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So today i made a Cinnamon Brown Sugar Babka. I am quite new to baking and i'm fairly certain i'm not taking the regular route a novice baker would. I've made a few loaves of regular bread, some Pita bread that was quite heavenly (along with some Pita chips), and now today a Babka. I'm thinking about a baguette or perhaps some bagels next. Anyway here are some pictures of this lovely piece of heaven! 

It was really cool getting the twist right on it. I should have rolled it out a little longer when it was still dough so i could add another twist but im pleased with the look. 

Some of it's gooey delicousness :)

If you'd like the recipe for it just let me know. This is my first attempt at making a babka so any feedback would be great! I realize it may not be the prettiest thing you've ever seen but i'm learning!

This is off topic, I recognize, but this was only the second time in eight years I stepped away from TFL for more than a day or two, so I hope you'll allow me to indulge in a couple of off topic posts!  Hopefully they'll be a of interest to some of you.  -Floyd

It wasn’t until we arrived that I realized how long it had been since we last visited Poland.  Seventeen years.  

We didn’t plan on staying away that long, things just happened: on our next trip to Europe we visited family members in France and Germany, then came pregnancy, babies, toddlers.  Road trips and shorter visits to grandma and grandpa’s seemed to make more sense than trans-Atlantic travel. More recently, our travel have been focused around migrating to Canada.  Next thing you know, seventeen years have passed. A generation, basically.

The last time we were in Poland was less than ten years after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Coke and jeans and Metallica, basically all things Western, were still a little edgy and cool.  English was rare.  The shortages and queues of the Communist years were gone and young men with cell phones in suits getting into black Mercedes at the airport signified the arrival of some kind of capitalism, but there was an uncertainty about the transition to a market economy. Frequent small crime like cars being stolen and pockets being picked, rumours of ex-KGB agents driving rogue cabs that would kidnap and blackmail Westerners, and fresh memories of hyper-inflation added to the insecurity. My impression at the end of that trip was of a culturally rich and spiritually strong country but one that had suffered immensely through centuries of oppression, horrific violence, and, more recently, exploitation, under-investment, and neglect. It was difficult to reconcile the heroic Poland of tradition and legend with the run down country before my eyes. It was hard to imagine Poland catching up with Western Europe any time soon.

All that has changed.    

The first change that caught my eye this time after getting off the plane into the glassy new terminal at Warsaw’s Chopin Airport was that all the signage and the PA announcements were now in Polish and English.  

I’ve read about how English has become the lingua franca of international tourism and business but didn’t particularly experience it in my last trip abroad, which was to France.  But in Poland we heard Poles, Danes, Norwegians, Spaniards, Japanese, Scots, Irish, and Chinese -- both Cantonese and Mandarin speakers -- all communicating with each other in English.  Most everyone in hotels, restaurants, and shops spoke good English and didn’t seem put out doing so.  I tried my best to use my limited Polish, but usually before I could the person I was speaking with would have flipped to English.  This was before they knew for certain that I was American or Canadian: English has simply become the language that Poles expect non-Poles to communicate with.

The next noticeable change were all of the new building and cranes in the skyline.

 The Warsaw skyline is full of cranes, almost as many as in Vancouver.  And new buildings, evidence of the 15 straight years of economic growth.

I won’t go into all the details of our trip, but we spent the next two and half weeks with my wife’s family and saw some amazing sites, travelling from Warszawa, to Kraków, down to the Tatra Mountain village Zakopane and back again.  

I'd never been in Europe this time of year. As you can see, it was cold but beautiful.

In terms of travelling, the trains were about the same as I remember them -- comfortable and quick, but not yet high speed the way they often are in Western Europe now.  Supposedly they are still upgrading the tracks and in a few years they'll have high speed rail.

Everywhere else we saw signs of economic development and investment in infrastructure.  The train stations themselves, for example, were much improved.  The major roads were as good as any in Europe.  Museums, parks, and historic buildings had many signs of renovation and frequently were marked with information about the grants the EU has been making to Poland to help it upgrade its infrastructure and achieve parity with the rest of Europe. 

