Blogs

Inspired by Karin's (hanseata) pan de muerto, I took her recipe, adapted it, and transformed it into a disaster---well, not entirely. I was content with the shape, the crust, and the crumb, but the flavour was... Bleh! Ick! Eww! And other interjections denoting disgust.

I was captivated... lured... by the traditional figure of the "Bread of the Dead", a boule grasped by a single hand, with segmented but bulbous fingers, topped by a spherical tear drop. Even more so, I was enamoured by the connotations and imageries associated with the pan de muerto. It's simply beautiful.

... But I had to deviate.

In no way do I mean to disrespect the customs or culture of Mexico, but my experimental thoughts were spurred and it had to come into fruition. I wanted a dead cactus.

Behold, the product of my perhaps twisted imagination: Pan de Muerto Cactus (Bread of the Dead Cactus).

Similar to the traditional pan de muerto, the bones remained but the tear drop was replaced by a withered (and burnt) flower. Moreover, the boule was sheathed by rows of thorns, made by tediously cutting the dough with scissors.

Keep this prickly monstrosity away from small children and pets. For a loaf of bread, it's rather hazardous. Heck, if you're desperate enough, it could be used as a non-threatening weapon.

Adapting Karin's recipe, I added rye flour and spices (i.e., ground anise, cloves and cinnamon), threw in a morsel of orange zest,  substituted the sugar with palm sugar, and replaced the orange flower water with brandy...

BIG mistake! 

The brandy overpowered the subtle taste notes of the cactus bread and proclaimed itself as its dominant flavour. Do you know that feeling after imbibing a shot of hard liquor---like hot fumes thrusting itself from the pits of your stomach, through your throat and onto the back of your eyeballs? To a much, much lesser degree, that's what I felt after ingesting a piece of the Dead Cactus.

Perhaps contributed by the addition of a "water roux" or "tangzhong", the crumb was rather soft and springy---just what I was aiming for.

I'm not disappointed with my results. No, not completely. I've several reasons to be content, actually: For the first time I bulk retarded a dough; I discovered the smooth and well rounded caramel taste of palm sugar; I properly cooked a water roux; and I learned that prolonged proofing and convection baking helps retain the intricate shape of a bread loaf.

Thanks for dropping by and reading my post. I wish you a better bake than I. :)

Zita 

My wife is having a girls weekend in Barcelona with her friends, so the kids and I are drowning our sorrows in dough. This 10% rye boule was made with a combination of techniques from David Snyder's San Joaquin Sourdough and txfarmer's 36 hour baguettes. Crispy, crunchy crust and soft but chewy crumb with medium sour tang. Very satisfying.

Recipe and story at Wandering Bread

-Ryan

Yesterday I had the chance to do a bake of Eric's Favorite Rye following Floyd * Baking Eric's Favorite Rye * and Andy's suggestion *here* that it would be a nice way to honor the memory of Eric Hanner. Eric was a great guy and friend so of course I wanted to make any sort of contribution I could towards that. Reading through Eric's formula and procedure for the first time in quite a while I remembered why I'd never baked his bread before....caraway...lots of it! Nevertheless, this bread was going to be made, I'd just dial the spice back a bit to suit my tastes. Other than that I wanted to stick as closely as possible to the original formula and procedure and produce what I feel is a classic deli style rye bread. In the original post http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/5076/eric039s-fav-rye#comment-25620 Eric leaves no doubt as to how he intended to use the bread, namely for corn beef sandwiches and I'm sure his home cured and smoked pastrami as well. I can tell you that now I've made the bread and made a CB sandwich from it I'd be hard pressed to come up with a better bread to use for stacking warm slices of corned beef on top of. In fact I couldn't. This is incredibly tasty bread, with a soft but slightly chewy crumb and crust, and loaded with flavour from the preferment, the onions, and yes the caraway. I like  Eric's Rye so much I've decided it will be the bread for my corned beef and pastrami sandwiches from here on. 

Thanks Pal!

Cheers,

Franko

A few notes about the formula (below) and procedure:

As mentioned I stayed as close as possible to the original formula and procedure, trying to make the bread as Eric outlined in the link above. There were a few minor exceptions however that I want to mention.

• Because of scheduling the preferment was left for longer than the 8 hours indicated in the original procedure, going for 12 hours total. The bread didn't taste overly sour to me, just slightly tangy.

• The onions used were fresh, slightly caramelized on low heat in a covered pan. I don't have anything against dried onions, I simply didn't have any on hand.

• Before the final mix the bread flour and water had a 40 minute autolyse.

