I’ve seen these Dutch Babies before but never had one let alone made one. Most of the ones I have seen are sweet, I decided to make this savory one for us tonight for dinner. It was quite easy and delicious. It is sort of like a pancake but made more like a Yorkshire pudding in a way.
We will be visiting friends tomorrow, and I wanted to bring a loaf of bread. We also ran out of bread, don’t know how that happens 😂, so decided to bake two loaves. I rarely bake more than one loaf. Since one of my Pullman pans is in Fort Lauderdale, I prepared the dough and after bulk fermentation divided it, shaped the one loaf, and cold retarded the other dough overnight to bake today. This worked out quite well.
We were out of bread again since we’ve been away so much and I haven’t had the time to bake as much as I like to. I also didn’t have much time to plan and do something different. When I realized that I hadn’t done a 100% whole wheat bread in a while I pulled out my tried and true 100% WW SD Hokkaido Milk bread formula which is now onto a 4.0 version. I have to say that this is one of my best bakes in sometime. Usually there are somethings that could have been better with each bake, some tweak that I’d so next time.
I haven’t baked in quite a while with the traveling that we have recently been doing. I was tasked with bringing rolls for our family dinner at my sister’s new place up in the Muskokas and this was going to be our first visit since she and her husband moved there. Everyone is a fan of milk rolls but I wanted to make them slightly different than I have for dinners past so added red Leicester cheese to the dough and the top of the rolls. They came out pretty well although I have have underdeveloped the dough somewhat limiting the oven spring.
I just baked this today and I think it is my favourite pan bread that I’ve made so far. I absolutely love the crumb, nicely open for a pan loaf. The flavour from the toasted walnuts, toasted sesame seed oil, touch of honey and the 20% whole spelt are just fabulous. There is a mild tang since I did not use a stiff sweet levain to suppress the acidity, but instead used a regular stiff levain. This bread is so soft yet the crust is pretty thin and crisp.
I’m working on improving my spelt baguettes by slowly increasing the hydration 1% at a time trying not to overshoot and have a disaster LOL. At only 9% of the total flour, whole spelt should give some good whole grain flavour while also helping the dough’s extensibility. Also this should help achieve an open crumb which is quite desirable for baguettes. I don’t think I’m quite there yet with this bake. I also had some trouble releasing one of the baguettes from the couche causing some degassing.
I’m am behind on my posting here. I baked this loaf a while back and it is already gone. I recently found ground black sesame seeds at a local Asian market, this saves me the trouble of grinding the seeds myself. I love adding the ground seeds to the dough as it gives the crumb a lovely grayish colour and a great black sesame flavour to the bread. If you cannot find already ground black sesame seeds, then I would use my coffee grinder to grind the seeds. You’ll just need to clean the grinder before and after use.
I’m back at work for a couple of weeks covering a few of my old colleague’s practices for them while they are on vacation. Working interferes with my baking and other retirement activities but at least I make a bit of extra money and keeps my mind fresh. I wanted a quick bake of something to bring to work with me, it seems it is expected now, so a quick loaf/cake came to mind. I was in Chinatown the day before and picked up a couple of pounds of purple sweet potato with this loaf in mind.
This past winter I figured out my miscalculation on the salt content of my miso when I realized that I based the salt on the dry weight of the beans when in fact I needed to account on the hydrated weight. This loaf achieves a nice mild yet distinct flavour of my homemade 1 year fermented red miso. To balance the flavour I have added a small amount of my friend’s wild flower honey from their beehives. Other than the addition of the honey, this is otherwise a lean bread since no fats were added.
Since my last two loaves were for family members I am low on bread again. I toasted some walnuts and decided to combine it with pepitas (pumpkin seeds) for a loaf. I love the flavor you get from the addition of nuts and seeds to bread. For this loaf I baked it once the total rise was 140%. I use an aliquot jar to measure this, a company called BillieOlive makes them. I’ve doing testing of their aliquot jars for them and most recently, they made a new one that has markings to allow me to measure over 150% rise. These are very useful.