Internet in Poland was reliable and easy to find too, as was cell phone coverage.  A ten minute stop in the train station and we had SIM cards so we could text family members while travelling.  Overall, travelling in Poland was much easier than I remember it being and no harder than travelling in any other foreign country.

I love this: the former dead zone between the Kraków train station and old town, the area which one used to scurry through quickly to avoid the beggars and pickpockets and which we'd warned our kids about, has been replaced with a four story shopping mall.

New malls were everywhere, actually.  The nearest one to my wife’s grandmother’s flat in Warszawa is less than half a mile from an old style flea market, which still exists but I expect whose days are numbered.

All in all, Poland was much easier to travel in that I remembered it being.  The country felt optimistic and welcoming, like it was open for business and that the generation that is coming of age might be the first in centuries that has the opportunity to live up to its potential on home soil.  We are already trying to figure out when we can go back and have a long list of other places we’d like to visit: Wrocław, Gdańsk, Toruń, Bydgoszcz, Lublin, Posnań, and Malbork, just to name a few.   

After baking out take on Karin’s (Hanseata) great post with her take on Maria Speck’s Aroma Bread here:  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/32830/aroma-bread-love-story

and my take here:  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/32921/100-percent-whole-multigrain-aroma-bread-2-soakers-11-seeds

We knew that we would have to try a similar version but bake it DaPmpernickel style which is quickly becoming our favorite bread type – although we love them all .  We stayed with 100% whole grains but dumped the WW portion and subbed rye in its place.

For the liquid we used yogurt whey for much of it while the add ins for seeds, scald and aromatic seeds remained the same since we had divided them in half for the last bake.  We dropped the VWG since not much rise was needed and we added some molasses and barley malt syrup to counter the bitterness of the rye and help with the deep dark crumb we want Dapumpernickels to display when cut.

This time, even though the formula doesn’t show it, we autolysed all of the dough flour with the soaker.  Why we held back such a small amount from the autolyse in the previous bake didn’t make much sense to my apprentice.   So few things make sense to her we as it is, we just chalked this change to another one of her wild whims.  We have also learned that not doing as told  could cause some horrific ankle biting episode.

We subbed a rye sour and a rye YW levains for the poolish and the WW SD levain of the last bake.  We though the rye levains in combination would be more traditional for this kind of bread even though traditions really go through the ringer around here.

This bread worked out very different than the last one.  It was much more sticky due to the rye in place of the WW and it acted like a paste instead of a dough.  We did do 10 minutes of slap and folds and tried our best to get some gluten worked up but it wasn’t having any of it.  Se we treated it like a paste, slap by slap and folding with the add ins to get them evenly distributed and panned the sticky mess lot into (3) cocktail loaf pans to about half full and smoothed the top with a wet teaspoon.

Instead of using tri-color poppy seeds to cover all of them like the last bake, for two of the loaves we used oat bran to cover.   After an hour and a half proofing on the  counter we put them in the fridge for a 12 hour retard.  The next morning they went onto the heating pad for a 2 ¾ hour final proof at 85 F. 

Each breakfast sandwich has 2 - 1/4" slices of DP Aroma bread, not toasted so no butter. One each slice is caramelized Minneola marmalade and 1 slice of aged white cheddar cheese on.  In the middle of each sandwich is 1/2 of a hot sausage paddy and 1/2 a fried hard egg.  Served with home grown and squeezed Minneola orange juice and a strawberry.  Dabrownman's place is one of the few places in the world where this breakfast is occasionally served but you can recreate it in your own kitchen!

28, 29 and 30 slices for the (3) each 6 7/8" loaf.

When the dough had risen near the rim of the pans we covered tightly with aluminum foil and started the reduced temperature over time baking schedule.  Last time we did a pumpernickel style bread we had let it proof over the rim and we wanted to fix that with this bake.  Since these pans were smaller, we lowered the initial start temperature and reduced the baking time too.  Here is the schedule

Pate Maison lunch with cukes, carrot, pickled Thai eggplant, Mexican green rice,  tomato, salad, extra sharp cheddar cheese and a strawberry.