• The caraway was reduced to 1.8% from 2.5%

• The baking temps and time varied slightly in that I started the bake (with steam) at 450F/232C for 10 minutes, reducing the heat to 385F/196C for the remaining 25 minutes. The bread was baked to an internal temperature of 210F/98.8C.

Other than the autolyse I can't think of anything that would improve upon the original procedure that Eric wrote up, so as a good friend of mine says "not for changing!"

Link to working spreadsheet *Here*

We are visiting our son in Las Vegas for Thanksgiving, and I'm introducing him to sourdough baking. This has entailed three challenges. The first is the demands of baking with a houseful of family. This is wonderful, but the scheduling complexity is greater by several orders of magnitude. The second is that Joel does not have a mixer. This is a very minor issue, but it does require adapting some recipes I am accustomed to making with machine mixing. The third challenge is baking in a gas oven. This is a new experience for me and, from my reading of TFL topics over the years, a challenge to many.

Yesterday, Joel and I made a large loaf of my San Francisco-style Sourdough. I followed my usual formula (see My San Francisco Sourdough Quest, Take 4) with the following changes:

1. Mix the flours and water in a bowl with a spatula and autolyse for 30 minutes.

2. Add the salt and levain and mix well using stretch and fold in the bowl.

3. Stretch and fold in the bowl x 2 at 30 minute intervals.

4. Stretch and fold on the bench x 2 at 30 minute intervals.

5. Ferment without molestation for another hour.

6. Pre-shape and shape one 1 kg batard. 

7. Proof for 2 hours en couche.

8. Bake at 450 dF for 35 minutes steaming for the first 15 minutes using Sylvia's method (towels in loaf pans, saturated with boiling water.)

Here are some results (I couldn't get a photo before Joel had cut the loaf after cooling.):

Even using two towels in loaf pans, the crust was rather dull, suggesting sub-optimal oven steaming. However, oven spring was satisfactory. The crumb structure was more open than usual and a bit less chewy. I judge it better than acceptable. Note that I did not retard the loaves, so the flavor was minimally sour but very nice - more like a good French pain au levain than a San Francisco Sourdough.

The results were good enough to warrent baking more hand-mixed SFSD's after I get home to my own oven.

I hope everyone had as nice a Thanksgiving as I did.

David

Every year, we spend Thanksgiving in Palm Springs, California with my boyfriend's parents. The weather there is warm and there are many blue, cloudless days to enjoy. We decided to do an alternative Thanksgiving dinner this year without turkey, cranberries, pumpkin pie, or any of the usual fixings. Instead, we had a nice rib roast, which coasted to 120 degrees F slowly inside a 200 degree oven.

Instead of dinner rolls, I opted to make epis using Hamelman's baguettes with pate fermentee formula. The dough was divided into three 500 gram pieces, which resulted in three very fat baguettes, as they had to fit onto a half size sheet pan. While the kitchen is quite spacious, my boyfriend's parents aren't bakers, so I had to do without a bench scraper or a baking stone - in the grand scheme of things, only a minor inconvenience.

For dessert, I made some apple cinnamon rolls with Glezer's Baking Team USA Sweet Dough formula. Instead of spreading butter on the rolled out rectangle of dough, I used a thick layer of apple butter and sprinkled cinnamon sugar on top. The result tastes like apple pie in cinnamon roll form. I highly recommend it. Plus, you can justify eating more than one if you tell yourself that this is a lower-fat version that cuts down on the butter content.

Here are the almost-proofed rolls. It took almost seven hours to fully rise.

After coming out of the oven, they were drizzled with some maple glaze: a couple tablespoons of maple syrup, powdered sugar, and cream.

This'll feed us for breakfast for a couple more mornings. I hope all of you had wonderful Thanksgivings. I look forward to seeing everyone's holiday baking in the coming month.

A while ago, I tried to make a loaf that resembled one of my favorites, Della Fattoria's Rosemary-Meyer Lemon bread.  It turned out pretty well, although it didn't exactly measure up to my memory of the bread.  On my last flour run to Central Milling in Petaluma, I decided to make a slight detour and stop at the Della Fattoria bakery to remind myself what it tasted like before I attempted to make it again.

It was a disappointment.  My memory was probably clouded, but it was nothing like I remembered it.  The crust was soft, the crumb was dense as if it had little oven spring, and the taste was generally flat.  It seemed as if they tried to squeeze in just one more bake in their WFO before it cooled too much, but the timing was off.  Or maybe, now that I am more happy with my own bread baking, I just like the taste of what I make better. One thing that I learned, though, was that their bread included olive oil, something that I missed the first time.

