Bread of Easter Brightness

I can't remember where I stumbled across the existence of special ethnic Easter breads, like the Greek lambropsomo. But the idea of Easter bread, and especially the name lambropsomo, Bread of Easter Brightness, entranced me. In 2010, I tried a recipe I found on The Fresh Loaf… it wasn't very good. But I was in love with the idea.

The next year I read as much as I could find find on the topic (which wasn't much) and eventually decided to just strike out on my own. I wasn't thrilled with the anise used in my first attempt, so I tried the one traditional spice (cardamom) that I could obtain. The eggs dyed with red food colors bled terribly, so I ransacked the onion bin at HEB for shed skins. And in an innovation of my own, I braided the loaf into a cross, with five red eggs: one in the middle and one at the end of each arm, like the grains of incense in the Easter candle.

It was a hit. Such a hit that I can't alter the recipe further, even though I've since acquired a source (and taste) for mahlep. GeekBaby remembers it, and asks at the beginning of Lent each year when I will bake it again. And it's beautiful for breaking our Easter fast.

I have no idea how authentic my recipe really is. Probably not very. Many elements come from, in my understanding, the traditional Easter bread. Others come from my own aesthetic sense. But, as I have no Greek heritage, I feel I ought not call it lambropsomo. So I named this recipe Bread of Easter Brightness, from the poetic translation of the Greek name that originally inspired me.

Bread of Easter Brightness

• 4 1/2 – 5 cups unbleached bread flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 2 teaspoons instant yeast
• 1 tablespoon cardamom
• 1 1/4 cup milk, warm
• 1/2 cup clarified butter, cooled
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 5 eggs, raw or hard boiled, dyed red
• Optional: egg wash
• Optional: sesame seeds or sliced almonds

Combine a cup of flour, the milk, and the yeast to create a poolish, and let it ferment for an hour or two, until it's very bubbly.

In a large bowl, whisk together 3 1/2 cups of flour, the sugar, salt, and cardamom. Stir in the poolish and the beaten eggs, and knead for five minutes. Add flour gradually from the remaining half cup, if the dough is very sticky. Gradually knead in the clarified butter. Let the dough rise until it's doubled in bulk.

Weigh the dough, and divide it into six equal pieces. Roll each piece into an 18″ long rope, and dimple them at the halfway point with a fingertip.

Spray your baking pan with nonstick cooking spray, and pinch together three ropes of dough at the top center of the pain. Braid until you reach the halfway dimples. Two strands of dough will naturally point one direction and the third will point in the opposite direction.

Rotate the pan 180 degrees. Join your remaining three ropes of dough at the top center of the pan and braid as above. Two strands will match up with the one strand from your first braid, and one strand will match up with the other two.

Rotate your pan 90 degrees, and braid these three strands down until you reach the end. Pinch the ends together and curl them under. Rotate the pan 180 degrees and repeat for the last arm of the cross.

At this point, the shaped loaf can be refrigerated for up to 24 hours. If you do this, let the dough return to room temperature and proof until doubled before you bake it.

Proof the loaf until it is doubled. Preheat your oven to 350 F. When the loaf is ready, you may brush the top with your egg wash and sprinkle it with the sesame seeds or sliced almonds. (I don't like the texture of an egg wash and prefer the softer, more rustic look, so I skip it.) Insert the five red eggs into the cross. Nestle them deeply in between the strands of the braid, wide end down, or the oven spring will push them out. If you use raw eggs, they will cook fully during baking, hardboiled will be heavily overdone. Eggs dyed red with yellow onion skins should not bleed.

Bake the loaf at 350 F for 45 minutes, or until the loaf's internal temperature reaches 185 F. Cool before cutting. It's delicious when fresh and warm, but it shouldn't be too hot to eat.

It's a lot of bread, the recipe ought to halve well enough, but you probably can't get a cross loaf out of a half recipe. If you make a half batch, I recommend just a straight braided loaf (with red eggs tucked into the ends).

 

Ash Wednesday Bentos

This second round of bento making went much better than the first!

This is the heavily calorie restricted bento I sent with Himself to school. Rice, a little bit of salted salmon, blanched green beans tossed with soy sauce and sesame oil. The whole thing can't be more than 400 calories. I used the little boxes from my original sandwich set and didn't have any trouble at all. Apparently I just pack better in threes than fours!

And here's my own bento. I don't dare fast this year, but there's no reason I can't abstain from meat. So more salted salmon for me together with rice, a salad, and a clementine. Packing two square boxes was much easier than the variety of differently sized boxes.

I was much happier packing the boxes this time. Each bento came out feeling like a coherent meal instead of a jumble, even though when I started I was uncertain of what each would contain. And in my lunch, I did a much better job of vertical packing and tight packing.

Bento 101: Assignment 2a

Packed into a Rubbermaid LunchBlox sandwich kit (with a dressing hanger-on from the salad kit). The beef 'n beer with noodles are a leftover from Sunday's dinner. Baby kale greens were a substitute for the original salad, and the little dressing cup just has some Italian dressing. But I didn't know what to pack in the other two wee cups. I finally went with yogurt (a standby) and a half serving of Green & Black 85% dark chocolate (which left most of the cup empty, boo).