375 F - 30 minutes

350 F - 30 minutes

325 F - 2 hours

235 F - 2 hours

200 F - 2 hours

We checked the temperature at the 3 hour mark and the bread was at 205 F so the rest of the bake time it was just getting itself dried out even though it was still covered.  I suppose you could take it out at the 3 hour mark if you wanted to but I’m guessing it won’t be a dry loaf if baked the full 7 hours – At least it isn’t 10 hours like last the laast DaPumpernickel

We haven’t used this baking schedule before but my Germanic apprentice and resident DaPumpernickel expert said she doesn’t really care how it gets baked as long as it is low, slow and she gets the first bite.  I’m thinking she is still mad she didn't get her way when I didn’t use the German made Romertopf clay baker to bake this bread in like the last bake.

One of the reasons to bake bread like this, besides it tasting terrific, is that the entire house smells fantastic the whole day!  We can already tell that we will love this bread too.  We won’t know for sure until we can cut into it and give it a taste – in a couple of days.  We let it sit in the off oven for 8 more hours before allowing the loaves to cool on a rack.  We wrapped them in a cotton cloth and will let them rest for 32 hours before slicing them.  Stay tuned.

This bread can be sliced 1/8" thick.  I has a powerful, deep and meaty taste.  It is moist, the crumb is open, dark chocolate in color and has chewy bits.  The crust is very dark and chewy.  It is everything you could ever want in a Dapumpernickel  - and a little more!   There really isn't much more to say about it except that I'm going to make breakfast and  see how it works with sausage and eggs.

Formula

One of the things I like about this nice yeasty cake is its versatility. You can fill it with just about anything you can imagine: the lazy amongst us will just spread some berry jelly or apple-sauce, the more adventurous will chop apples, grind walnuts and start mincing cloves. And on top, well, just about anything you can think of. The most popular is a streusel, but I've seen chocolate chips, sprinkles and even whole plums. Me? I like the simple elegance of a chocolate filling and sugar water on top.

I'm not really sure about the origins of this recipe. I got a recipe from my mother who had gotten it from some cooking book. But it doesn't really matter, since I made drastic changes to the original recipe. I altered all of the amounts, and most of the ratios as well. There were some steps that I omitted entirely, and some that I added, and the bake time is about half of what the original recipe called for.

 Day 1

Sponge

• 1/3 cup lukewarm water.
• 1 cup flour
• 1 Tbs yeast

Combine and let sit for 1 hour.

Dough

• 2 cup flour
• 1/3 cup margarine
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 tsp vanilla

Cream the margarine with the sugar. Add the sponge, salt, eggs and vanilla. Mix on low for 2-3 minutes. Gradually add flour until you get a good dough. Mix on medium for 10-12 minutes.
Remove dough, dust  with flour, cover loosely with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge.

Day 2

Take your dough out of the fridge, and let it rest for twenty minutes while preparing the filling.

Filling

• 1/2 cup margarine
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder
• 3/4 cup white sugar

Combine. I had to use my mixer on fast to get the margarine to blend nicely with the other ingredients.

Split the dough into two equal halves. Do the following for both halves.

Roll it out rectangle, about that big. It really depends on the size of your loaf pans. Then spread half the filling over the dough, leaving some edge. I keep trying not to leave any edge at all, but the filling is really hard to work with, and I give up.

Roll your dough up like a jelly-roll, from the short side.

Then twist it around in your hands a couple of times. You need to do this gently but firmly, since you don't want to tear the dough. Put it in a loaf pan and move on to the second piece of dough.

Let the cakes sit while you preheat the oven (350F/180C) and prepare the topping.

Topping

• sugar
• hot water

Mix the ingredients together until all the sugar is disolved, then brush it onto the cakes, covering the top and sides liberally.

Bake for 30 minutes, maybe less. The top of the cake should be hard. Baking it for too long will dry it out, but it's still good.

I took one of these to my parents' house for a family dinner one weekend, and got two of the best compliments a home baker can get:

1. When I brought it in people asked  "You made that? I thought you had bought it!"
2. It was devoured instantly. Everybody took seconds, and some people took thirds.

I've baked this recipe twice before, but this one i wanted to exclude the yeast and extend the bulk fermentation. Actually, this bake was sort of a controlled test that was aimed at verifying whether or not i could bake during my working weekdays, which i'am happy to say: YES, it works!