I decided to make another attempt at a Rosemary-Meyer Lemon bread of my own.  I modified the sourdough recipe I have been using lately (already a modification of David's SFSD).  Instead of spelt flour, I used 10% rye.  The addition of 4% extra virgin olive oil changes the flavor to something reminiscent of a focaccia, but the crumb is more sourdough-like.  The results were pretty satisfying.

My standard starter is 100% hydration, wheat only starter.  It is fed with Central Milling Artisan Baker's Craft (ABC) flour and is refrigerated between bakes.  Before use it is warmed to RT and fed at least twice in 24 hours until very active.  For the final build I used about 11.5B-% rye and kept the hydration at 77%.  The overall hydration is 67%.  Just after scoring I sprinkled some Maldon salt (the flakey kind) into the spreading scores and peeled into the oven.

It has a nice sourdough tang, and the flavors of the rosemary and the lemon are evident but not overpowering.  The crust is dark golden and chewy.  I tried to avoid a very bold bake by slightly lowering the temperature because it might overwhelm the lemon.  The formula for this bread is:

I have become fond of using bran instead of corn meal or semolina on the peel to transfer loaves into the oven after learning about it for Genzano Country Bread in Local Breads by Daniel Leader.

Here are some photos of the crumb.  The loaf was very airy and much less dense than it seemed considering the size of bread.  The mouth feel was a bit less creamy than I was looking for, and the sourdough tang was too much for the other flavors, so no doubt there will be another iteration.

San Francisco is having a very warm fall this year.  After the rains in the early part of the week, it has been warm and sunny.  When I went to pick the lemons for the bread, the buzzing of bees was all around, no doubt responding to the wonderful fragrance of the blossoms.  I managed to capture one of our fertilizing friends starting the 2013 crop of lemons.

Thanks for reading.

-Brad

My Daughter’s summer kitchen apprenticeship with my other apprentice seems to have stuck.  She recently made Thai Green Curry Chicken for her boyfriend, - from memory and she quickly impressed Ole Dad with her remembering how to do French slap and folds and stretch and folds on her Thanksgiving rolls that she is always in charge of making for dinner.   

She also is in charge of the gravy since she is the Gravy Queen and this year’s was the best yet and she decided to not put a splash of cognac in to start the de-glazing – no wine either!  Who knew gravy could be so good without either?

Look at those yellow specks from Toady Tom's Toasted Tidbits !

We made up this recipe as we went along.  After we scraped the small polish plastic tub down thoroughly to make the last bread for the stuffing, we put some more flour and water in the tub hoping the leftovers would be enough to start a new batch of polish.   24 hours of counter fermenting later, it was bubbling and ready to go.

We decided to make 8 rolls of 100 g each and wanted the polish to be 15% of the final dough.  We used 5 g of Toady Tom’s, Tasty, Toasted Tidbits for some extra flavor and brown speckles, 25 g of WWW flour, 25 g of butter, 2% salt and 72.2% hydration.

The final exam Bakers percentage test question was:  If the butter was 20% water and using equal parts of cream and water for the liquid, how much AP and Bread flour were required if the AP flour was 3 times as much ad the bread flour and how much cream and water were used?

Yep the mini put some blisters on these rolls.

We hear that professional bread baking instructors use questions like this for their students even though they aren't allowed to beat them for answering incorrectly like the old days and private instructor’s still can today…..  The trick follow up question was, if we would have remembered to put milk in for the water portion of the liquid, added 10g of potato flakes,  1 egg and 10g of honey in to make them more soft roll like, instead of french bread like,  how many grams of extra milk or flour would you have to add to keep the hydration the same?

Very nice french bread but not really the soft rolls we usually enjoy.  Great with butter and jam though . My wife said they would make fine croutons or bread crumbs and my daughter said she is making biscuits next holiday in a month or so :-)

Daughter's French slap and fold tutorial....hard to believe it became that beautiful dough ball.

We didn't have time for an autolyse because the turkey, that my furrier apprentice was in charge of, was going to be done in 5 hours - so time was as short as her legs.   After mixing everything together, my daughter got right into a good rhythm of French slap and folds for 10 minutes. 

Next thing you know the dough was resting in a plastic covered bowl for 30 minutes before a set of S&F’s were done and it was back in the bowl for 1 1/2 hours of fermenting after once again impressing with her boule shaping and skin tightening techniques. 

The dough was divided into 8 pieces.  6 of the dough balls were divided again into two pieces.  The remaining 2 large 100g pieces were folded and then free formed into rolls on parchment and the other, smaller pieces were used to make 6 rolls in a muffin tin - 2 to a tin opening.  Then they were to proof for a couple of hours and be ready to bake.

