Yeast

Eggs are important in baking because they help add structure to the doughs that they are being used in. If eggs weren't added to our pretzel or cinnamon roll doughs, there wouldn't have been much to help bond all of the ingredients together.

Yeast is a living organism which is activated by warm water. It eats the sugars in the bread dough and produces CO2 gas, which causes the bread dough to rise. Without yeast or any other kind of leveners, a baked bread will turn out flat.

I feel that the cinnamon rolls required a lot more work to make. They needed to be rolled out, covered in butter and cinnamon, rolled back up, and then cut up into a bunch of pieces and shaped if they turned out weird. With pretzels, we just had to make the dough, roll it out, and shape it into a pretzel. With cinnamon rolls, the flavor was added to the dough (in the form of cinnamon) before it was baked, therefore getting baked into the dough. My group put cinnamon and cheese on top of the pretzels, so those things weren't baked into the food. In terms of what was actually put into the dough, we didn't use any eggs to make the pretzels.

A good dough will not be sticky. If you put it on a dry surface and start kneading it, you shouldn't need any flour, because it won't stick to the surface. Your dough is too wet if it sticks to surfaces (like a rolling pin, in example), and too dry if it begins to crumble.

My team absolutely sucks at cleaning as a group effort. I've gotten stuck with doing a lot of it while everyone else stands around talking to you, Mr. Stutzman. Once I'm done, I'm usually the one who ends up drying it off, too. It's really frustrating me, and I don't appreciate getting stuck with doing all of the cleaning. I wouldn't mind so much if it was the only thing that I did in the kitchen, but it's not. A lot of time is also wasted, I think, because no one seems to know what someone else is doing. One person could be headed to go get the flour, but someone's already got it. We're not on the same page most of the time. There's generally a few of us standing around doing nothing at any given time, too.

The pretzels were really awesome, though. I wish we could have left them in the oven a bit longer so that they would have been more brown and hard on the outside, like a German pretzel. I miss eating them for breakfast!

Crepes & Zucchini Carrot Bread

Leaveners make the dough or batter rise. Without leaveners, breads would all be flat. There would be no air pockets to make your bread fluffy. Different kinds of leaveners include flour, baking soda, baking powder, and (I assume) yeast.

Making crepes is pretty simple. They are like pancakes except "flat"- they do not rise like pancakes do, so they are not as fluffy or filling. Instead of putting things on top of a crepe like you do a pancake, you put things inside of it instead. All you need is to prepare a thin batter is flour, eggs, and a few other things like salt. Heat up a pan and after it's warm pour some of the batter into it. Once it's mostly cooked through you can flip the crepe and in a few moments it's done.

For our filling we decided to make caramelized apples, which are also pretty simple to prepare. All it takes is some melted sugar and butter. You mix in the apples until they turn golden brown- the trickiest part is just keeping the sugar from burning!

Here's the recipe from allrecipes.com. . .

Ingredients

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted

Directions

1. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour and the eggs. Gradually add in the milk and water, stirring to combine. Add the salt and butter; beat until smooth.
2. Heat a lightly oiled griddle or frying pan over medium high heat. Pour or scoop the batter onto the griddle, using approximately 1/4 cup for each crepe. Tilt the pan with a circular motion so that the batter coats the surface evenly.
3. Cook the crepe for about 2 minutes, until the bottom is light brown. Loosen with a spatula, turn and cook the other side. Serve hot. 

Sadly, our zucchini carrot bread was not as delicious as this specimen looks. It probably would have been much better if the butter we had available didn't taste so strange. Sugar and cinnamon really helped. But none the less, I digress. . .

This was probably the "biggest" recipe we've had so far. There were a lot of little things needed to make it, so there was a lot of running around. The biggest issue was probably grating the carrots and zucchini, though. If we make it too small it just turned into mush, but we didn't want it to be too big either, otherwise it would make for an unpleasant experience to bite into a giant chunk of carrot or zucchini whilst eating this bread. Eventually we found a good groove for grating it, though, and it turned out well enough. 

Here is the recipe for the zucchini carrot bread from allrecipes.com (we halved it, though). . .

Ingredients

• 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 1/2 cups buttermilk
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 cup shredded zucchini
• 1 cup shredded carrot
• orange, zested
• lemon, zested
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease two 9x5-inch loaf pans. Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon; set aside.
2. Combine the eggs, buttermilk, and melted butter in a mixing bowl. Stir in the brown sugar. Add the zucchini, carrots, and orange and lemon zests.
3. Stir the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir gently until just combined. Fold in the walnuts.
4. Pour batter into prepared loaf pans. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 60 to 75 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean. Cool loaf in the pan for 10 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely. 

 

The bread and crepe have a very different texture from one another. The crepe was slightly soft and/or spongy and certainly not crumbly like the bread. Our bread was actually a bit dry, but the crepe didn't really have a lot of moisture either- perhaps the caramelized apples had something to do with that, though. There was a big visual difference between the batter for the bread and the batter for the crepes: the crepe batter was pretty watery, and any lumps in it would have been very obvious. It would have been very hard to see any lumps in the bread batter that weren't supposed to "be" there, because it was already very lumpy, filled with a bunch of bits of carrot and zucchini.

In my opinion, the crepes were better. The bread probably would have been a lot better if more cinnamon had been added to the recipe and if the butter we had used with it hadn't been so gross. 

Vegetable Stir Fry

It was simple enough to make this dish. The most work came from gathering all of the ingredients and chopping them up. While that was being worked on, there were several other ingredients that needed to be gathered, like flour, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, and the chicken bouillon cube. The dry ingredients and soy sauce were combined and refrigerated for fifteen minutes. After the pan heated up, oil was added along with the vegetables. After the mixture had been in the fridge for fifteen minutes it was added, as well as the dissolved chicken bouillon. We also made some rice to put our stir fry on top of.

The proper way to hold a knife while cutting is to hold it just where the handle meets the blade. In this way you have the most control over it. Holding it with your index finger on top of the blade or holding it with your hand all the way around the handle is the wrong way to do it.

It was very important to have the vegetables be cut/chopped into similar sizes so that they could be cooked all the way through. If some pieces of carrots were very skinny or very small and other pieces were very thick, the skinny pieces would be overcooked and the thick pieces would be undercooked. Our vegetables were pretty uniform when they were finished.

I'm generally not one for stir fry, but I enjoyed this (although the texture of cooked peppers creeps me out, kind of). I'm so used to eating my dad's teriyaki-soaked food that I've just grown used to not liking teriyaki-flavored things. It was much, much better than I had expected it to be. The only real issue with the food was that our rice wasn't cooked all the way through. We didn't add enough water to the pot when we were making it. Even so, it wasn't horrible and I would eat it again.

I was not here when we made the hash.