First day eve, I started feeding my starter one day to creat the levain for the next day;

Second day, when i came back from work i mixed the levain into a dough and retarded the dough after 2.5 hours;

Third day after work, i preshaped, shaped and baked.

i'll have to admit, though, i don't like to split the joy of baking into several days, but the convenience of having bread anyday of the week was my incentive.

One thing worth mentioning: i added 1/2 tsp of diastatic malt to compensate for the extended refrigeration of the dough (21 hours).

Flavor wise, there was no noticeable sourness to this bread, though the sweetness of the raisins may have masked it. It was a good basic bread with sweet pockets of raisins, but nothing more. Could i be too accustomed to wholegrains that i can't appreciate delicate flavors of white-ish breads anymore? Could it be the malt? All i know is that the original recipe with the yeast added had a better overall flavor.

Still, though, i like this bread and loved the idea of being able to have bread almost any day of the week.

Khalid

Made some Italian Easter bread and everybody helped shape it. I'll have to check on revealing the carefully saved family recipe from a likely long out of print cookbook. I can reveal that it has a nice mix of fennel seeds and lemon zest that I haven't seen in other Easter bread recipes making the rounds.

Easter was great visiting with family, but I got home and there was a washer to be fixed and plenty of clothes to be washed. Since I wanted to watch the washer while running a test load I made sure I had everything I needed to pass the time, fresh coffee, and a copy of Clayton's Breads, recently snagged at a library book sale:

  After returning from a great weekend at the first ever The Fresh Loaf get together just outside of Boston I ended up with some left over starters that I had brought with me.  I decided to use most of the corn flour/AP starter along with some AP starter to make my next bread.

Now that Spring has arrived I wanted to get into the mood so I used some chopped tomatoes in this one along with some cilantro roasted onion olive oil, Kamut flour and Turkey Hard Red Wheat flour and some Spelt flour.  I added some mashed potatoes to add some extra softness to the crumb.

I followed my normal procedure below for making the bread and I must say I was very happy with the results.  You can really taste the tomatoes and the specialty olive oil I added.  The nuttiness of the Kamut, Spelt and Turkey flour really combined to make a nice complex flavored bread.  The crumb was nice and open for such a whole grain bread and the potatoes really did help make the crumb nice and moist.

Directions

Starter Build 1 (Corn/AP Starter)

95 grams AP Flour (KAF)

55 grams Corn Flour (Bob's Red Mill)

50 grams Seed Starter at 65% hydration (If you use a 100% hydration starter you need to adjust the water amount and flour amount to compensate)

90 grams Water at room temperature.

Mix all the above ingredients together for about 1 minute and cover with plastic wrap.  Let it sit at room temperature for around 4-8 hours or until the starter has doubled.  I usually do this the night before.

Starter Build 2

75 grams AP Flour

25 grams Corn Flour

75 grams Water at room temperature

Mix all the ingredients into the starter from step 1 until they are incorporated.  Cover with plastic wrap and let it sit for 4-6 hours or until doubled.  You can then refrigerate for up to 1  day or use in the main dough immediately.  Note: You can either use all of this starter or per the recipe below use only 300 grams and combine with 125 grams of a AP starter at 65% hydration.

Main Dough Ingredients

300 grams Kamut Flour

150 grams Turkey Red Hard Wheat Flour

130 grams Whole Spelt Flour

200 grams Mashed Potatoes

130 grams Diced Tomatoes Drained (I used a can and drained very well)

18 grams Seas Salt

28 grams Cilantro, Roasted Onion Infused Olive Oil

415 grams Water

Main Dough Procedure

Mix the flours, and 365 grams of the water together in your mixer or by hand until it just starts to come together, maybe about 1 minute.  Let it rest in your work bowl covered for 20-30 minutes.  Next add the salt, starter (cut into about 7-8 pieces), oil, and tomatoes and mix on low for a minute.  Add the rest of the water unless the dough is way too wet.   Mix on low-speed for another 3 minutes.  Remove the dough from your bowl and place it in a lightly oiled bowl or work surface and do several stretch and folds.  Let it rest covered for 10-15 minutes and then do another stretch and fold.  Let it rest another 10-15 minutes and do one additional stretch and fold.  After a total of 2 hours place your covered bowl in the refrigerator and let it rest for 12 to 24 hours.

