Monthly Archive for December, 2006

Christmas Oranges?

Published
by
chrisandcamri
on December 21, 2006
in Food
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Camri’s Dad sent us some oranges and tangerines from sunny Florida this week. Oranges for Christmas is one of these traditions you see thrown around a lot, so I wanted to look into how it started, but I can’t find anything.

Giving oranges on Christmas seems like a tradition that should have some documentation around it, but I can’t find a definitive explanation. I guess you really don’t need one, I mean, it’s cold, oranges are like summer, it all sort of makes sense. And yet, I feel like there’s some specific origin out there that we can say: “this is the reason why oranges are a common Christmas gift.”

There is a really corny orange fable about an orphanage at Christmas. I found three instances of it: one, two, and three. The story is different in each instance, but ends with orphans taking a slice of their Christmas oranges, combining them, and giving them to an orphan that didn’t get an orange.

There’s also a few mentions of oranges for Christmas being French in origin, but no specifics beyond that. Clementines, everyone’s favorite candy-in-a-peel, are ready for eating around the holidays, giving them the nickname “Christmas Oranges.” Which might be part of the mystery.

Clementines, as an aside, are the honeycrisps of the citrus family, both in taste (sweet!) and in history. Like the honeycrisp, the clementine is a hybrid. Unlike the honeycrisp, which was ‘created’ around ten years ago, the clementine has been around for just over 100. Interestingly though, it wasn’t until the late 90’s that Americans discovered how great clementines are. A Florida cold-snap destroyed that years orange crop. To make up for it, millions of clementines were imported from Europe. Europe had known about clementines for years.

Clementine history aside, what’s up with Christmas citrus? If you know, feel free to email us. Is there a specific origin for the tradition? Other than a bunch of orphans banding together?

Sourdough Cliffhanger!

Published
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chrisandcamri
on December 14, 2006
in Food
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Our sourdough

Our sourdough

We’re phoning it in a bit today, as we’re both busy at work, and the holiday season is taking up most of our weekends and evenings. However, we wanted to give a quick update on the sourdough experiment from last week. The bread turned out great, but wasn’t very sour at all. I improvised a recipe that was probably too heavy on whole wheat flour, it pretty much masked the sour. That said, the bread turned out great, and proved yet again that baking in a dutch oven is a great method.

We’re going to try this again, using mostly white bread flour. That should allow the sour to come out more.

Sourdough!

Published
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chrisandcamri
on December 7, 2006
in Food
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We’re trying to bake something new every weekend, for the most part we’ve kept our promise to ourselves. We’ve tried a handful of variations on the no knead bread recipe from the New York Times, some whole wheat buttermilk biscuits, and a cookie or two. This week, we’re trying something we haven’t in the past couple of years, sourdough bread.

The bubbly sourdough starter.

The bubbly sourdough starter.

For some reason, Chicago doesn’t like sourdough. We’re not sure why. In Arizona, it’s almost always an option at restaurants. Here though, you almost never see it. It’s a shame, as it’s one of our favorite bread types. Baking it is sort of a mystery to a lot of people. Commercial yeast turns out standard modern bread. It’s good, it’s flavorful, but it’s not sour. We’ve bought special “sourdough starters” from speciality shops in the past, believing that that was the only way to make sourdough. The loaves turned out great, but the starters were relatively expensive. When you can buy a loaf of bread for two dollars, it doesn’t really make sense to buy a speciality $5 starter.

Sourdough used to be called “bread.” Meaning, all bread used to be sour. Yeast wasn’t something you’d buy at the grocery store in the time before grocery stores, so a home baker (everyone was a home baker back then) would mix some flour and water, and let it sit out in the open air for a few days. Yeast floats out in the air (yuck!), after a few days in open air, the flour and water batter would start to bubble as the air-yeasts got at it. This “starter” would then be added to more flour and water, kneaded, and baked in a big communal oven. Small portions of the starter would be kept aside. More flour and water would be added, to keep the yeast alive. A starter kept like this could last a family for years.

Eventually, the communal ovens became bakeries, scientists figured out that yeast was what made the starters bubble, brewers started to package yeast for sale, and everyone forgot how to bake their own bread, until the Japanese invented bread machines and everyone remembered how good baking bread smelled, but refused to get their hands dirty trying to make it. Phew. For a little bit more in depth information on the history of bread, we recommend “On Food and Cooking”. It’s one of our favorite bed time books.

“Recipes From the Old Mill” has a few sourdough recipes in it, one of which we’re going to play with on Saturday. The best part of all their sourdough recipes is that they’re built around a homemade sourdough starter. The starter is essentially rye flour, water, a half teaspoon of milk, one grain of yeast, and three to five days sitting in a covered container at room temperature. We mixed ours up on Tuesday night, to get ready for a Saturday bake.

So, in short, this article is a bit of a cliff hanger. Will the sourdough turn out right?! Will we have yummy bread to eat with our Saturday pot roast?! Stay tuned!