Hello,

Here is a great recipe for not to sweet but delicious cinnamon buns.  If anyone else has any good recipes please let me know.  I am looking for something ideally a little flakier than this and more along the lines of a danish spiral, but with a cinnamon filling.  Enjoy the recipe!

Skylar

BBA Cinnamon Buns (adapted from Peter Reinhart)

3.25 oz granulated sugar
.25oz salt
2.75oz butter or shortening (at room temperature)
1 large egg (1.65oz) slightly beaten
1 tsp lemon extract or 1tsp lemon zest
16oz unbleached bread flour or all-purpose flour
2 tsp (.22oz) instant yeast
9-10oz whole milk or buttermilk at room temperature or 1oz dry milk and 8oz water
½ cup cinnamon sugar (6 ½ Tbsp sugar plus 1 ½ Tbsp cinnamon)

Mix together the sugar, salt, and shortening on medium-high speed in an electric mixer with a paddle attachment.  The recipe said to "cream" them, so I mixed them until they seemed smooth and well blended.  I never liked the word "cream", because it always seems so ambiguos as to how thoroughly the mixture should be blended.  If you are using the powdered milk, mix the milk with the sugar, but add the water with the flour and yeast.  Mix in the egg and lemon extract until blended.  Then add the flour, yeast, and milk.  Mix on low speed (or stir by hand) until the dough forms a ball.  Switch to the dough hook and increase the speed to medium, mixing for approximately 10 minutes, or until the dough fairly smooth, tacky but not sticky (I wound up adding a little extra flour to make the dough not stick to my hands completeley.  You may have to add a little flour or water while mixing to achieve this consistancy.  The dough should pass the windowpane test (and it did!) and register 77F to 81F on your fancy little thermometer (I wish I had a thermopen so I wouldn't have to wait a half minute for a reading!)  Lightly oil a large bowl and turn the dough in the bowl to coat with oil to prevent a skin from forming.  Cover the bowl with plastic wrap.  Ferment at room-temp for approximately 2 hours, or until the dough doubles in size.  Mist the counter with spray oil and proceed as follows

Roll the dough out into a rectangle 2/3 inch thick and 14 inches wide by 12 inches long for large buns or 18 inches wide by 9 inches long for small buns.  Don’t roll the dough too thin or it won't be soft and tender like a cinnamon bun should be.  Sprinkle the cinnamon sugar over the dough and roll the dough into a log (I like to roll in towards myself so the finished roll is right in front of me).  With the seam down cut the roll into 8-12 pieces for larger buns or 12-16 pieces for smaller buns.  Place the buns approx ½ inch apart so that they are not touching but are close to one another.  Proof at room temperature for 75 to 90 minutes, or until the buns have grown into one another and have nearly doubled in size.  You can retard the buns in the refrigerator for a couple days supposedly.  I baked them straight away.  Bake the buns at 350F for 20-30 minutes or until they are lightly brown.  Cool the buns in the pan for about 10 minutes and then smear or drizzle the glaze over the top of the buns.  To make the glaze combine: 4 cups sifted 10x sugar with 1 tsp lemon extract or juice and about ½ cup warm milk.  Enjoy the buns!  (Preferably the day they are baked, they stale pretty quickly!)

Notes:
I had to add a bit of extra flour (quite a bit actually) to make the dough workable.  This could be because I used A.P flour versus bread flour, hence lower absorption.

You can put raisins and nuts into your buns!

I used 1% milk versus whole milk.  Is there a difference?  I can’t tell you that, perhaps you can tell me!

I thought this was a great video and information on wild rice!  http://www.cawildrice.com/video.php

Sylvia

I (am very new to bread baking and) want to use the stretch and fold technique that I have been reading about here.  I don’t have a mixer and I want make very wet doughs like for focaccia and ciabatta.   I have done the no-knead method and autolyse and know very well that you can make tasty bread without any kneading whatsoever.  And I am intrigued by the knowledge that whipping the day light out of a dough results in over oxygenation and actually less tasty bread and therefore leaning ever more toward stretch and fold.  

I have not had a chance to read the PR and JH books that describe/discuss this method only the videos and chats on this site.  Is it possible to give some generalized guide lines?

 I am confused about the following:

1)      After you mix in the yeast how do you know how many times you ought to stretch and fold the dough before you let it rest?  Some advice is just once to quite a few times?

2)      How do you decide how long you should let the dough rest before you stretch and fold again? Some advice is as short as 10 mins or up to 30 mins.

3)      How do you know how many cycles of S & F you should do?

4)      How can you tell when the right amount of gluten is developed?                                                          I have a specific question here.  For example in http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/2984/jasons-quick-coccodrillo-ciabatta-bread  or Rose Levy Berenbaum’s sheet foccacia or http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/3621/quick-rustic-ciabatta-pizza-recipe-full-howto-pics it tells you how long to mix with a mixer at a certain speed for a certain length of time and how the dough will suddenly come together.  Not having seen the dough prepared with a mixer is there some way to tell from S & F that you have achieved the same?

