The Focaccia Bread

 On yesterday's post about the focaccia bread, a couple of readers asked how thick the focaccia bread was since I mentioned using it for sandwiches. I don't know if I mentioned this yesterday but the focaccia bread I've always made has been thin - not cracker thin but probably less than one inch thick. Here's a picture of a piece of the bread I made yesterday.

It's about 1-3/4" (just a tad over) thick and that's probably as thick, maybe thicker, than the focaccia bread Panera uses for their sandwiches. 

This is the recipe I used and it is so good! It truly is so easy - I stirred it up in a bowl with a spoon, the description says it needs to stay in the fridge 18 - 48 hours and she shows one she left in the fridge for three days so it's pretty forgiving. I left mine in about 14 hours and it did great.

I did use whole wheat flour. The recipe called for 512 grams of flour. I used 400 grams of hard white and 112 grams of soft white. I shifted out the bran so I actually milled extra and weighed the flour after it had been shifted. The bread I made this morning, I used all hard white and only shifted the bran out of about half of it so we'll see how that turns out.

The recipe calls for 8 grams of instant yeast. I used 10 grams because I felt like the dough might be a bit heavier with the flour I used. The last change I made was to add more water. I used the 455 grams called for and then added more water until I got the dough where I felt like it needed to be. Sorry . . I didn't measure. On about the third set of stretch and folds, I felt like the dough was a big dry so I added a bit more water. I'm just guessing so use your own judgment but I probably added close to 1/2 cup extra water. Again . . just do what feels right for your dough if using whole wheat flour.

Here's the photo of our Azure haul.

This evening's pickup was great. The truck was supposed to get there at 7. We got there about 6:40 and the truck was already there, people were already there and they mostly had the truck unloaded. We helped unload it, got all our stuff loaded in the car and were on the road home by 6:50. I hadn't planned to be home til about 8 but by 8, we had everything unloaded and put away. Nice!

I got 8 cases of pint jars. Almost everything I can these days is in pints or half pints. By this time of year, my jar stash is kinda unorganized so before adding the new jars, I straightened all the jars, got the pints all stacked together, the quarts all stacked together, etc. so I'm ready to start canning season with the jars organized and knowing what I have. I still want to can more beans (pints) and the potatoes need to be canned and I do that in pints so I'll go through the pints pretty quickly.

Here's what I picked up this evening:

3 tubes of Desert Essence Toothpaste - I use that because it has no fluoride.

8 cases of pint jars

6 - 7 oz. jars of Bionature tomato paste.

3 cases of 6 jars/case of 24 oz. of strained tomatoes

25 pounds of rye berries

1 pound of organic pine nuts

1 pound of organic almonds

1 - 128 oz. jug of Sweet Zephyr Ylang Ylang laundry detergent

1 - 32 oz. bottle of Azure Dish Soap - Citrus scent

1 - 32 oz bottle of Azure Dish Soap - Lemon Verbena

1 pound organic cocoa powder

1 pound organic cacao powder

25 pounds of organic cane sugar

2 cases of Jovial diced tomatoes (6 - 18.3 oz jars/case)

3 cases of Jovial crushed tomatoes (6 - 18.2 oz. jars/case)

3 - Mullein plants in 4" cups

Since I bought all those tomato products, watch my tomatoes wake up and produce a ton of tomatoes!  :)

Bread Making Day

 You know how I like to have a schedule and plan EVERYTHING but that never seems to work. It was so easy to keep a schedule when Vince was working but now that he's retired, we do so many things spur of the moment and that makes it hard to stick to a schedule. I guess it's kinda the same way for all of us retired folks.

But . . my preferred schedule is to make bread on Monday and Thursday. Wednesdays I stitch with Debbie so Mondays and Thursdays are good for making bread. I've also asked Vince to let me know a couple of days ahead of when he's going to need Ezekiel bread and rye bread. I make three loaves of Ezekiel bread and 2 loaves of rye bread at a time.

Yesterday I had started focaccia bread so I was going to finish that today and make hamburger buns so we can have pork burgers Thursday.

I was just about to start breakfast this morning and Vince said "I need Ezekiel bread and rye bread". OK . . forget cooking breakfast. I make about 20 breakfast burritos at a time, wrap them and freeze them for morning like this so I grabbed a couple of those, let them sit out while I started making bread, then baked the burritos and spritzed them with water a few times to keep them from drying out. They were delicious and quick and I'm so happy to have those in the freezer.

This is the recipe I used and it's the best focaccia bread I've ever made. Beware that it needs to sit in the fridge for 18 - 48 hours before baking. I baked it in a 9 x 13 pan and it's plenty thick enough to slice for sandwiches. Panera has several sandwiches with focaccia bread and I love them so I'm probably going to make this recipe again for baking Saturday. I did divide this bread into three pieces, wrapped and froze two of the pieces but I like to have several varieties of bread in the freezer and I was out of focaccia so I'll leave that in there and make more.

