Overnight Sourdough Cinnamon Rolls

From Foodsies!

Fair warning: while these cinnamon rolls are easy and take little actual work, they do take forever to make because of the long resting times needed to rise properly. It's basically like Do Step 1. Wait 3 hours. Do step 2. Go to sleep. Wake up, bake, devour. So: easy, but requires a bit of planning.

Fortunately, you can freeze them once baked, and have them ready at a moment's (or thawing's) notice.

The reward for all this waiting around: Soft, sweet, flavorful cinnamon rolls that will rock your world (and they're vegan too, of course!)

Oh yeah, the "downside" is that they require a sourdough starter. Whatever. Just accept the fact that almost all bread/roll/biscuit/pancake recipes from me are going to involve sourdough starter. That stuff multiplies fast, and I hate to throw it out and waste it, so I gotta use it! Plus, i'm completely addicted to the depth of flavor that it gives all baked goods, as well as the communion it provides with a slower kind of life.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the recipe for these delicious cinnamon rolls (which I made in part as a test to make sure they are good enough to bake for my parents Easter morning... and in part because who doesn't love cinnamon rolls?)



Overnight Sourdough Cinnamon Rolls

Ingredients

Dough

1 1/2 Cup Sourdough Starter
2/3 Cup Soymilk
2 TBSP Sugar
2 tsp Vanilla
1 TBSP Melted Earth Balance/"butter"
1 tsp Salt
2 Cups All Purpose Flour
1 tsp Baking Soda

"Filling"

3 TBSP Melted or Softened Earth Balance/"butter"
2 or 3 TBSP Cinnamon
1/2 Cup Sugar

Glaze*

1/3 Cup Powdered Sugar
2 TSBP Soymilk
1/2 tsp Vanilla

* If you want something more like "icing" than "glaze," double the powdered sugar and add in 1 TBSP of melted butter. Stir. Adjust the sugar vs. milk ratio until you have the desired consistency. You can also add in a splash of maple syrup or even coffee (yummmm!!!!) for some extra flavor.

Instructions

In a large mixing bowl, mix together the Sourdough Starter, Milk, Sugar, Vanilla, Melted Earth Balance, Salt, and Baking Soda.

Slowly add the flour a little at a time until you have a dough that is soft but not sticky, and which is cohesive enough to be handled.

Rub some Earth Balance in a bowl and roll the dough around in it so it is coated in a thin sheen of butter. Cover and let rise until doubled...

It will take about 3 hours to double. You can leave it for longer and I suppose if you were in a pinch you could do it for a little shorter. If you have a gas oven, you can set it in there and the pilot light of the oven should provide a good temperature for it to rise (keep the oven off).

Once it's doubled in size, punch the dough down**. Punching the dough down just involves pressing it down with your hand. No need to go crazy on it, as the following step of rolling it out will also help the process.

Sprinkle a cutting board or table with a good amount of flour. You can add some sprinkles of cinnamon also (the dough will happily pick it up when you lay it down, yum). Roll out the dough into a rectangle***. You want it to be maybe 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch thick and it will probably wind up around 9x18 in size****.

Now brush/spread the melted or softened butter all over it. Mix the cinnamon and sugar together and sprinkle as evening as possible all over, even out to the edges. If you don't feel like mixing, you can sprinkle with sugar and THEN with cinnamon, instead of mixing them. Either way works with only slightly different results.

Roll it up! You can roll it up one of two ways, the long way or the wide way. I think the wide way is the more common method, but I did the the long way and obviously they turned out fine. The long way results in fewer but larger rolls, with more spirals of cinnamon sugar yumminess. The wide way results in more rolls, and like I said, it's the generally recommended method (although mine turned out fine, clearly). In any case, rolling towards you is easier than rolling away or to the side of you.

Pinch the "seam" down so that the roll doesn't unroll itself too easily. Also, if your ends are messy, ignore it. It all comes out fine once it's baked (and those "ruined" ends can be claimed by you, a cook making a noble sacrifice).

Now take a sharp knife and cut the roll into rounds about 1.5 or 2 inches thick. Arrange them touching on a well-greased baking sheet (or in a casserole dish if they will fit, which is what I did) and refrigerate overnight.

Wake up the next morning remove from the fridge. Let them sit out somewhere warm while your oven preheats to 400. When my oven preheats the stovetop gets pretty warm, so that is where I like to set them (or over top of our strongest radiator if the heat is on.. which in Boston is um, most of the year). Bake for 20-30 minutes at 400. You want them to get a little golden brown and to be firm when you tap them.

If you're eating them now, make the glaze/icing while they cool a bit and then spoon the glaze on them. Proceed to devour.

If you plan to freeze them to have around for cinnamon roll emergencies, do NOT glaze them. Just freeze them. When you want to eat them, thaw them carefully in the microwave or open air (or in the fridge overnight) and then heat and then glaze. Got it?