5)      And importantly why can’t I just do a bunch of S & Fs all at once (as kneading used to be) let the dough rest and not hover over it?  Why are the intermediate rest periods important?  Would it not work if I did a bunch of S & Fs and then let the dough rest?

6)      Related to (5) can I simplify this process in some way and do S & F only once or twice?

7)      And then is doing S & F in the bowl just as good as taking the dough out on a counter?

8)      Can you actually over do the S & F and ruin your bread?

Last night, just to see, I mixed water and flour at 100% and 113% hydration and let it autolyse.  The dough(s) did firm up quite a bit after the 1 hour autolyse.  I gave it a few S & F in the bowl with a rubber spatula and that seemed to move things along a little further.  I just couldn’t tell if the gluten was developed as the recipes described they should be.  Would having added yeast changed things?  Those goops are in the fridge.  I will add some yeast to them tonight and see where that takes me.

Well!  This is a long post.  Some of these questions must be so naïve but I hope some them are relevant.

Thank you for any input!

K.

hi, i recently came across a nice segment all about bread. watched this on the gourmet.com site, part of their diary of a foodie series. also, interested to see richard bertinet's episode with ruth although i think i have to wait awhile for international viewing.

this made me realise how much i really love to watch anything about bread really and so was wondering if anyone out there knows of any othe interesting videos to watch on the net and can maybe post links. im not the best at 'surfing' the net, so i thought i'd  post this and maybe others could benefit from the feedback too.

i remember once watching an interesting show on the australian sbs channel about a woodfired bakery in the country. sorry i know that sounds so vague, will try to come up with more details. in the meantime il leave it to you....

thanks heaps, appreciate it!

High I am new here and this is my very first post!  Extremely informative and vibrant forum, I am so glad I found it.  I have been learning so much by browsing, at least what can be learned by reading.    

I am so new to bread baking that I just don’t get this.  All recipes say proof the shaped loaf till it is twice the size.  How on earth do you know what is twice the size?  Some loaves are round and flattened, some are round and high.  Some are baguettes or batards.  Then there are the focaccias and ciabattas.  How do you tell when the loaf has doubled?  It’s not so easy to take out a ruler or measuring tape and estimate the volume for such shapes.  And we all know the trouble with over-proofing or under-proofing.  And temperatures and other environmental conditions are so variable for the home baker that the suggested times can be quite off.  I can guess at the unshaped dough if I use a graduated clear container but the shaped loaf?  And going by my 5th grade geometry eyeballing volume can lead to great errors. 

So please give me some tips how you guys do this.  I am interested in the above kind of shapes.

Many,  many  thanks.

K      

Hi,

I am facing a problem with BBA's Marble Rye swirl design.

After mixing the dark and light mixtures and fermenting them for 90 minutes, I created two A4 size sheets of dough and then put the dark rye sheet over the light one.

I rolled the two sheets together and put them in the tin pan, covered with plastic.

After about 45 minutes of final fermentation the top light rye layer got cracked and torn by the layers of dought under it, pushing it upwards.

The bread comes out very airy and tasty, but the crust is all torn apart.

I baked this bread twice, and it happened in both cases.

I thought of creating my own cut to ease the pressure and let it rise easily, but I am not sure if this is the best way to solve the problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Shai

Hello,

This post is follow-up to my earlier posts on bagel baking.  I now have much more success with my bagel baking.  I now produce much more rounded and delicious bagels thanks to the Reinhart recipe.  A question for the bagel experts out there, however, is how come my bagels develop blisters on thier crust?  Some sources I have read say that these blisters are a good sign, however, I spent some time observing the operations of a professional bagel bakery today, and I noticed that thier bagels have a perfectly smooth skin with no sign of blisters.  What could be causing these blisters on my bagels?  They aren't bad, they just aren't like I am used to in the shops.  Could the be caused by the preferment from the Reinhart recipe?  Or perhaps it is the fact that the only instant yeast I have access to is rapid rise?  I would appreciate any thoughts!

Skylar

i was watching  better homes and gardens last night and saw fast ed make the nicest sweet bread. you can watch the video on the yahoo 7 site. he made cinnamon babka. you can also find a beautiful potato foccacia on the same site made by karen. i found these two recipes wonderful and can't wait to try them.

 http://au.video.yahoo.com/network/100000090

you can find it under fast ed's food or just type in cinnamon babka in the search section.

would love to know what you all think of these videos

Hi everyone!

Does anyone know where i can get info on a malt products used in baking? This website has been a help but i could do with more information.

Thank you

Brian

I've dried and frozen some dried starter as a back up that I have.  My question is, has anyone ever froze the whole Mother in it's container?  I'm going to be gone for close to a month and I don't have anyone here to feed my 2 starter. 

Peggy