Next was Vince's Ezekiel bread. I don't like the taste of it and I detest making it but . . I do it! 

That's the grains/flours that go into the Ezekiel bread. The recipe I use calls for rye, barley, hard red wheat, millet, lentils, pinto beans and great northern beans. There they all are - freshly milled.

Two loaves of this will go into the freezer. Vince eats this every morning as part of his breakfast.

Final bread for the day - rye! That's another one Vince likes.

It seems like I'm making these two recipes once a week but I know it only happens about once a month so I'm not really complaining.  OK . . I am but mostly because that Ezekiel bread is a gooey dough and I have to use my hands and I hate sticking my hands in gooey stuff.

Tonight we have to drive about an hour for our Azure Standard pickup. It was supposed to happen at 3 p.m. but then it got moved back to 7 p.m. Then we get home and have to at least get it all inside the house. This one was a large order for me. I haven't ordered since January. I told Vince I'm going to try to make three larger orders per year instead of doing it monthly now that we have to drive an hour each way to our pickup. Going forward, I'll probably try to order in March, July and October. I don't like to order in November because we never know when our order is going to be delivered and we could be going to meet the truck the day before or after Thanksgiving and I don't want to do that.  Then December - February there can be snow and ice. When we went for the January pickup, it was 14 degrees, the wind was blowing and I think the "feels like" temp was below zero and there was about 8" of snow in the parking lot where we met the truck and guess who forgot her coat at home! Yep . . it was so cold - never ordering for a winter delivery again.

I'll try to get a picture of our "haul" and share what I got and how I use it if it's anything weird.

 

Egg Piercer

 Learning new things, especially those things that help in the kitchen, makes me so happy. I was watching Homesteading with the Zimmermans today. I love her!

She showed this gizmo for poking a hole in the bottom of an egg (raw) before boiling it and that makes a tiny little pin hole in the bottom of the egg. Ruth Ann said it allows hot water to get around the egg and results in a super easy to peel egg. 

She showed it in action and it seemed to work perfectly. We no longer have Amazon Prime and I'm hoping Vince can make it through the Prime Days (or whatever they call the days with all the specials) without signing up for Prime again  . . though he told me today he could sign up for just two days. I hope he doesn't but . . anyway, Walmart had the same thing Amazon has and it was $2 less at Walmart and we get free shipping there too.

I can't wait to try this thing. I've tried "boiling" eggs in the Instant Pot, then submerging them in ice water and that helps but sometimes when I get eggs that were are so very fresh, the Instant Pot trick doesn't even work.

It will be a couple of days before the poker arrives (Thursday).  You can bet I'm going to make egg salad for sandwiches as soon as it arrives.

Sourdough Starter

This post is more for a friend who has been struggling a bit with her sourdough but, of course, everyone is welcome to read it.

I've been thinking about it and have a question for any sourdough experts. Is it possible (or even likely) that an older a starter is, the more active it is? Even if that's true, I'm sure it would depend on the health of the starter but what I'm wondering is . .  my starter is probably 6 years old. Maybe it has adjusted itself to how I do things, to my water, flour, etc. I have no idea.

I fed it this morning and I was peeling a ton of garlic so I was able to set a timer and take pictures along  the rising progress.

I will add, and this is one of those don't do as I do things . . I don't measure. I like to have a very dense/thick starter. For starter/flour/water, my ratio is probably about 1/2/1. I will often add a bit of sugar or honey to the starter when feeding. If I do, say I have 1/2 cup starter, 1 cup flour and maybe 1/2 cup water, but probably a bit less, I would add about 1/4 tsp. sugar or honey. And, my water is highly chlorinated city water (which makes me sad!) but so far, my starter has not complained.

The above photo is one hour after feeding. 

This was 2 hours after feeding.

This was not quite 2.5 hours after feeding. I was getting ready to go downstairs so I put it in bowl, knowing that by the time I go upstairs, it will have gone over the top of the jar and made a mess on the counter.

Other things I was doing while in the kitchen . . in the blue bowl is focaccia in the making, there's a pint jar of garlic getting ready to start fermenting. In the back bowl is another starter - what was left in the bowl after I put some in the jar in the photos above. There was only a bit of starter left in the bowl - maybe 1/4 cup so I need to get it built back up. Between making bread, crackers and now pizza dough, we go through a lot of starter.

