Sprinkling Caraway Seeds for Quick Rye-ish Fix

A few weeks ago, I had a yen for rye bread. Being ignorant of rye bread dough, and seeing that caraway seeds always seemed to be in rye bread, I simply thought of these seeds as the add-in that makes rye bread rye bread.

I wondered why rye breads weren't called caraway seed breads. I wondered if one-syllable "rye" edged out three-syllable "caraway". Turns out that rye is its own item—a grass.

Numerous rye bread recipes call for both rye bread flour and white flour. Some recipes call for additional type(s) of flour. Almost all specify one or two tablespoons of caraway seeds. FWIW, my bottle of Morton & Bassett caraway seeds states a serving as 1/4 teaspoon of caraway seeds. Thus, I infer that each pound of bread should have 4 teaspoons of seeds.

Looking at several recipes for rye bread, which require more ingredients than I wanted to bother with, my eyes glazed over. Rather than pay a king's ransom for rye bread at the store, I decided on a cheapie, quick way to get a rye-ish fix—a jar of caraway seeds for sprinkling onto buttered carb delivery products (grin). Some suggestions:

With room-temperature bread, toasted bread, or toasted English muffin, spread butter or peanut butter on it, sprinkle seeds, and use the knife to pat the seeds down.

With a toasted English muffin, another suggestion is to sprinkle seeds, add shredded or sliced jack cheese, and microwave until the cheese melts. Melting cheese with added seeds works well also for crackers. If you spread butter or peanut butter on crackers, it's optional to use the knife to smear and "glue" the sprinkled seeds.

At the supermarket's spice aisle, I found caraway seeds from McCormick, McCormick Gourmet, and Morton & Bassett (no relationship to Morton of salt game). Tabulation of the three brands is as follows:

Brand	Weight	Price	Price/ Ounce
McCormick	.9	$4.34	$4.82
McCormick Gourmet	1.62	$3.78	$2.33
Morton & Bassett	2	$6.42	$3.21

I'd have chosen McCormick Gourmet for best economy. However, the store displayed a coupon for $2 off for Morton and Bassett, reducing the price per ounce to $2.21. (Yay!) As the nutrition table states each serving as 1/4 teaspoon (.7 grams), about 81 total servings, I'd be shaking about 6 cents of seeds for each bread slice or muffin half. (FWIW, if the seeds were the density of water, the amount of servings would have been only 48 servings.)

While perusing the spice areas, I noticed that Morton &Bassett also sells whole cumin seeds, 2 ounces for $6.68, a smidge more than the normal price for caraway seeds. Cumin seeds are yummy with jack or cheddar cheese. One bread loaf came out divine when I mixed in cumin seeds and shredded cheddar.

Thinking about the caraway and cumin seeds, I recalled having bought something called kuminost cheese many years ago. Did not think to look at the list of ingredients, but associated the name with cumin. All-dictionary.com provides the following information:

Kuminost Cheese; Kumminost meaning in Cooking Dictionary
Danish semifirm mozzarella cheese made of entire or skimmed cow's milk, having either a natural or waxed rind and a pale yellowish to orange interior; flavored with cumin, caraway seed and clove. Kuminost is great in casseroles as well as for treats and sandwiches. Also called nokkelost.

Quickie DIY kuminost cheese sounds like a reason to buy cumin seeds and mozzarella or jack cheese on my next store trek. Maybe I'll skip the cloves, though. Hmmm, a flour tortilla rollup with cumin/caraway seeds and melted jack cheese sounds tempting.
Some websites about caraway seeds and rye:

• Caraway seed nutrition facts ("member in the parsley or Umbelliferae family; a large family of plants that also includes commonly known herbs and spices such as dill, anise,fennel, cumin, etc.")
• Types of Rye
• What's the Difference? Light Rye, Dark Rye, Pumpernickel, and Marbled
• 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Rye, The World’s Most Underrated Grain

Zucchini Overflow?

Good harvest of zucchini lately? Gotten a bunch from people who have been harvesting them? An explanation for the overflow might be from wiseGEEK's "What is zucchini?" site. "Many markets carry this squash in the summer, and it is also a snap to grow at home, although some caution is advised, as the plants can produce way more fruit than one would think is physically possible."

A few times this month, a co-worker brought some gargantuan ones, and I've gleefully partaken of them, and passed on buying any in the store for awhile. I've grated or sliced these homegrown ones for recipes, or bagging and freezing after shredding and slicing, As of a week ago, I've baked two half batches of zucchini mini-muffins, varied by well shapes, and one batch of crustless ham-swiss-zucchini quiche.

For the next few articles, I'll publish three recipes for zucchini mini-muffins and one for the quiche.
The two half-batches of mini-muffins I baked last week had the same ingredients and baking time. The pans differed—aluminum round vs. silicone square—because I wanted to test my theory that one type of pan would yield moister results than the other pan.

My third batch of mini-muffins will again use the same ingredients, but the amount will be a 3/4-recipe batch, using both types of pans. I'll be using zucchini that I grated, froze, bagged, then let thaw. I'll not squeeze, as thawed zucchini is watery when squeezed.

I consider mini-muffin sizes to be a bit more appealing than regular cupcake size—more units that are available for distributing in a social environment. The amount of batter for making one cupcake-sized goodie is the same amount as for three mini-muffins. (At a potluck event, people can more easily pick up a small, self-contained morsel than commit to a larger item or something that requires slicing, particularly a pie.)

