I've begun exploring kamut and spelt flours in no-knead bread.

They are easy to find here in San Francisco in the bulk section of Rainbow Grocery. These are old varieties of wheat have slightly different flavors, nutritional profiles, and baking properties than whole wheat. Kamut tends to have less gluten than modern wheat varieties so I've kept the proportion of whole-grain flours (the rye and kamut) to about 30 percent of the total.

To add more nutritional umph, I add some chia seeds and flax seeds for their omega-3s as well as oat bran for soluble fiber. Sometimes I grind the flax; it has a terrific flavor that reminds me of sesame. But it's also fun to soak it and the chia seeds. Soaking softens the seed coats and turns the mass into a sort of jelly. The whole seeds give the bread a rustic, attractive look.

43 g organic rye flour

99 g organic kamut or whole-wheat spelt flour

241 g organic bread flour

28 g organic oat bran

6 g kosher salt

14 g organic chia seeds

20 g organic flax seeds

354 g water

28 g fresh sourdough starter or 1/4 teaspoon dried yeast

Weigh the flours, oat bran, and salt into a bowl and whisk together until blended. Weigh the chia and flax seeds into a small bowl and add half the water. Let soak a few minutes until gelled.

Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the soaked seeds and the soaking water, the remaining water, and the starter. Mix together until you have a shaggy dough. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside at room temperature for 30 minutes. Take a bowl scraper and fold the dough over on itself, folding with one hand and turning the bowl with the other, until you have worked your way all around the bowl. Recover the bowl. Repeat the resting and folding twice more, and then set the dough aside until fully fermented, about 24 hours.

Continue with the folding, shaping, proofing, and baking methods explained in no-knead bread and whole-grain variations.

I was teaching a no-knead bread class and discussing ideas for the San Francisco Food Bloggers' Bake Sale (We raised over $1400 for Share Our Strength this past Saturday, 28 April!). We were making the fig-fennel variation that is one of my favorites and riffed on other ideas. A bag of dried apricots from a Mariquita Farm Mystery Box that has lived too long in the refrigerator provided the inspiration for this apricot-anise no-knead sourdough bread. It makes great breakfast toast or spread it with fresh goat cheese or ricotta.

In the variation here you will notice that I am now using metric for weights. I've been a proponent of weighing ingredients for years. It's faster, less messy, and more accurate than measuring by volume, not to mention giving more consistent results. But I've been using ounces because that is the default measurement on my scale. It was not until a recent discussion with the cookbook author and blogger Jennie Schacht, that she pointed out the completely obvious (except apparently to me) way to clarify the ambiguity in my recipes when it came to liquids. When I've called for, for instance, 8 ounces of water, do I mean weight or volume? I think most people wonder: why is she calling for 8 ounces of water? Everyone knows that's a cup! Jennie's brilliantly simple answer: "Express the liquids in grams!" So here goes.

To make the apricot-anise bread, use the amounts listed here and follow the usual method for no-knead bread explained in the the no-knead multigrain sourdough bread and variations.

To make a fig-fennel variation, substitute dried black figs for the apricots and use 11 g fennel seed instead of the 8.5 g anise seed.

567 g organic bread flour (or use 57 g whole-wheat flour and 510 g bread flour)

425 g water

170 g dried apricots, chopped

28 g fresh sourdough starter or 1/4 teaspoon dried yeast

8.5g or 9g kosher salt

8.5g or 9 g anise seed

Note: Soak the apricots in some of the water until the fruit is soft. Make sure to use that soaking water in your bread.

and an empty stomach to Omnivore Books, 27th and Church, San Francisco between 11 am and 4 pm Saturday, 28 April.

There you will find one of the most eclectic and amazing bakeries ever. You can feel good about indulging, too, since the proceeds go to Share Our Strength, a nonprofit dedicated to ending childhood hunger.

“No kid hungry. We share our strengths of baking to help end childhood hunger. It’s that simple,” said Annelies Zijderveld, a food blogger who with Shauna Sever and Anita Chu are organizing the SF Food Bloggers' Bake Sale for the third year in a row. Anita began the effort and the first sale raised about $1500. The second year we raised $2500. And the 28th will be the third.

I'll contribute several large loaves of no-knead bread: fennel-fig? or the apricot-anise I just baked for the first time this morning? Pull-apart oatmeal rolls? Definitely Meyer Lemon-Rosemary.

