As I sometimes take a walk in the morning, this is the driveway I walk up as I am returning home.
Today at school we decided to make Italian Food. We had Polenta as our main course, with some bread and Biscotti with coffee after our meal. Or meal was light, simple and delicious.
Polenta
Yield: 5 lb
- 5 pt Water or milk
- 1 tbsp Salt
- 1 lb Polenta
Procedure
Bring the liquid and stirred in salt to a boil, add your polenta and slowly stir it over low heat until it thickens and starts unsticking from the sides. It should take about thirty minutes.
If you want to serve it soft keep it warm over a bain marie stirring it occasionally.
If you want to serve it in pieces, pour it over a butter-coated sheet pan and let it cool. Once cool, cut it into squares and lightly bake the pieces in a low heat oven with some olive oil and dried spices to give it a crunch.
Meat Sauce-Procedure
Brown some ground meat on a sauce pan with some high smoke-point oil keeping a lot of space in between the browning pieces so that the juice that leeks out of the meat evaporates quickly before getting any part of the meat gray. As the meat is starting to brown add some dried spices of your choice, such as oregano, basil, salt, curry and pepper and also add some chopped onions, carrots and sweat them in the fat in the pan.
Finally add your minced garlic, making it golden.
Now that the meat is browned, the onions are translucent, the carrots are getting golden and the garlic is golden, remove all this delicious food from your sauce pan and deglaze the pan with some red wine.
Add your canned or fresh tomatoes with all its juices and add all the previous ingredients and let it simmer until tender.
Serve it on top of the pieces of crunchy polenta and your choice of cheese. I chose some house made and well flavored broiled Ricotta.
These are some dinner rolls that we made with Baguette dough.
Important note:
I have learned from a new baking book I just bought, Artisan Baking Across America-Maggie Glezer, that it is very important to Autolyse the bread dough as you are making your bread. This means that after you mix the flour, instant dry east (or active dry yeast) and the water together, your should let the dough sit covered for a period of 15 to 30 minutes before adding your salt and sponge mixture.
This will allow the flour and the water to mix intensely developing the proper gluten.
Don't add the salt and the sponge as you Autolyse, since the salt would tighten the gluten, hindering its development and hydration, and the the sponge would ferment and acidify the dough giving it an odd flavor.
The yeast that was added at the beginning of the mixing before the Autolyse period will not acidify the dough since it does take about 30 minutes for a dry yeast to start its activation.
At the end of the Autolyse your once rough dough will have greatly smoothed out and become much more extensible. Now you can add your salt, sponge (or compressed yest) and continue mixing.
Autolyse will result in final product with a creamier colored crumb and more aroma and sweet wheat flavor.
To follow our Italian main course we also made some Almond Biscotti to eat with coffee.
Almond Biscotti
Yield: 4 lb and 3 oz
- 10 oz Eggs
- 1lb and 2 oz Sugar
- 2 tsp Salt
- 2 tsp Vanilla extract
- 1 1/4 tsp grated Orange zest
- 1lb 12oz Pastry flour
- 0.7oz Baking pouder
- 10oz blanched Whole almonds
Procedure
Whip over a hot water bath the eggs, sugar and salt until thick. Fold in the vanilla and the orange zest.
Stir the flour and the baking powder together and mix it in the egg mix little by little.
Finally mix it the almonds and shape the dough into logs, about 2.5 inches thick. The dough should be soft, so flour your hands and use a bench scraper to help you shape.
On a baking sheet, bake your logs in a 325 F oven until lightly golden, about 30 to 40 minutes.
Let it cool slightly and now slice the logs diagonally 0.5 inches thick slices. Place the slices on a sheet pan and bake them in a 275 F oven until toasted and golden brown.
It will take you about 30 minutes.
These are the final Biscottis. They became very crunchy and flavorful.
Part of this beautiful winter day.
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