The Betty Crocker recipe has lots of details, including baking times for various pans. The Paula Deen recipe includes nutmeg, a spice I'd like to use in more recipes than I do. The most appealing reason I like these two 2-loaf recipes, besides relative ease of the process, is the even number of eggs. Making half-recipes is a lot easier when dividing four eggs than three eggs.

Some additional zucchini links:

• Zucchini History
• Vegetable Dictionary - Zucchini
• Zucchini nutrition facts
• My veggie pasta recipe, which calls for zucchini as one of the four veggies. (Other veggies are celery, carrots, and yellow squash--all 1/2-pounds each, and Salad-Shooter sliced.)

Wanted Unholed Lotta Bagel

The first time I'd become aware of bagels was about the early 90s. Oh, I'd encountered "bagels and lox" in books occasionally, but never gave them much thought. Seems when I read about them and saw pictures, they mystified me. They looked like doughnuts. Sometime shortly thereafter, I bought one. I ate it as though it were a doughnut. Hmmm. Kinda plain, not sweet. (Hadn't thought about the lox; thought cream cheese sounded icky.)

Over the years, I'd eat them in spurts. Sometimes a co-worker would bring in a box of them, accompanied with little containers of specialty cream cheeses. I really liked the salmon-flavored ones, also the jalapeno ones. Now I've finally settled into eating them mostly toasted, with a layer of butter.

I sometimes wondered about bagel denseness contrasted with store bread. Whenever I occasionally bought bagels at bagel stores, the stores tended not to list caloric information. Maybe I was too much into the out-of-sight-out-of-mind mode to bother looking up nutritional information.

In any case, bagels have become another bread aisle staple, in the same area as loaf bread, buns, and English muffins, with something called sandwich rounds starting to make appearances. Not long after I started to add bagels to the weekly shopping list, I looked at the nutrition table. Wow! 300 calories! That's about the same amount of calories as four slices of bread! Now, my days of eating one whole bagel (or more) at a time are gone, hopefully not to return.

The other day as I started the butter smear on my toasted half bagel, it crystalized in my brain that the hole in the middle makes the smearing inconvenient. I then thought about other times I'd thought about bagels and their holes. Bagel shops sell sandwiches on bagels. Occasionally, I'd bought bagels that had almost no hole. (I attributed the condition to the bagel dough preparer using a small ring to cut the dough instead of using a big one.) Most times, holes seemed to be about an inch in diameter.

I had thought using a bagel absent a hole at all would make a better sandwich than using a bagel where you need to be artful with the spreader; otherwise, condiments fall through. Also, if you're going to eat bites that have bread for each bite, it seems odd to run into breadless bites. The spreading care is even more crucial if buttering or creamcheesing a toasted bagel.

Why do bagels have holes? According to answerbag.com, the serious answer is that the holes allow thorough cooking of the bagels. "History of the Bagel: The Hole Story" has some history of the bagel in addition to details about the hole. Googling keywords "bagels no holes" yields numerous results. Closely related to why holes is how to make them. I ran across three ways to make them, none of which involve use of a cooky cutter device as I originally thought might be the case.

From baking911.com—

Hole in the Middle Method: From a ball shape, moisten your finger with water and poke your index finger through the center to form the hole. Moisten your finger with water, if necessary to smooth and to reshape the sides. Pull gently to enlarge hole.

The Hole Around the Finger Method: Flatten the ball of dough slightly into a disk shape, folding the bottom edge under and smoothing it until it looks like a doughnut shape. Make a hole in the center of the circle from the bottom up and twirl around your index finger to widen the hole. Reshape the round into a doughnut shape.

The Tube Around the Palm of the Hand Method: To form the bagels, take each piece of dough and roll it into a ball. Flatten the ball, then fold it in half, sealing the edges with your fingertips. Then fold again to form a tight cylinder. Roll the dough into a tube about 9 inches long. Wrap this piece around the palm of your hand, overlapping the dough about 2 inches. Pinch the ends together to form a ring. I like this way because it is quite fast.

Besides explicit information about shaping bagel dough to make the holes, Baking911.com has lots of detailed background and techniques throughout the stages of bagel making—even a q/a section. A passage that had caught my eye was "Boil on each side, about 3 minutes or less at a time, turning with a slotted spoon or skimmer. When done, the bagel will be puffy and the center will be nearly closed." Soooo, it's possible commercial bagels might have larger holes than necessary (or for my taste, anyway. ).

Well, after having poked around some sites to find out why bagels have holes and also reading the methodologies, maybe I'll settle for the normalcy of most bagels having approximately 3/4" diameter holes. OTOH, it seems possible that homemade ones might yield almost-closed-hole results.

I have listed some promising recipes that use breadmaking machines. My criteria for recipes tend to be calls for few items and ease of the process. (Look in my blog index for any title that has "convenient" in it, then visit articles. The fewer the ingredients, the better, I say.)

http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/1180/Breadmaker-Bagels129588.shtml
Lists 6 ingredients. Features a calculator for adjusting recipe ingredient amounts to numbers of servings.

http://www.recipezaar.com/recipe/Basic-Bagel-For-the-Bread-Machine-55609
Lists 5 ingredients for the bagels, 2 additional for egg wash substitute for Pam-type spray. Also includes recipes for bagel sticks and chips.

http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=5812.0
Lists 5 ingredients, accompanied by numerous comments.