It's zucchini season and I'm looking for recipes. This zucchini salad was delicious! The recipe called for lemon juice and olive oil but I subbed balsamic with Italian herbs for the lemon juice. I didn't have pine nuts so I use some macadamia nuts and some pistachios. We pick up our Azure Standard order tomorrow and I have one pound of pine nuts coming. I've been out for almost a month so I'll be happy to get those things.

Appliance Funny

 This is really funny to me. I just finished writing the previous post about the problems with the shelves in two of our freezers. Then I went to Facebook and the first thing I saw was this memory:

On this day in 2025, the appliance store came to pick up the non-working 2 or 3 year old fridge and bring a new one. That was very nice and very appreciated (even though we had paid for an extended warranty) but we had not had a working fridge in the kitchen for six months. The appliance store did give us a loaner which we kept in the garage. 

I read it to Vince and we laughed and the next thing on my Facebook page was this memory!

On this day four years ago, this little stove was supposed to be delivered from Lowe's. It was going to be the canning stove in the basement. But, it arrived damaged and then there was something weird . . maybe they had sold this stove to someone else and the one they tried to deliver, aside from being damaged, was not the same stove we had purchased.

By the time Vince got done having his say, this is the stove they ended up delivering.

IF we ever move from here, I'll probably leave the G.E. stove upstairs since all the appliances match but I will take this stove with us. 

All's well that ends well, right? 

Sourdough Discard Pizza Crust

Sometimes during this past week, I saw this recipe for Sourdough Discard Pizza Crust. I thought about making it but wasn't sure. 

Kinda hopping off subject here . . but Vince detests G.E. appliances. I had never cared what kind of appliances we bought until we bought this house in 2020. I read and researched and the stove I wanted was the G.E. Cafe gas stove. That took a lot of convincing but he agreed to it and since the G.E. white didn't match the old Kenmore white, we replaced all the kitchen appliances. They were 17 years old so I didn't feel like we were being extravagant to replace them. Other than the issues with the fridge, which were enough to make me feel the same way about G.E. that Vince felt, everything has been fine and I could not love my stove more so I'll say I'm 85% happy with G.E. but we will never buy the brand again. We did get a new fridge after 6 months of them trying to repair our totally non-working kitchen fridge.

We have several upright freezers. We still have one we bought in 2006 and it works fine. We brought one from Texas with us that we had purchased in about 2017 and it still works fine. Then, because we have access to buying a whole cow and a whole pig, we ended up buying two more freezers. It was probably still during the time when it was hard to get appliances (is it still?) and Vince bought two G.E. freezers. My dislike for those freezers is why I have joined Vince in committing to never buy anything with that brand again.

The shelves are so flimsy, if you put a frozen turkey or a ham on the shelves, they will bend and collapse and then I open a freezer and a frozen turkey or ham comes tumbling out onto my foot. It's happened enough that I have learned to stand way back when opening either one of those freezers. I've had upright freezers for 40+ years and have never had one with such flimsy shelves. Vince called G.E. and they offered to send him new shelves for about $100 each and we needed 8 shelves. Vince asked if they had improved the shelves. Nope, same shelves we have. Why would we pay $800+ for the shelves that aren't working.

I kept telling Vince . . I know you can figure out a way to fix this and yesterday, for about the 100th time, I wasn't paying attention, opened the freezer and one of the shelves, which did not have a turkey or a ham on it, dumped everything into the floor . . and my foot!

The biggest problem is not so much that the shelves are flimsy but they are about 1/2" too narrow and don't really fit into the little edges that they are supposed to rest on. Even the shelves that aren't bent, if they're all the way against the wall of the freezer on one side, they fall off on the other side. It's a ridiculous design.

I went straight to YouTube and found quite a few videos with fixes. Obviously, we are not the only ones having the problem. The fix that looked the easiest and quickest to me was where a guy had a hose - something left over from a kit for changing the transmission fluid in his car. Vince was gone and when he got home, I showed it to him. This morning, he went to Atwoods but what they had wasn't thick enough. He had to go down to a hardware store and found a thick walled hose, cut it into about 3" strips, split it lengthwise so it would fit over the edge of the shelves and now it's a perfect fit. I don't think there's any way these shelves are going to fall now, even if they bend a little.

OK . . back to the pizza. I had planned to make stuffed peppers for dinner today but after totally unloading two freezers, adding the hoses to the shelves, re-loading everything, I was tired and I remembered the pizza recipe using sourdough discard. I was apprehensive but too tired to care. I told Vince . . I'm going to try this recipe and if it doesn't work, we'll go pickup a pizza.

Vince doesn't like onions and jalapeno peppers so the little one is mine.

This is the easiest recipe ever! From start to finish, I had the pizza on the table in less than half an hour. I may never make a real pizza crust again.

If you click on the link to the recipe, she has a video. So glad I tried this recipe!