Benito's blog

For appetizers before dinner tonight I wanted to have some bbq pork gua bao and pork shrimp and chive dumplings.  This was a second try at sourdough gua bao and finally successful.  I’m not sure why the previous attempt at this didn’t work without the hit of IDY because this time the only real change was the addition of sweet potato.  The gua bao will get filled with bbq pork after re-steaming just prior to serving so the filling isn’t in these photos.

So this is the big weekend where I have to have the three layer tropical carrot cake ready.  I baked the cake on Thursday, once cooled fully wrapped in plastic wrap and refrigerated until this morning.  Today I made the frosting and iced and decorated the cake.  The orange stuff on top is candied orange zest.  My cake carrier unfortunately is a bit to short for this decorated cake so some of the frosting at the center got smooshed.  I would increase the frosting by 50% so I’d have more than enough next time.

I like to tinker with my formulas over time.  I haven’t done a country sourdough in a while and wanted to try it using a stiff levain.  I kept the hydration to a comfortable 76% since I haven’t done this style of a bread in quite a while so didn’t want to go crazy high.  

I am still working on my steamed buns.  Today I prepped to try again with a new sourdough gua bao recipe.  I’ve added a tangzhong to make the flavour more complex and increase the hydration without making the dough handle like a higher hydration.  There is also some vegetable oil to help with moisture and tenderness.  I have kept the baking powder in the recipe since almost all the recipes I’ve seen have either baking powder or baking soda to help reduce any sourness, I’m not sure that it is necessary or not.

I was working on a SD version this morning but something went wrong, I suspect I measured the water incorrectly and added way too much.  When I realized my error I started a second batch, but since I had no levain ready it was IDY to the rescue.  I’m glad I made the second batch, other than an issue of tearing of the dough during one coil fold where I wasn’t gentle enough it turned out just fine even with the increased hydration to 110%.  Another change was that I did final proof with a couche.

I felt like having fish burgers so decided to make buns for the fish.  I’ve had some luck with using potato so decided to add some mashed potato to my milk bread for buns.  Both the potato along with the tangzhong should made very soft buns.

I love baking challah breads so whenever we host a brunch recently it has given me an excuse to bake another challah in order to make a strata.  Strata for those unfamiliar with it is essentially a way of making French toast for the masses and somewhat like a bread pudding.  It is best that the challah is a couple of days old and a bit firm.  In fact, to have a firmer challah I particularly like using 50% WW for the challah used to make a strata.

I have a big birthday for my partner to plan.  So part of that is to bake one of his favourite cakes, carrot cake.  You will notice that baking cakes isn’t something I do very often, in fact I probably bake fewer than one per year.  So I thought it would be prudent to do a test bake and ensure that the recipe I’m doing tastes good and that I can turn out a decent cake.  I hope to make this a three layer cake and decorate it better, although my decorating skills aren’t that great.

My family has a lot of birthdays from December to January.  My mother’s is one of them so we are having her over for brunch this weekend.  My favourite thing to make for brunch is a strata, I’ve made a few now and they are always tasty.  One thing I should do but haven’t is bake the challah a couple of days ahead so it can stale a bit.  So I decided I’d bake a slight variation of challah by adding the zest of half an orange to my sourdough challah 50% whole wheat.

Ilya recently started a thread linking to Martin Philip’s recipe on the King Arthur website for a IDY Pan de Cristal.  I’ve always wanted to try baking this unique bread and I’m glad that I have now.  I believe most recipes for this bread have some olive oil in them, so I added that.  Also rather than mixing all the water at once, I bassinaged the water gradually.  I used my Ankarsrum Assistent to mix since I am still learning to use it and want to get as much experience as possible.  It does an awesome job with bassinage.