** Feels like you're defeating all the rising doesn't it? Well, you're not. The rising allows the dough to get gassy, and punching it down basically breaks up the gas bubbles into more gas bubbles, which is critical for the texture of the final product. It also helps distribute the sugar that the sourdough yeast eats, as well as evening out temperature and moisture

*** Good luck with that. Mine was a sort of vaguely rectangular oval.

**** If it were a real rectangle, of course. Which it totally won't be.

NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM oh yeah and I took a nice long bike ride the day before to compensate for all the cinnamon rolls ;)

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Pancakes and Crepes (a round, flat Sunday)

From Foodsies!

Ah, nothing quite like breakfast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a nice Sunday!

I started off the day by making Sourdough Pancakes. It's a great use of extra sourdough starter, and makes pancakes that are not only egg free (duh) but don't even require soy milk! Craziness!

And yet they turned out really great - maybe not the poofiest/fluffiest pancakes ever, but had a light and fluffy texture nonetheless (if that makes sense). And the sourdough really did add a pleasant (though subtle) yeasty flavor. Mmm.
And cold, they were much better than a normal cold pancake.

I ate leftover pancakes for lunch during a short hike with Oscar and some friends.

And for dinner, keeping with the flat and round theme, I made savory crepes. I prepared a Duxelle (fined chopped mushrooms and shallots) for the filling and made the crepes with buckwheat flour. Of course for the last crepe I filled it with marmalade and soy yogurt for dessert :)

Recipes after the jump:


Sourdough Pancakes (recipe adapted from Wild Fermentation)

You can make this a few different ways. This is what I tried on Sunday.

Ingredients

1/2 Cup Sourdough Starter
1 1/4 Cups Whole Wheat Flour (or half and half whole wheat and all-purpose)
1 Cup Warm Water
1 TBSP Sugar
1 TBSP Vegetable Oil
1/4 tsp Salt
1 tsp Baking Soda

Instructions

Mix the Starter, Flour, Warm Water and Sugar together in a mixing bowl. Cover with a slightly damp towel and set in a warm space for a few hours to ferment.* You can do this overnight (so set it up the night before) to have breakfast the next day. I just put it near our best radiator for an hour. It worked, but I think the flavor is better if you let it sit longer.

*Have you noticed that you're basically just feeding your starter here? I mean, you add in more flour and water than for a normal feeding, but in a ratio such that you're still maintaining the consistency of the original starter. I therefore believe that if you had an over-abundance of recently-fed starter lying around, you could just warm it up to a little past room temperature and then proceed with the following steps as if you had done the first step.

Once you're sick of waiting, take the bowl from above and whisk in the oil and salt.

Mix the baking soda into about 1 TBSP of warm water and then add that mixture to the bowl as well. Fold it gently in to evenly distribute.

Heat a cast iron skillet and coat with a bit of oil. Once it's hot (water sizzles when flicked on it), ladle about 1/3 cup of batter on it.

Once lots of bubbles have formed in the middle and aren't re-closing, and the edges look a little firm, you can flip the pancake. You only get one flip! This is key to making good pancakes. Flip once. Don't get excited and flip too early, but of course waiting too long isn't good either. Plan to mess up the first pancake and that should help you establish your timing :)

Once you've flipped the pancake, the 2nd side should only take about 1/3 of the time to cook as the first side did. You can also peek to see if it looks done (nice golden to golden-brown color). Toss onto a plate and pour the batter for your next pancake.

Serve and enjoy.

You can even freeze these for microwaving later.


Buckwheat Crepes (recipe from Veganomicon)

Ingredients:

1/2 Cup Buckwheat Flour*
1/4 Cup All Purpose Flour
1/4 Cup Chickpea Flour**
1 3/4 Cup Soy Milk
1/4 Cup Water
1 TBSP Arrowroot Powder or Flour***
1/2 tsp Salt
1-2 TBSP Sugar (optional)
1 tsp Vanilla (optional)

* If you don't like buckwheat or don't have any, you can use any other kind of flour or just use All Purpose flour instead.

** I believe this provides some additional binding, but I think it's ok to just use a little more All Purpose Flour instead.

*** If you do not have Arrowroot, try about 2 TBSP of oil or melted Earth Balance in its place. You could try 1 TBSP of cornstarch as well, but the flavor is more likely to come through and be unpleasant.

Instructions

Combine all of the ingredients in a blender and blend. Pour into a container, cover, and refrigerate for somewhere between 4 hours and overnight. This chilling process will making the crepes much easier to flip.

Once chilled, heat a griddle on medium heat and coat lightly with oil, and some Earth Balance as well if you like. With one hand, scoop 1/3 cup of the batter onto the griddle, and with your other hand, tilt the griddle in a circle so that the batter spreads out thinly and (more or less) evenly in a large circle.

Wait about a minute and a half until the top is fairly dry and bubbling in the center, and the edges are crisping and browning a little. Carefully scootch your spatula around the edge of the crepe until it is removed from the skillet. Flip!
Just like pancakes, the 2nd side should only take about 1/3rd of the cooking time as the first side did. Slide the finished crepe onto a waiting plate, brush a bit more Earth Balance onto the griddle, and pour out your next crepe.

