Benito's blog

A visit to Fort Lauderdale wouldn’t be the same anymore without visiting with Alan (Alfanso) and his lovely wife.  We spent last evening chatting about life, travels and many other topics and a little bit about bread (actually very little). We were lucky enough to get to enjoy Alan’s famous baguettes.  In this case he had baked a set of Hamelman’s seed SD baguettes that I have always admired in his posts.  Well I can say that they look and taste even better than the photos and descriptions on TFL make them appear.

This loaf was a gift to Alfanso (Alan) and his wife.  We got together for a lovely evening at their place here in Fort Lauderdale last night so I wanted to bring them something different so I came up with the idea to use mashed cooked sweet potato with some cinnamon as a filling for a milk bread.  The baked loaf had some structural issues that made me concerned that it was either overproofed, underbaked (due to the added moisture of the sweet potato) or just too tall to handle its height.

We had some friends over for dinner and had to have some nice soft rolls to go with my chicken with artichoke hearts and sun dried tomatoes.  I decided that I wanted something with rosemary since the chicken dish has rosemary in it.  So I prepared a mashed Russet potato and added rosemary and black pepper to taste.

I am still trying to get used to our oven down here in Florida.  For this bake, I wanted to see how I might add steam to a bake.  I wanted some more sandwich bread, but thought I’d make a loaf that used a tangzhong with milk but without milk in the mix or butter in the dough.  I decided to use olive oil instead for the enrichment.  To add some flavour there is King Arthur whole wheat in the dough and the three types of sesame seeds on the crust.

We are seeing some friends in our building tonight for dinner and I offered to bring some rolls. We are still here in Florida and without my starter so these were made with IDY. I wanted to bring something that wasn’t just a milk bread so decided to add mashed steamed sweet potato to the dough. I couldn’t find purple sweet potatoes anywhere near me so went with the regular orange ones. I didn’t measure the amount of sweet potato that I added. I added it after the dough was well developed after adding the butter/flour paste.

I did not bring my starter with me to Florida.  Instead, I have decided that I would bake using preferments using tiny amounts of IDY.  Today I baked a loaf using a biga.  The main reason I chose a biga is that I want milk to be the main hydrating liquid for this bread rather than water, it is a milk bread after all.  I didn’t do a good job accounting for the humidity of Fort Lauderdale and the formula I wrote up ended up with a dough that was too wet.  I gradually added little bits of flour until it wasn’t so wet.

After I posted my first sourdough Mazanec and Vanocka, I heard from many European bakers on IG who love these breads and they said that they eat them year round that’s how much they are loved.  We leave for Florida in a couple of days, unless we are delayed by the newly forming tropical storm, so I needed to bake another Christmas present, this time for the staff of our building.  With the feedback from the first bake, I decided to make some adjustments to Maurizio Leo’s recipe.

I ran out of bread, hard to believe since I’m semi retired with more time to bake, but it happened.  I found a bit of whole kamut in the back of the closet so that gave me the idea of combining it with some semola rimacinata (semolina) since they are related and both have a great yellow colour.  I decided to try doing a cold retard after shaping.  I’ve never done this with a milk bread that I can recall.  This is the reason for the blisters on the crust, which for this type of bread I’m not a huge fan of.

This year we will be away until just before Christmas.  As a result, I need to do at least some of my Christmas baking before we go.  I’ve been eyeing the mazanec recipe from Maurizio Leo since Easter.  I realize that Mazanec is an Easter bread, but the recipes for Mazanec and Vanocka are so similar and since Vanocka is a christmas bread I thought I would try making these.  The Mazanec seems to be shaped as a boule and given a cross scoring.

This is my first bake using my new Ankarsrum Assistent to develop the dough.  What they say is true, there is definitely a learning curve and I am at the beginning of that slope.  This would usually take 30 mins from start of mix to the end of kneading in the KA mixer, not that I could safely do two loaves though.  With my being totally new to this mixer and wanting to try both the dough hook and the roller, it took me 60 mins!  Much of it was me f’ing around though so I can’t blame the Ankarsrum Assistent.