bread photos

House sweet dough

This sweet dough is a mixture of two recipes; The brioche recipe from the Tartine bread book, but with the percentages of butter, eggs, and hydration scaled back to similar percentages as  Richard Bertinet's sweet dough (My favorite yeasted basic sweet dough).   I use this dough for most of my basic sweet dough pastries, some of my favorites are Monkey Bread, Cinnamon Rolls, Orange/lemon sticky buns, fake croissants (in this case with chocolate), Fruit braids, etc. 

Details on the starter/poolish: Chad Robertson advocates the use of "young" levian and poolish, with less fermentation time than more "mature" starters, using them right when they float in water.  I admit that I use them whenever it works best with my time schedule usually between 6-8 hours.  The starter is a 100% hydration, fed with a 50/50 mix of AP flour and whole wheat flour.

For people who like Yeast Water, I think this one would translate very well to YW + SD, with YW used instead of poolish (I'm looking at your dabrownman).  Pictures are of cinnamon rolls and fake chocolate croissants, dough also made an apple/cheese braid which is not pictured.  Baked at 375.

200g Poolish
150g Tartine Style starter (100% hydration, Whole wheat/AP)
210g Milk (Scalded and cooled)
50g Butter
50g Sugar
100g (2) Eggs
20g (1) Egg Yolk (retain the white for glazing/frosting)
500g Flour
12g Salt

(music starts) "Daddy's Little Baby Loves Sour-dough Sour-dough;

Daddy's Little Baby Loves Sour-dough Bread" (music ends).

JonnyP

Rediscovering Waldkorn bread this week. I can only take credit for mixing it all up and shaping it as tight as I managed this time around; I'm using a "soezie mix". I'm trying to break down what is in there to make it THAT dark a loaf. Any help in deconstructing is appreciated. And no, alas, the flour formula is not on the bag... Crumb pics to come when the loaf has cooled down enough (after seriously ripping a beautiful bread to pieces I have found the patience to properly cool at last)

My bananas were turning on me, so I decided on a banana bread. with toasted almonds, walnuts, vanilla, cinnamon and a lemon zinged icing. If anyone is interested in the entire recipe, give me a shout. I'll post some crumb pics of this one later as well. The banana bread was baked on the waldkorns residu heat; I'm not wasting my oven heat any more after getting in this year's gas bill...

happy baking every one, greetz from Amsterdam

Freerk

After lurking for a year I've decided to share what I've been up to.

Five Grain Levain

Vermont Sourdough

Pizza

Baguette a l'Ancienne using Don's recipe and Sylvia's wet towel steaming method

I was fairly pleased with La Grigne and the scoring

I do pastry too :)

The couple of folks who actually read my posts may have noticed that I seem to be posting at crazy hours.

I've been working in the Ryukyu (or Okinawa) and although beginning to suffer from baking withdrawal have been absolutely blown away by the beautiful breads in the nearby department store.  Unfortunately, to a Western palate, many of these breads are tasteless - but they sure are beautiful.

I finally bribed a colleague who has both a camera and photography skills to take pictures.

 Here is a shot of a "simple" pain de mie that seems to have been laminated and twisted in some way to produce a wide open, fluffy crumb and a parquet style crust.  If anyone out  there knows precisely how this is done - I would love to know.

These pastries reminded me of my days at the Back Home Bakery (Was that even in this same lifetime?). That is if we had put our inner pastry chefs on steroids.

These sweet little pussy cat buns are almost too cute to eat.  You just want to pinch their little cheeks.

These chocolate breads are an enriched bun only very lightly flavored with chocolate (again, beautiful, but not much flavor.)  The lighter flecks are sweet crispy peanutty things.

That layer on top that looks like extra chocolately goodness is actually just an egg wash.

 There are many more, but we were becoming an embarrassment by acting like insane tourists.  I really wanted to ask if I could spend a week being free labor in the bakery, but my limited Japanese language skills stood in the way.  I tried my normal means of communication (pointing, smiling, and nodding...) to no avail.

I also had the chance to visit a store with a baking factory in the back.  Even on the street we could catch an unusually delicious buttery aroma.  The factory was dedicated to baking little boat shaped tarts filled with purple sweet potato filling.

This machine took a large chunk of pastry dough and measured it out into the tart molds, then tamped it down.

You can see the finished tart shells exiting the machine in the next picture.

This one squirted in the sweet potato filling and it was a hoot to watch it make the little curlicues.

 Then the pastries were baked and a machine delicately lifted them onto a conveyor where gossamer wheels straightened them on the belt in preparation for wrapping.  They are quite delicious and no baker required!

Of course, this isn't all I've done  - but I'm trying to stay "on topic."  I will just say that I haven't had a bad meal since I got here, and as I type I'm watching the tide go out on the East China Sea.

Happy Baking!