to give. I want that weight back, it took my whole life to earn it. 

I resolve to stop this downward trend and reverse it.  

The hamburger is large. I already ate half of it and I am going to eat the rest of this thing if takes all night. 

Egg, bacon, cheese, lettuce, tomato sandwich

This started out a simple cheese sandwich: bread, butter, cheese. That's it. 

But then I kept seeing fried onions and an egg seemed like a good idea too and it was all downhill from there, bacon, lettuce, and tomato. So a BLT then, with egg, onion, and cheese. 

Sandwich:

Step 1 Wheat

a)  plow land and sow a field of wheat

b)  tend wheat field to maturation

c)  harvest, thresh, ensile wheat

d)  mill wheat

Psyche!

No, SRSLY. Step One of making a sandwich around here is to bake a loaf of bread. 

We baker types have words for everything, every phase of dough and yeast activity and fermentation -- a whole vocabulary unique to baking that amounts to another language. Sponge is such a word. Sponge is an early and wet phase of dough with an active yeast culture that lacks salt and the final addition of flour that will stiffen a sponge to a proper dough. 

But wait, there's more! 

This sponge contains 1/2 cup foreign material. 1/2 cup of dry small red beans were milled to a powder using a small household coffee bean mill. This is a small amount of bean powder relative to the amount of all purpose flour, an estimated 5 cups, possibly even so many as 6 cups, so 1/10 or 1/12 total dry ingredients. The milled bean will not contribute to the gluten matrix that is formed by wheat and that makes bread leavening possible by yeast. The bean powder is dead weight, as it were. It will also absorb twice its weight in water. The funny thing is, the yeast loves this bean powder and gobbles it up like there is no tomorrow. There is also 1 tablespoon of Lyle's Golden Syrup, because I do no not know why, I was going for the honey and saw the Golden Syrup first. 

ARTS !

This is an excellent sponge. The yeast is really going like mad in there. The sponge has non yeasty, non spongy things in it like milk, butter, and egg, all things that you wouldn't think would contribute to perfect yeast environment. Butter and egg also interfere with gluten web formation. But the sponge also has things that yeast thrive on, sugar, flour, bean powder, warm liquid environment. 

So the sponge proofs for a period, as a semi dough free of buffering salt and rife with an active yeast culture eager to maximize its mostly advantageous environment. 

The sponge visibly expands. It develops an odor of fermentation. 

Fine! Now the full amount of salt and the remainder of flour is added without any appreciable salt-buffering effect on the highly active and newly fed yeast culture. 

Working in the final cup of flour into the dough on the work surface, the baker can feel the dough tighten up by the addition of salt and stiffen with each pass picking up additional flour until a suitably sturdy dough is attained. 

You know how bread instructions say to punch down the dough and form into a loaf? 

This is where we are different. Yeast loves a liquid environment. By keeping the environment wet as a sponge we gave the yeast what it needs to reproduce the best. It has done that magnificently as a sponge and not as dough. We will not punch down our sponge but we will process it down as the salt and the final amount of flour are finally added. The violently redistributed yeast culture is now at maximum activity and freshly fed. The second period of proofing at room temperature is even faster than the first.