I just unboxed, cleaned and setup my new Ankarsrum Assistent, I’m loving the build quality and this gorgeous orange we picked. I can’t wait to try it out. I plan to bake two Hokkaido milk breads tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll have a glowing review and I hope I can learn to use this quickly with tomorrow’s bake. In the meantime here are the photos.
Having friends over gives me an excuse to bake dessert. Bags of lemons were on sale so I decided to bake a lemon tart. I hadn’t tried lemon curd with chocolate before so decided to bake my chocolate pate sucrée for this tart. Since the curd recipe leaves me with 4 egg whites I decided to make Bravetart’s marshmallow meringue to top the tart and then torch the meringue for a nice finish.
So I’ve discovered that most people prefer white bread to wholegrain, at least it seems that my friends do. So in planning for a dinner party I decided I’d do my milk bun recipe but using only bread flour and no wholegrain other than the rye in the starter. They turned out really really well especially when finished with some melted butter and some Maldon flaked salt.
I find that if I don’t make baguettes often enough I get very rusty. I haven’t made baguettes in about 4 months so was really very overdue. I’ve always thought that epis look really nice and never tried making one, so here is my first effort at an epi. I also hadn’t done a seeded crust in quite some time so that was also overdue.
I’ve just uploaded a new video to my YouTube channel about dough development. Novice bakers might find it useful. In the video I demonstrate some of the techniques I use to develop dough strength. Hopefully someone finds it useful to them.
These are the perfect buns to have with your Thanksgiving dinner which we just had this year in Canada. At 30% whole wheat they have that extra flavour without being too whole wheat for those in your family who don’t like 100% whole wheat breads. The tenderness achieved by the tangzhong, butter and milk make these so soft and fluffy and delicious, everyone will love them.
Two of our close friends have birthdays this month. We decided to host a brunch for them, in part to give me an excuse to bake a challah loaf again. I thought I’d make a couple of changes to Maggie Glezer’s SD challah. Mostly I thought it needed more egg, so I increased the egg from 3 to four and reduced the water to compensate for the 72% of the egg which is water. I needed the challah to make a peach and blueberry strata. Basically this is a type of French toast that you bake in a pan using cubes of the challah.
That’s a mouthful to say and a delicious mouthful to eat. I have just retired from my full time practice of medicine at the end of last week. My colleagues long complained that I didn’t bring enough baking into the office. As you know, it can be challenging to bake during the work week so you can bring it something that is freshly baked. Well since I’m now retired (I’ll return to work part time next year doing locums) I have time to bake during the week.