As for the rest, well! San Francisco Food Bloggers from around the city bring multi-layered cakes, pies of all sorts, gluten-free goodies, and I am hoping Shauna brings a collection of her marshmallows from her new Marshmallow Madness cookbook (Quirk, 2012).

Come and feast your eyes on the abundant goods and drink in the festive atmosphere. You will be amazed at the many, many, many offerings almost none of which you will ever find anywhere else except for this one day in this one location. Come and take home a treat. Or two. Or more.

Even those of us who think we know better make mistakes.

I show you this picture of my foot, not to show off my bunion, as impressive as it may be, but to show you a burn made by boiling water and to demonstrate the stupidity of  cooking in bare feet. Things--knives, pots, hot water, carrot peels--fall to the floor. And that is where your feet are. And so I offer you this cautionary tale.

One day I was steaming-braising some beet tops. When I was small, my mother could not force me to eat spinach. But when she cooked beet tops, I stood by the stove until they were ready. Such are the incomprehensible sensitivities of the human palate. Now where was I? Ah yes.

I opened the pot on the stove and stirred. Sloppily. Boiling water sloshed out and right onto my foot, dressed only in a sock. I was surprised how much it hurt. As you might guess, the water burned the top of my foot. Wearing shoes was a pretty good trick for the next week. And burns heal slowly. Thank goodness, here in San Francisco we rarely see barefoot weather so the evidence of my stupidity stays under cover.

Here are the kitchen clogs I should have been wearing. They are so sturdy (thick soles with good treads and stiff leather uppers) that the pots, crockery, and even falling knives would have left my feet unaffected. I bought them to recipe test in the Fleur de Lys kitchen in San Francisco for Hubert Keller's new cookbook, Souvenirs (Fall 2012 from Andrews McMeel LLC). I tried every other pair of shoes in my closet and nothing but these prevented slipping on the  freshly washed floors--or on the freshly spilled milk, custards, and oil I managed to splash around so liberally.

and Hubert Keller stands at the stove with a pan of potatoes sizzling happily in front of him. I had written the recipe for this dish, pommes paillasson--shredded potatoes cooked in oil and butter until they are crispy outside and meltingly soft within. Easy right? But as I wrote, I'd stumbled over this: just how do you flip a 10-inch pancake? Put a plate over the top, grab it and the hot pan together with both hands, and flip? Then what? A second plate? Suddenly what had been a simple recipe with about 5 ingredients threatened to become complicated. (Such are the trials and tribulations of a cookbook writer. Hubert and I are working on his cookbook memoir, Souvenirs.) So now, as I stood next to him, I thought: "Now, I get to see how to flip it." Then, I confess, I squealed. Because no sooner had that thought crossed my mind, when the pancake flew into the air, flipped, and returned exactly to the pan, cooked side up. "How is a normal person supposed to do that?" I asked. Hubert was already basting the edges of the pan with a nut of butter that ran under the cake to help brown the second side. He turned on me a puzzled expression. From the time he was an apprentice at Auberge de l'Ill in Illhaeusen, Alsace, France he had flipped pommes paillasson (where it was generously laced with black truffles) in just this way, with a graceful swirl and jerk. I've since made the dish again at home (no truffles) and let G handle the plate-and-hot-pan flip.  Then he used the crusty cake as the base for a good, old-fashioned American breakfast of fried eggs and bacon.

Meyer Lemon Rosemary No Knead Sourdough Bread

Are you ready for the bake sale of the year?

Yesterday I refreshed my sourdough starter. After some (who's counting) weeks of negligence it looked pretty sad. But this morning it was awake, puffy, full of life, ready for work. So I took the very few minutes needed to mix up batches of no-knead bread destined for the San Francisco Food Blogger's Bake Sale tomorrow, Saturday 14 May at 18 Reasons on Valencia St from 10 am to 6 pm. I'll take 2 loaves each of Meyer Lemon-Rosemary and Fennel No-Knead Sourdough Breads. Both are variations on my multigrain sourdough no-knead recipe. But I can hardly wait to see what everyone else brings. Scenes from last year's sale still dance like sugar plum fairies in my memory. For a few hours the sale tables will be, I would bet, the best bakery with the widest, most colorful, and creative offerings in San Francisco. And rivaled perhaps only by the simultaneous food bloggers' bake sales going on in other cities to benefit Share Our Strength's programs to end childhood hunger. Hope to see you there.

