Over Sourdough? 5 Cooking Projects To Take On During Year Two of COVID-19

If you’ve spent the majority of your time at home over the past year, it’s likely you’ve started a coronavirus project. What’s even more likely is that your project is making sourdough bread. The pandemic’s lockdown spurred a 2020 baking craze, which in turn led to flour and yeast shortages, and the resulting media attention brought on even more excited bakers. Home bakers turned sourdough tutorials into their side hustles, and celebrities also got in on the baking craze. On FoodPrint — a website focused on the entire food system — our primer on making the fermented dough and ways to use the discarded portions quickly became one of our top viewed posts after we published it last year.

How to Make Puff Pastry

If the precision of making sourdough was exactly your style, then kick things up a notch and learn how to make puff pastry and other laminated doughs this year. The basic ingredients of puff pastry are simple: flour, butter, salt. The complicated part is the technique: lamination, in which you wrap a block of butter in a dough, then follow a series of folds and turns to create a dough that will bake into an insanely flaky pastry. The complicated part isn’t so complicated, you just need to control the temperature (keep your ingredients cold), follow the process and have a lot of time, enough to allow the dough to rest in between each fold.

If that’s not challenging enough, switch things up and try reverse puff, creating a sheet of butter that will be wrapped around a piece of dough. Whichever style you make, puff pastry is perfect for making croissants and other classic pastry recipes. It’s also a great dough to make quick hand pies or turnovers filled with leftovers like roasted vegetables, fruits or meat.

Learn Different Food Preservation Methods

While quick-pickling and jamming should be skills in any waste-free cook’s repertoire, preservation methods can get more complicated and highly specific quickly. Using fermentation ingredients like Japanese koji (rice inoculated with a fermentation culture) or nigari (magnesium chloride), you can get into more serious preservation techniques. If you have some good quality soybeans, koji and salt, plus about six months, you can make your own miso. Koji is also a great way to pickle vegetables and preserve other foods, and it’s also used in making soy sauce, sake and other traditional Japanese ingredients. For a more meditative experience, pick up the art of hoshigaki, helping your stash of persimmons dry out through a traditional hanging and massaging technique.

And preservation doesn’t have to be about fruits and vegetables. If you end up with quality meat from a local butcher, maybe it will be time to learn the art of sausage making. Once you are ready for salami or other preserved sausages, you can use fermentation techniques, like dry curing, to help preserve them.

 

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Cook Through A Cookbook

Instead of picking a cooking project, why not pick a cookbook project? Make like “Julie and Julia,” and cook your way through an entire cookbook. If you want to master all the breads after sourdough, work your way through “The Bread Bible,” and bake everything from pizza dough and ciabatta to crumpets and bagels. If you gave up a big trip in the last year due to COVID-19, delve into a book devoted to your favorite vacation locale. Do you have a favorite food blogger, or are you trying to eat more plant-based foods? Find a cookbook that really sparks your interest and commit to cooking the whole thing.

A few pointers to get you through it. Make a plan. Take note of all of the recipes before you start and decide how many you need to cook each week or month to get through your book. Instead of going from page 1 to end, keep seasonality in mind and break up pantry basics and complicated recipes to help keep a steady flow to your cooking. Find a friend to cook through the book with you, or to cook through their own book. Plan a socially-distanced park meet-up to share some of your creations.

Top photo by Mehmet Gokhan Bayhan/Adobe Stock.