Odds are that your first crepe will be a total disaster. Oscar loves this, because he usually gets some of the first crepe/pancake/tortilla/etc. because my first one is always to horrible for human consumption.

I think Veganomicon says these can be wrapped up and refrigerated, and i'm sure that like pancakes, they can be frozen as well.


Duxelle

I have been following this blog for a while, and i've been inspired to start at the beginning and teach myself to veganize all of his recipes (well, the ones I am interested in making at least). It's like a DIY vegan french cooking class ;)

At the very least, it gets me thinking about vegetables, seasonings, and cooking methods that I might not have considered before.

This is a great example. I love mushrooms, and I cook them a lot, but it never really occurred to me to make a garnish/filling like this. Maybe it was too simple for me to think of. Anyway, it makes a great filling for savory crepes!

(Also, I plan to combine the leftover Duxelle with another early recipe of the whiskblog, Portugaise (a tomato-based sauce with a base of concassées (fresh crushed tomatoes, basically)), to make a tasty pizza sauce for pizza later this week. So many snobby sounding French words, just to make a pizza to have with some beer).

Anyway, back to the Duxelle. I used 3 different kinds of mushrooms to keep things interesting: Baby Bella, some kind of asian mushroom whose name I forget right now, and regular button mushrooms. And I got to justify my purchase of cooking wines recently (a red and white)! The original recipe calls for a Medeira wine, but mine is a Marsala and it did just fine. In fact, I probably could have used a touch more :) Also, I love shallots. They're like the love child of onion and garlic.

Ingredients

2-3 Cups Mushrooms, finely diced/minced
2-4 Shallots (1/4-1/2 cup), finely diced/minced
2 TBSP Earth Balance
1 TBSP Olive Oil
1/3 Cup Madeira or other red wine
Pinch Salt and Pepper

Instructions

Easy peasy. Dice/mince your mushrooms and shallots.

Melt Earth Balance in a skillet along with the oil.

Add the shallots and cook for a minute or two to allow the flavors to sweat out.

Add the mushrooms. Cook until the mushrooms darken and get tender (this took about 5 minutes for me).

Add in the wine and allow the wine to boil away pretty quickly (ie, don't turn the heat way down - you want it to simmer heartily).

When most of the wine has cooked away, add a pinch of salt and pepper and you're done!

It can be refrigerated or even frozen for future use in crepes, sauces, whatever.

Here is a buckwheat crepe stuffed with Duxelle. You can also see some of the Duxelle garnished on the top.

From Foodsies!

I apologize for the shoddy picture. The crepes are brownish/greyish because of the buckwheat, and the Duxelle is by nature brown. Not wonderfully photogenic, but tasty to eat.

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Kale-based Smoothies Don't Suck (I know, I was shocked too)

From Foodsies!

What?!

Kale in a smoothie? Bleeeech.

WRONG!

Smoothies are delish! And fruit > kale, so if you put some fruit in with the kale, you don't notice the evil kaleness.

No offense to kale, of course. I love me some greens and all. But it's really hard to eat kale every single day...

Unless it's in my daily breakfast smoothie!

Mmmm mmmmm.



The fun of smoothies is experimentation. Here are two of mine:

1 Solid Handful of Kale
1 Banana
1/4 Cup Frozen Blueberries
1/4 to 1/2 of an Apple
1/2 Cup Orange Juice
1 Cup Water

Remove the Kale leafiness from the stems and tear into smallish bits and dump into blender.
Slice the half apple and dump the slices in the blender.
Add the frozen blueberries.
Tear the banana into small chunks and add to blender.
Pour in OJ, followed by water.
BLEND!

1 Solid Handful of Kale
1 Banana
1/2 Cup Frozen Blueberries
1 TBSP Peanut Butter
1/2 Cup Soymilk
1 Cup Water

Remove the Kale leafiness from the stems and tear into smallish bits and dump into blender.
Add frozen blueberries
Tear the banana into small chunks and add to blender.
Pour in Soymilk, followed by water.
BLEND!

I make small modifications based on what fresh and frozen fruit we have on hand each morning. Sometimes I add in 1 TBSP of cocoa powder, or 1 TBSP of Blackstrap Molasses. Sometimes I use frozen banana or apple, sometimes fresh. Sometimes I use more Peanut Butter. A few times, I used Red Kale, and that was a little weird but still drinkable.

It's important to use at least a little frozen fruit, because that will make your smoothie nice and cold. You can use ice cubes instead if you have a stance against frozen fruit for some reason.

This works awesome in the Cylon Blender (aka, the VitaMix) but it doesn't require such a crazy blender. You might want to chop some pieces smaller, and check the instructions for the blender to make sure it's up to the task of ice cubes or whatever. The resulting smoothie might not be AS smooth as from the Cylon, but it'll still taste good.

And by "good" I mean "really, really great compared to just eating some raw kale."

PS. My smoothies are always reddish because I use frozen berries (yum!). One of these days i'll resist, and see if I can get a new color (i've seen lots of pictures of people with green radio-active looking smoothies and I want a radio-active looking smoothie too!

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