A recipe for Hubert Keller’s upcoming cookbook called for pale malt. Pale malt??!! I knew malt was made from barley and that brewers use malt in great quantities. Wikipedia, while helpful to an extent, left many questions unresolved. Not the least of which was a source for pale malt so I could test the recipe.

The receptionist at Anchor Brewing was kind. She listened. She put me through to the voicemail of the brewmaster, Mark Carpenter. He called me back! And listened. And offered his help.

Getting out of the car across the street from the brewery (conveniently located fairly close to my house), I was enveloped by the characteristic smell of breweries: malt. It’s a smell I associate with European cities, not those in the US. But as the craft brewery trend expands, this smell, which was once part of the American landscape, is returning. At Anchor it is a light, slightly sweet scent. Does everyone who lives within a few blocks stay hungry all the time?

brewing ingredients, from left: hops; dark roasted malt (smells like espresso and chocolate!), pale malts

“Here, taste some,” said Mark as he gestured toward a zip-up bag of pale malt sitting on his desk. We each took a few grains. Crunchy and lightly sweet with, yes!, a malted flavor. He described it as “malted milk balls without the sugar. Or less sugar.” He explained that pale malt is barley grain that has first been sprouted, and then dried. It is never husked. (Important detail.) And, because malted barley is never heated above 160°F to preserve its natural enzymes, it’s catnip for yeast. Beer yeasts. Bread yeasts. Sourdough yeasts. Can you tell where this is going?

Mark described the role of those pesky (for a cook) husks: In the brewery, the malt is soaked and warmed and stirred and stirred until all those barley enzymes and sugars are dissolved in the water. The water is decanted off the barley solids. Without the husks acting as natural filters, the barley water, or way too much of it, would stay trapped in the solids. Brewers call the barley water, wort, and it is what gets spiced and flavored with hops, for instance, and then fermented.

pale malt mixing with water in one of the huge copper kettles

My recipe called for simmering the malt until tender, 3 to 4 hours! But that temperature would kill the enzymes. What would be the difference in flavor between boiled malt and malt cooked at temperatures between 140°F and 160°F? G suggested a double boiler method: I heated water to 160°F, poured it over the malt, and suspended the bowl above a pot of hot water which I could heat as needed to keep the soaking malt warmed to the correct degree. What a revelation! The simmered malt was only slightly sweet and tasty, but the malt kept in the sweet spot temperature wise: it was distinctly sweet and fresh tasting. It took a day to get around to baking bread and by then, the little sprouts had grown longer. Still those husks. I’m delivering the loaf to Mark today. I hope he has good teeth.

The recipe I was working on describes a risotto made from pale malt. Hmmmm. All those husks. I’m not sure any amount of cooking will soften those so the research on that topic continues. But Mark helped me brainstorm an alternative: a risotto of pearl barley with barley malt syrup stirred in at the end of cooking. It was delicious! Even my did-you-put-anything-weird-in-it G loved it.

No-Knead Sourdough Pale Malt Bread

Meanwhile, though, thanks to Mark and pale malt, I’ve rediscovered one of the most ancient food-alcohol relationships: beer and bread. In ancient---and not so ancient---times, bakers used beer yeasts for their bread. I’m not sure I would recommend putting the cooked, whole malt in bread. You might have to stop and spit out the chaff too often. On the other hand, all that fiber would have a beneficial effect on cholesterol counts as it scrubs out the digestive system.

The answer, I think, is to compost the malt and bake bread with the malt soaking liquid. The barley sugars caramelize making the already crunchy, crackly crust developed by the no-knead method even more delicious. And the aroma!! That tantalizing malt scent wafts through the kitchen as the loaf bakes. The crumb seems transformed, too, a little softer, more tender. Now I understand why barley malt (the syrup and the powder) is a baker’s best friend.

The aroma insists, insinuates: chocolate. Remember Ovaltine? Perhaps my next experiment will be a chocolate cake made with cocoa and pale malt soaking water.

Alison Ashton of Nourish Network and I were talking about a favorite subject---no-knead bread---and soon enough found ourselves wondering whether the dough would work as a pizza crust. I was sure it would but had not specifically tried it. Naturally, that meant I had yet another reason to stir up a batch of bread.

