Branny Boils Over

I hate it when we have hamburgers or hotdogs for dinner. It isn’t that I have anything against ground meat or pork products-of-ambiguous-origin, fact, I’ve been known to crave a hotdog.  That doesn’t mean I ate the hotdog.  I’m still a vegetarian.

What I *hate* is having to buy a bunch of hamburger buns or hotdog buns to complete the meal.  With a family of two, only one of whom actually eats burgers and dogs, how can we really get through a package of hamburger buns or hotdog rolls without either

1) becoming insanely sick of burgers and dogs? or

2) resigning to eating stale buns?

In the past, I’ve caught the Omnivore downing a hotdog bun laden with tuna salad.  It was kind of like getting a tunasalad sub-sandwich from Subway, only much more crass. He just couldn’t take another hotdog.  And I just wouldn’t buy sandwich bread knowing that we had perfectly good bread, albeit in the shape of a hotdog roll, in our breadbox (yes, we use a breadbox).  It was sort of like this stale-mate situation, with tuna salad that was quickly souring stuck in the middle.

Sometimes, we just use english muffins for our hamburgers and sloppy joes.  They’re more multi-purpose than buns, afterall.  And sometimes I put feta cheese in the burger, call it a “Greek Burger,” and then serve it in a pita pocket.  If you’re going to Go Greek, afterall, Go Greek.  Keep your Americanizaed buns to yourself.

Plus, after you make a batch of pita bread, you can have pita pizza.  And that’s half the reason you put Greek Burgers on the menu for the week: leftover pita pockets for pita pizzas.

This type of bread is a snap to make at home and bakes up in less than 8 minutes.  The dough can rest in the refrigerator for awhile and so, really, you have no excuse not to make this, even if you work 7 days a week, 365 days a year at the 7-11 Convenience store.

And, as the Omnivore and I enjoyed these wheat pita pockets (and he didn’t even MIND the wheat flour!), we realized that every other pita pocket we’d had in the past has been stale.  Pits are soft and velvety.  Not shoeleathery and apt-to-crack.  Delicious.

Pita Bread (6 large rounds, adapted from Deborah Madison)

3/4 cups warm water
1 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 teaspoon honey or barley malt syrup
1/2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon olive oil
1.5 cups whole wheat flour
1 cups bread flour

Put the warm water in the mixing bowl, stir in the yeast and honey, and set aside until foamy.  Meanwhile oil a bowl for the dough.  Stir in the salt and olive oil in the stand mixer bowl and then beat in the whole-wheat flour until smooth.  I just used my dough hook all along.  Add the rest of the flour in small increments and need until dough is smooth and supple.

Put the dough in the oiled bowl, turn to coat, then cover and set aside until doubled in bulk, 50 minutes to an hour.  At this point, I just put the bowl, covered in plastic wrap, in the fridge.  It stayed there for about 36 hours and I occasionally punched it down and turned it over until ready to use.  1 hr before cooking, I brought the dough to room temperature and made rounds as follows.

Punch the dough down and divide into 6 pieces for 7-8-inch breads. Roll each piece into a ball and then cover them with a damp towel. Put a baking stone or 2 sheet pans in the oven and preheat to 475°F. Allow the dough to relax while the oven heats—about 15 minutes—and then roll each ball into a circle a little less than 1/4 inch thick. Do not stack the rolled-out dough.  Drop the rounds of dough directly onto the stone or heated pans and bake for 4-6 minutes, flipping once during baking. At this point, they should be completely puffed; remove them from the oven and cover with a towel to help them deflate, if desired.   If you prefer un-pocketed pitas, bake stovetop.