When you are ready to bake remove the bowl from the refrigerator and let it set out at room temperature still covered for 1.5 to 2 hours.  Remove the dough and shape as desired.  Place your dough into your proofing basket(s) and cover with a moist tea towel or plastic wrap sprayed with cooking spray.  The dough will take 1.5 to 2 hours depending on your room temperature.  Let the dough dictate when it is read to bake not the clock.

Around 45 minutes before ready to bake, pre-heat your oven to 500 degrees F. and prepare it for steam.  I have a heavy-duty baking pan on the bottom rack of my oven with 1 baking stone on above the pan and one on the top shelf.  I pour 1 cup of boiling water in the pan right after I place the dough in the oven.

Right before you are ready to put them in the oven, score as desired and then add 1 cup of boiling water to your steam pan or follow your own steam procedure.

After 1 minute lower the temperature to 450 degrees.  Bake for 35-50 minutes until the crust is nice and brown and the internal temperature of the bread is 205 degrees.

Take the bread out of the oven when done and let it cool on a bakers rack before for at least 2 hours before eating.

Lucy hard at work

This one isn't very seasonal at the moment, but I love eating it for breakfast. It's so buttery and soft that I really don't think it needs an accompaniment. The recipe is taken from "non solo zucchero vol.II" where it is called pandoro evolution, but it is very similar to the pandoro a sfoglia from Cresci. 

Main impasto - in grams

sweet starter (50% humidity) 45

dry active yeast 3

very strong flour 179

sugar 36

unsalted butter (soft but not melted) 27

egg 107

salt 3.5

half a vanilla pod 

melted butter flavour 0.3 (I've made this before without the flavouring and it tasted exactly the same - but it's in the recipe so I've included it here).

mix all the ingredients together and work it until it forms a smooth, elastic dough. It should be strong and windowpane, but still very slightly sticky. Wrap it in plastic and put it in the freezer. I left it in there for an about an hour, but the book actually recommends overnight at -10C. While this is firming up, I worked on the butter for lamination:

softened unsalted butter 147

icing sugar 39 

mix the two ingredients together thoroughly, then pat into a square, wrap, and put in the fridge to firm up. When both parts are at the right consistency, take 362 of the dough and laminate it as if you were making croissants - 3 simple turns in total, with at least half an hour between each turn. It ought to look something like this when you've finished:

the total weight is 550g.

The difficult bit is then forming this into a ball without breaking the laminations. The book gives absolutely no guidance here whatsoever! I usually fold the ends underneath and then roll it around until it looks more or less spherical. I doubt very much that this is the best method! The dough by this point is really quite resistant to being shaped. 

It looks so tiny in the tin - it's hard to believe that it can possibly fill it!

Leave it to prove at about 27C and at least 60% humidity for about 10 - 12 hours. I left mine for 10 hours. 

I think it could easily have grown even more than this, so next time I might put less dough in the pandoro tin. As it was, it was just about to start spilling over the edge. If my shaping of the ball had been better then I also think this might have helped.

Leave it in the open air for about 30 minutes in order to form a skin on the dough and then it goes in the oven for 30 minutes at 170C. Leave it in the tin for a few hours after cooking before turning out. Mine stuck a little bit - I should have used more flour and butter to grease the form. 

When it's ready to eat (after a few days), dust it in icing sugar and enjoy! 

I was very happy with the crumb on this one - really light and shreddy, with a wonderfully complex buttery taste. It just fell to pieces as I was cutting and eating it. 

David

Compagne is another bread I am recently into...

I just feel so happy when those coupes opened up nicely!!

This is round campagne, and I sprinkled mealy graham flour on the outside.

They gave extra crunchy texture and savory flavor to the crust which I really enjoy.

Here is the oval one!  I like this shot because it looks like A big smile!!  :)

For this oval one I've tried to make it little softer crumb...

whith some cheddar cheese!!

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