While the yogurt was tasty and provided me with a good serving of dairy that I would otherwise probably neglect, I really would have rather had more baby kale salad. I packed that salad as tight as I thought wise, but still wanted more in the end. And the yogurt felt like a kind of non sequitur to the meal. It was only there because I had two empty containers to fill. The chocolate was a delicous treat*… but I would have been as happy, or happier, with some fruit.

I like the idea of these LunchBlox. The set of four boxes seems to hold about the right amount of food – it is a lot of food, but I need those calories – however the four container paradigm is just reinforcing the basic block I have against packing bento lunches in the first place. All the little boxes are fun and appealing, but I feel intensely pressured to fill each one with something different. And then I end up with lunches that aren't coherent meals so much as semi-random collections of food. It seems like all the larger volume bentos are similarly composed. For example, the Mr. Bento lunch jars hold a similar amount and have three or four separate containers. And the less compartmentalized boxes just don't hold enough to keep me going.

The goal of this assignment was to learn about fitting the contents of my plate into a three dimensional container. I don't feel I did this very well. The food all fit easily enough… The problem is it wasn't distributed in the same proportion. I had less salad, extraneous yogurt (replacing the frozen shoepeg corn I am apparently incapable of cooking) and a lot of wasted space in the box with the chocolate.

Yet, writing this all out has helped. I think I will obtain a second large square container to use instead of the side and snack containers. This, hopefully, will solve my “four box constraint” issues, and force me to pack with some attention to vertical space.

Lent begins Wednesday. Between the fasting and the abstinence from meat, it should add an interesting twist to the rest of this week's bento making exercises.

* A whole snack container was overkill for the chocolate too, and it rattled around in there dreadfully. It would have done much better in a second dressing tub, if I had one. I wish Rubbermaid sold those little tubs separately, they are amazingly useful.

Pumpkin Math

…I may have bitten off more than I can chew.

After a couple articles showed up Monday advocating cooking your (used) jack o'lantern to make puree as an exercise in frugality, I bought one of these Tuesday out of sheer indignation.

Fairytale Pumpkin. French press frame for scale.

That is a Fairytale Pumpkin. I always want to get one every fall, just because they're pretty. But this year, thanks to my gardening endeavours I found out 1) Fairytale Pumpkins are really French heirlooms named Musque de Provence, and 2) they're famous for being good eating pumpkins. The barriers to splurging on fancy pumpkins were shattered, and I bought one to roast for puree.

Anxious to get the most value for my $10, I bought the biggest one I could find. My pumpkin weighs 25.8 pounds.

Curious, I measured my pumpkin, to estimate how much puree it would give me. The pumpkin itself is a rough ellipsoid, and the interior (based on pictures of what one looks like cut) is supposed to be a rough sphere with a radius of about half that of the whole pumpkin.

Not my actual pumpkin.

Mine was 16 inches both ways across, and 8 inches tall, so I plugged 8, 8, and 4 into the ellipsoid volume equation:

Ve = 4/3(8*8*4)π = 341.33π

and 4 into the sphere volume equation:

Vs = 4/3(4^3)π = 85.33π

and then I subtracted the two:

Ve – Vs = Vf = 256π = 804.25 cubic inches

804.25 cubic inches converts to 13.93 quarts of pumpkin puree.

Given that my initial measurements were very rough estimates, the irregular and heavily grooved exterior of the pumpkin, that the shapes are not really perfect ellipsoids or spheres, and that some of the volume difference will necessarily be rind, I've rounded this down to 10 quarts.

Still. 10 quarts is:

• 2.5 gallons of puree
• 22.85 cans of store pumpkin (@ 1 3/4 cups per can)
• enough puree to make two batches of pumpkin bread every week from now till Christmas (12 weeks), plus a couple pies.
• all that bread and pie would require eight and a half dozen (102) eggs.

Come Friday, we'll see just how much puree we do get. And my sister laughed at me on Twitter, for saying I wanted to weigh my pumpkin “for Science!”

Update:

Flycat is going to loan me her pressure canner, so if roasted cubed pumpkin, or Three Sisters Soup are hits, I'll be able to can some cubed pumpkin as well as freezing puree. I'll roast half the pumpkin for puree to start – to be honest, I don't think I could fit the whole pumpkin in my oven, even in slices.

 

The Bratwurst Equation

Cooking bratwurst is not for the algebraically challenged.  First, there’s the fact that bratwurst come 5 to a tray, but buns come 8 to a bag.  But that’s not the only math this meal involves!  One must also consider that you need one bottle of Shiner for every 4 brats you plan on cooking!  Unless you’re planning on cooking 40 bratwurst (an attractive, but expensive proposition) you will have either buns or brats left over.  Plus that’s 10 Shiner’s you’re dedicated to not drinking.

We’ve settled on 15 as the perfect small number. (Well, smaller than 40.  Luckily they’re great leftover.)  Three packs of brats and two packs of buns leaves just one bun left over.  And while this number technically needs four beers to cook, you can get by with three if you are vigilant in rotating brats from top to bottom of the pot of beer for even cooking.

And then we must consider the correct number of mustard varieties to provide with a meal of bratwurst.  This number is equal to n + 1, where n = the number of bratwurst eaters.