My pita, soft and tender and delicious, overfloweth with cucumbers, lettuce, tomato, and a homemade chik’n breast with a drizzle of honey mustard.  While the Omnivore enjoyed a burger of ground turkey with feta and oregano folded in the mix:

Many teachers are just amazing beings.  That’s all there is to it.  The Omnivore, yeah, one of those amazing beings.  Although he’s out of the classroom now and actually teaching the teachers, when he was teaching the kids he touched so many lives in meaningful ways.  Former students are incessantly tracking him down to thank him for his guidance.  He really followed his childhood dream of wanting to be a teacher and stuck with it.  He changed lives.

My fourth grade teacher changed my life.  Her name was Mrs. Crisp.  (and, for what it’s worth, I remember the name of every teacher I ever had, so I don’t just remember the life-altering ones).

She was about 40 when I had her as my teacher and she’d been teaching in that southern public elementary school for a really long time.  She had those lesson plans memorized.  Rote, people, rote.  She was a pear shaped lady with kinky-curly hair and glasses.

And she loved English and grammar and spelling.  Looking back, I suspect she was your classic math-phobe, and so she delved into Language Arts and deprived us of good old fashion long-division.  I remember one time she gave me a talkin-to when I inappropriately used the word how. Yup.  She asked that we use it in a statement and not a question. And you better believe I’ll never make *that* mistake again.

Anyway, we had spelling tests every week.  Generally, the lists of words had themes to them.  One week, the theme was holidays. The words were Christmas, Easter, Lent, Advent, Epiphany, and for good measure, and political correctness, she threw Chanukah into the mix.  That, dear readers, was the pivotal decision in my life.  

I was an industrious kid. I always had a plan of action.  And I always went over my spelling words (after learning them independently of course) the morning before the quiz.  So one fine Southern morning, my mother and I were reviewing the list.  She was announcing the words and I was reciting the spelling as fast as lightening.

Then she got to Chanukah.  But she pronounced the chet properly: hah-nuh-kuh.  Naturally, I had NO idea what word she was referring to.  But I was quick as a whip, so I blurted out, “Oh mom!  You mean CHA – NOO – KAAAH.”

Her face was like this: 

And she said, “Mrs. Crisp said it was pronounced with Cha Cha Cha instead of Hah hah hah?”  “Affirmative,” little branny said.  And then my life was changed.  Goodbye Mrs. Crisp.  Goodbye public school.  Goodbye little friends.  I was off to get a real education. The whole experience was kind of like this.

Honey Vanilla Challah (2 loaves, adapted from SK and here)
1 1/2 packages active dry yeast (1 1/2 tablespoons)
1 3/4 c warm water
2 tablespoon honey plus 1/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil, plus more for greasing the bowl
5 large eggs, 1 reserved for egg wash
1 tsp vanilla
1 tablespoon salt
4 c bread flour
4.5 c AP flour

Dissolve yeast with warm water and honey.  Whisk the oil into the yeast and add the 4 eggs one at a time, whisking thoroughly between additions.  Add salt and remaining sugar.  Then add flour in increments until a nice dough forms.  Knead until smooth and let rise in a greased bowl until nearly doubled in size.  Then, punch down dough, and let rise again for another half hour or so.  The third rise will take place when the bread is in its braided or loaf form.  *Note; allowing any of these rising processes to be retarded by the refridgerator overnight is said to improve the end result vastly.*

So, after the 2nd rising, halve the dough and form 1 half into a long tube on your cutting surface.  Cut dough into 3rds, then cut each third in half.  This yields 6 balls of dough for a 6-straight challah braid.

Roll each of the 6 pieces into a 12-15 inch rope and smush together the edges:

Refer here for a lesson how to braid a 6 strand challah loaf:

At this point, I refrigerated my dough overnight.  The next morning I pulled the two loaves (yes you must go through the above process 2x) out of the fridge and spread an eggwash over them.  I preheated the oven to 375* and let the dough continue to rise.  Just before baking, I washed the dough again with an eggwash and added poppy seeds.  I baked the loaves for 35 minutes, rotating the sheet pans halfway through the cooking time.

The flavor of this bread was fantastic.  Subtle vanilla and just slightly sweet.  The texture could not have been better.