Sometimes Less is More

I've tried to love it.

I worked, I slaved, I spent days preparing sponges/poolish, dousing my sourdough starter with pineapple juice, taking dough temperatures, checking my gluten to see if it made a windowpane; I rested dough on couches of dusted kitchen towels, I weighed ingredients precisely by grams and ounces, and after a few exercises in painful precision, I have come to a sad conclusion:

Peter Reinhart's "Bread Baker's Apprentice" may be beautiful bread porn, and may be worth the effort for others, but it is not for me.

I've gone back to an old standby... "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day", and the results are good enough that I don't feel the need to do three plus stage doughs, or mess about with sourdough starters from scratch.

I talked to friend with two kids, who said that while he loved the idea of getting complicated, he was too busy to find it worth doing more than the five minute method of mixing dough, and then just taking it ready to rock from the fridge to a peel and into the oven.

You can just have anything you want anytime you want it, with little to no effort.

The results are great. You can buy it here. You won't be sorry.

Sorry for the Hold-Up

This is for T., who was over for dinner and wondered how the salad dressing came together...

Mirin-Miso Miracle Dressing:

You'll need the following base...

8 parts neutral oil (rice bran or grapeseed are you loveliest of heart healthy options...)
4 parts mirin (japanese sweet cooking wine)
4 parts rice wine vinegar (if you like the dressing sweeter, you can substitute mirin for some or even all of the vinegar, but it's not my personal preference, plus vinegar is a calorie free way to add bite and flavor, while mirin is definitely not)
1 part Dijon mustard (more to taste if you like)
*1 part miso paste (red/white to taste)

Once these are combined, add salt and pepper to taste. It's quite important to put the miso in BEFORE adding in the salt, as you otherwise risk over-salting the dressing altogether.

Depending on the density of the miso paste, you might find it useful to add the liquid to the miso a little bit at a time, blending it in, so that you don't have chunks of miso paste floating in the liquid... nasty, and a pain to get rid of.

We keep a few different dressings on the sideboard in the dining room, in old, clear wine bottles... it's the "Re-Use" part of green living, and they are a pretty good size both for mixing and for holding a reasonable volume of dressing close by.

Use less miso, or none at all, but in that case you'll need to increase the amount of salt, and probably increase the mustard portion. That's my own taste talking, but I find it's a bit bland without some added beefing up.

If you want a more hearty and robust version of this dressing, substitute sesame oil for a portion of the neutral oil indicated. Be advised that a little goes a LONG way, you can always add a touch more if you like.

With any dressing/vinaigrette, trust your own palate; if you need more acidity, add vinegar, more sweetness to balance the acidity comes from mirin, mustard rounds out the flavor and emulsifies the dressing (this will keep it from separating back into oil and vinegar in the bottle), and salt tastes, well, salty.