Sadly, the increasingly de-focused appearing apprentice somehow managed to get the really big chicken done 1 1/2 hours early.  This was probably through faulty calculations that did not require the actual calculus poorly used - if not totally incorrectly applied.

The other college educated apprentice’s fine rolls were no where near proofed and would not be ready for the mini oven’s blistering heat until after the Thanksgiving dinner dishes were done.

They were eventually baked at 350 F in the mini oven for 8 minutes with steam and the baked for another 15 minutes at 350 F, convection this time.  We rotated the rolls every 5 minutes to make sure that they baked up evenly brown.  They sure puffed themselves up well once they hit the steam 

Thankfully, we have Thanksgiving Dinner all over again the next day, usually a Friday for some reason, as a bizarre, if totally fulfilling, as well as, filling, tradition started by my Great, Great, Great, Granny C now deceased neigh on 150 years.

The Ozark Mountains have never been the same since Granny C died and was buried at Dooley’s but Uncle Jed, Ellie Mea and Jethro were all better for her lording over and caring for them and the rest of us wouldn't even be here without her either.  So the rolls will be half polished off tonight in the Thanksgiving Dinner After.

When I went to freeze half the rolls last night, I noticed that 1 was missing and it is hard to freeze half of 7 without making a mess of one of them.   I suspected the badly calculating, if cute, apprentice managed to sneak a taste of the missing when I saw her licking her chops and sticking her tongue out at me in her ‘that was delicious’ grin.

So we won’t be able to take a look at the inside or have a taste till later tonight but I’m guessing they are pretty good from the look on Lucy’s face.

Happy Thanksgiving to all Fresh Lofian’s everywhere. 

This is very much my take on Eric's formula.   I don't like dried onions, but I love fried onions.   I used my liquid rye sourdough, and it ended up as 30% pre-fermented flour.   There is no added baker's yeast, and the hydration is 70%.   I used an Organic white bread flour in the final dough.   Here is the formula:

Eric’s Favourite Rye

Rye Sour Refreshment

Method:

• Build the sour according to the schedule.
• Chop and fry the onions in olive oil and allow to cool
• Combine all the materials for mixing, and use a hook attachment, mixing on first speed for 3 minutes.   Scrape down the bowl and mix a further 5 minutes on second speed.   DDT 28°C
• Ferment in bulk for 2½ hours, with 3 S&F, every half hour.
• Scale, divide and mould round.   Rest covered for 15 minutes.
• Final shape and proof 1½ hours.   Use couche or bannetons
• Score tops and bake in wood-fired ovens
• Brush with Corn Starch Glaze.   Cool on wires

I've also been making lots of mince pies, and a rather nice Banana Bread flavoured with vanilla, fruit and nuts too.

Some photos:

For an all-round great guy

Best wishes

Andy

It has been over a week with the stollen being wrapped in cotton and sealed in its tin coffin where the back porch would be if we had one.  Instead we have a covered patio.  So we took it out, leaving its sister to ripen until the next Holiday and decided to gussie it up some to be traditional - a non traditional Brownman trait.  Here it is naked but looking like a million dollars  on a pretty 50 cent Goodwill Stollen Plate.

Then we buttered it up with a pastry brush.

Then, taking a cue from a fine Fresh Lofian Baker suggestion, gmabaking,  we decided to make a lemon juice and powdered sugar glaze to sprinkle off a spoon for decoration.

Then to get back to the traditional stollen page we dusted it with some powered sugar to make it look like the first time it has ever snowed at the Brownman AZ abode.

Then it was time to slice it open and see if it was as festive on the inside as the outside.

The snow was melting fast in the hot AZ desert but is sure was purdy on the inside.

It tasted wonderful and a grateful shout out goes to nellapower for her original Dresden Stollen recipe that was used as the basis for this version of Not So Stollen.  The citrus peel, pistachio nuts and snockered fruits really come through.  The lemon /sugar drizzle was especially nice too thanks to gmabaking.  Not at all as heavy as a fine English fruit cake or a German one like my apprentice.   Can't wait to see what the sister will look and taste like in about another 4 weeks or so. 

Served with some cold French Silk ice cream and a little chocolate sauce.

Can being sealed in a tin and subject to the 40 F to 75 F daily AZ temperature fluctuations really be good for Not So Stollens?

Here is a link to the original Not So Sollen post if yu want the recipe and methods:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/30996/not-so-stollen

And our choice for a perfect Not So Stollen accompaniment - a Not So Champagne Cupcake Prosecco

Hey y'all, I don't have time to post the recipies but I just wanted to give a big happy Thanksgiving to everyone here on TFL! Hope you all are eating well today, we certanly are...

Apple and sweet potato. 

-Ryan