Benito's blog

Did you know that the price of pecans is much less here in the south compared with in Canada?  So I decided I’d try making pecan sticky buns that I’ve seen but never eaten.  To bring a bit of Canada to them I’ve added maple syrup to the topping.  The rest of the bun is pretty standard cinnamon rolls.  I’ve used my usual stiff sweet levain to keep the sourness in check.  I’m still fully hand developing the dough so decided to try an experiment.

I’ve always loved the appearance of a fougasse but had never baked one.  Since Mr. And Mrs. Alfanso are going to be our guests tonight and I know how Alan loves crust, I decided it was time to bake a fougasse.  We love Kalamata olives so decided that my fougasse would have chopped Kalamata olives and oregano in it.  I found this recipe in Maurizio Leo’s new book The Perfect Loaf and got it into a spreadsheet.  I also made modifications to the method based on what I thought would work well.

We are hosting Alfanso (Alan) and Mrs. Alfanso tonight for dinner for the first time at our apartment here in Fort Lauderdale.  I wanted to bake a nice sunny pie and had this one saved for sometime that I hadn’t made.  I have seen both grapefruit and lemon lime variations of this pie in the past and since I had some limes still decided upon the lemon lime version.  I believe one of the aspects of this pie that make it an Atlantic Beach pie is the choice of crust.  I’ve seen both saltine and Ritz Cracker crusts for these pies and chose the Ritz Cracker version.

Although I’ve been baking quite a bit of bread down here in Florida, I hadn’t baked any sandwich bread in some weeks so we were out.  I wanted to use up some of my King Arthur Whole Wheat flour, I had purchased a bag in the fall but haven’t used that much of it yet so decided to make a 100% WW sandwich loaf.  For this bake of my Hokkaido milk bread I have increased the tangzhong to 20% and kept the hydration of it at 200% using milk of course. The rest of the formula was adjusted to keep the hydration and other ingredients the same.

I’ve been making mostly all white flour breads while down here this visit in Florida.  That has been because most of the baking has been for dinner parties and I never know if guests will appreciate whole grains in their bread. So for this bake I decided to sneak a bit of KA WW into the dough, 20%.  This shouldn’t affect the softness of the rolls significantly and with the cheddar cheese both in and on the rolls I figured that they wouldn’t be able to taste the WW much at all.  I decided to put 6 g of shredded cheddar cheese inside each roll.

We had another dinner party for a few of our friends last evening.  For dessert I decided to make another graham crust pie since the last one turned out so well.  I reduced the sugar in the graham crust recipe down from 50 g to 20 g.  I had read somewhere that the sugar was necessary for the structure of the crust so I was hesitant to eliminate it completely.  Having now tried only 20 g I think I could eliminate this additional sugar completely.

I’ve been sharing many of my bread bakes with our friends who live in our building here in Fort Lauderdale this winter.  So when having them over there is pressure to come up with good bread to go with the meal.  I’ve already posted the dessert that followed the Artichoke Chicken dish I prepared for dinner.  So the bread needed to go well with the flavours of the dish.  The chicken dish has rosemary in it so I decided to try doing an herbed garlic sourdough rolls recipe with rosemary and thyme as the herbs.

We are still enjoying the Florida warmth down here in Fort Lauderdale.  Since we arrived there has been rain only one day and there might have been one cloudy day at most.  It has been sunny days after sunny days, I’m not complaining.

I’m still down in Florida for almost another two months. I felt like baking something sweet so I thought that oranges would be a good way to celebrate Florida. I have posted about my sweet roll before, this bake adds orange zest to flavour each component of the rolls, the dough, filling and glaze. I added a hint of cinnamon so that the flavour wasn’t too one note. I don’t have a stand mixer here in Florida so I fully developed the dough by hand. It actually required 1000 slap and folds!

I’ve been enjoying using Alan’s starter for my baking here in Florida.  I have made an offshoot and I’ve fed it with whole rye.  For this bake I used the rye offshoot starter to build the levain.  My intention was to make the tangzhong with whole wheat but accidentally used King Arthur bread flour so the whole wheat in this recipe is from the 20% in the stiff sweet levain.