Benito's blog

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.

These buns are super soft and fluffy get hold up to a fish burger nicely.  The sweet potato gives it a bit of extra sweetness while the tangzhong helps with flavour and freshness.  They are topped with black, white and golden sesame seeds.

This bake used my offshoot of Alan’s starter, a 80% hydration and all whole rye.  The levain was whole wheat and was stiff and sweet.  What is a bit different about this bake was that I used rye for the first time in a tangzhong, this one again has a 1:2 ratio of rye:milk.  I had a bag of sweet potatoes so decided to add mashed sweet potato to this dough.  Being still in Fort Lauderdale I do not have my Ankarsrum Assistent so fully hand mixed this dough.  

Alan’s starter is quite potent and still not getting much of a sour scent to it.  It is living in a ziplock bag in my fridge and I made the stiff sweet levain from it directly without any refreshing and the levain was ready in no time.  I think I’ll figure out how to bring some home and compare it to mine.  Alan if you read this, what is the hydration that you keep your starter?  It is certainly not 100%.