I recently saw the Nussknacker (eng: Nutcracker) on Dietmar Kappl's Instagram feed and decided straight away that I wanted to bake it. It comprises a tasty mix of wholemeal spelt and coarse rye flours, leavened with a rye sour and packed full of roasted hazelnuts, almonds, sunflower and hemp seeds.
I chanced upon this recipe for wholemeal rolls on Abel Sierra's wordpress blog. I liked the look of them and thought I would give them a try.
Sadly, Abel's blog no longer exists, but it can still be accessed via The Wayback Machine.
Here is a screenshot with my English translation of the ingredient list:
I decided to do a classic English 4hr sponge:
440g BF 13%
389g H2O
3.1g diastatic malt flour
2.65g IDY
DT 26C
This is the second time I've made these buns and they really are very tasty. I was so pleased with the first batch that I used exactly the same recipe second time around.
The recipe is courtesy of chef Rick Stein. I watched him make the buns in an episode of his recent Cornwall series. I more or less followed his recipe, but, as always, did a few tweaks:
Starting All Over Again
I've been hit by a mystery starter affliction. The starter, levain and dough would rise well and in a timely manner. But when the dough went into the oven, loft and oven spring were poor.
Somehow or other I landed on an Italian web page with a recipe for Colomba di Pasqua. Being nearly Easter, it did seem like a good time to make an Easter dove. Besides, I wanted to send my sister a birthday present, having not seen her for a long, long time - like so many people.
This is the recipe, found on the giallozafferano website. I figured that this must be a well tested recipe, since it has well over a thousand comments! It's a yeasted recipe (I used SAF Gold), but nevertheless, fairly complex.
My Hot Cross Bun Recipe
Here is a hot cross bun recipe I worked on last year, as I felt many recipes I looked at had room for improvement.
It combines elements from two classic commercial breadmaking books (Manna by Walter Banfield published 1938 and Kirkland's The Modern Baker published 1908). Other sources of inspiration were Rossnroller's TFL recipes and a few of my own ideas.
Key points are:
use of a true flying sponge to get the yeast nice and active
Work in Progress
First step: make the brew piece. Russian red rye malt and process detailed here
Here's the result after 5.5hrs in the water bath at 65.5C. The water bath is a cheap sous-vide circulator in a saucepan of hot water.
To be continued....