Then, over this past weekend, G and I went to Pizzeria Delphina on 18th Street in San Francisco. We sat at the counter where I could watch one of the chefs shape the pizzas. No flying, circling pizza-shaping dramatics---but it also didn't look like there was room for theater where he stood perhaps 4 feet from the pizza oven. He had a big white tub of risen dough balls on his left, and a pile of flour to one side in front of him. He dipped the dough in the flour, put it on his work counter and prodded the dough into a circle, working from the middle out so he had a nice double-thick rim around the outside edge. Then he picked up the dough, holding it just high enough so one edge brushed the counter top, and fed the dough though his fingers, working it around and around. The dough stretched naturally thin in the middle and retained its rim. Only when it was as thin as he wanted it did he put it on the back of his fists and immediately transfer it to a wooden paddle, stretching it slightly into shape as he laid it down. If it was a tomato-based pizza, he poured a small laddleful onto the crust and smeared it around with the back of the ladle. Then his neighbor slid the paddle onto his own work station to finish assembling the pizza. All of this took probably less than 60 seconds. I didn't time it---reason enough to go back. As if the pizza itself and the tempura-battered, deep-fried heirloom broccoli(!) were not enough.

Now I had two reasons to try pizza: the no-knead dough question and the shaping technique. No-knead dough works great. When I do it again, I think I will use just 10% whole-wheat flour instead of 30% and that will, I believe, improve the dough's performance in terms of rising and blistering around the edge. (Even though I keep two pizza stones in my oven as well as a 14-inch cast iron frying pan to add mass and retain heat, after the first pizza, the oven cools significantly. How I wish I had a convection oven.)

I need more practice with the technique (tough duty, I know) but even doing it for the first time, it was faster and easier than my normal method of rolling and then stretching. The dough handled very like that at at Pizzeria Delphina. I was interested, too, that at the pizzeria, the dough was not brushed first with olive oil which I have always done. Not doing so made assembling the pizzas quicker and the resulting pizza a little lighter to eat but no less concentrated in flavor. What is definitely true is that if your pizza is going to be as simple as bread, tomato sauce, garlic, and a little cheese, all those ingredients need to be of superior quality and intense flavor.

Whenever a bout of “gastrointestinal distress” causes Kit (the dog) to go off his feed, I cook him a pot of chicken porridge—chicken, white rice, carrots, garlic, thyme, a little salt, and lots of water. Once I thought it would be healthier to use brown rice. Bad idea. The purpose is digestibility, not fiber.

And whenever I cook the porridge, I think how good it looks and smells: sweet from the fully broken down rice and lightly chicken-y. And I wonder how the dog would feel about sharing. Unfortunately, the past weeks have found me cooking porridge several times.

But also this week, I went out to a casual Vietnamese restaurant in the Tenderloin district with a couple of gal pals. (We are all looking for good, inexpensive choices.) We ordered a bowl of chicken porridge. It was delicious comfort with a big hit of ginger. The time had come to cook porridge for Kit and for me, too.

I pondered about adding ginger to the pot. Ginger helps settle people’s upset stomachs but would it work for a dog? Or would it be too spicy? I thought about a cinnamon stick, another anti-inflammatory. Kombu? How hard it was to stay simple and bland when I put myself on the eating side of the equation. Maybe if I were cooking for myself when sick, it would be easier. (But then I wouldn’t feel like cooking.)

A whole chicken went into the pressure cooker with chopped carrots, a chunked onion, a couple of garlic cloves, some parsley and thyme (no lavender thyme, lemon thyme, or English thyme, just large-leafed, mildly flavored garden thyme), a good pinch of salt (no pepper or chili peppers), and enough cold water to submerge the chicken. Twenty-five minutes later, the chicken was cooked and cooling.

After shredding the meat back into the cooking liquid, I added a pound of basmati rice and another pinch of salt. Another few minutes under high pressure and that was done. I’ve noticed a puzzled and even hurt expression on Kit’s face if I give him something that is too warm, a bit of leftover egg, for instance, or a pancake. So we had to wait until the porridge cooled.

While we waited, I sliced ginger, shallots, and garlic as thinly as I could and fried them, separately, in a little oil until they turned golden brown and crunchy. While they drained on paper towels, I minced a little parsley (I tore the scraggly cilantro out of the garden just last week.). Then I filled my bowl (It does not say Fido on it.) with the chicken porridge dog food and turned it into pretty good people food with the garnishes. An even simpler version would be to add a spoonful of hot black bean sauce. Or curry powder. Or, or, or