Benito's blog

Time for pizza dinner again.  I’ve gone back to all purpose flour and spelt to achieve a more open crumb.  I added a cold retard overnight for convenience, extensibility and more flavor in the crust.

I love sour cherries and I love chocolate, so when I came across this cake recipe I knew I had to make it.

I needed to get a challah baked quickly because we were hosting a last minute brunch for which I was going to bake a ham, cheese, mushroom, red pepper and onion strata.  So with little time to plan I bake this challah that relies on IDY for leavening.  I was surprised at the slight tearing that this loaf had between the strands.  At the time of baking the dough didn’t bounce back at all with the poke test.  This is usually quite a reliable sign that the challah is well fermented, but in this case it could have used a bit more time in final proofing.

I  wanted to try adding an egg to my country sourdough again.  I’ve seen other bakers on IG post their bakes and some of them achieve quite incredible rise and open crumb when adding an egg to their otherwise lean dough recipes.  Then again, these same bakers always post super open crumb anyways, so who knows if the addition of the egg adds to this or just adds to the rise.  When adding the egg one has to compensate for the water in the egg (74%) and reduce the water used to make the dough.

I want to maintain my skills in making baguettes.  Unlike Alan and Don who has really developed their skills for the long haul, I find unless I make them every few months my skills backslide.  I haven’t made baguettes with inclusions in a long long while so decided to add a handful of poppyseeds to the dough.

Finally home and had a chance to bake a loaf of bread.  We are really enjoying this particular blend of whole spelt and whole wheat along with a combination of nuts and/or seeds.  I decided to use walnuts, sesame and poppy seeds this time and I’m glad that I did, the flavour from these inclusions really enhance the flavour of this milk bread.

We are visiting family in Newfoundland for 1.5 weeks now and I wanted to bring a loaf of bread for my brother in law.  The bread had to travel well and stay fresh for a while.  A lot of people seem to enjoy a nutty seedy loaf so decided to make a milk bread.  I had sunflowers, pumpkin seeds and walnuts and wanted to amp up the walnut flavour again by adding toast walnut oil.  Not everyone likes a 100% wholegrain loaf so I decided to use whole wheat for all the levain and tangzhong and the rest of the dough would be bread flour.

I first saw this type of shaped steamed bao when I borrowed Kristina Cho’s book called Mooncakes and Milkbread from the library.  My brother in law then emailed me a recipe for them out of the blue so I decided to make them.  Unfortunately my brother in law is no where near us so I’m unable to share this with him.  I’m pretty happy with how they turned out even if I didn’t do the twisting of the strips of dough prior to shaping them.

So I’ve gradually noticed differences between my two starters, one fed only white bread flour and the other whole rye starter.  The white starter I got from Alan (thank you Alan) and the whole rye is my own now what, four years old?  It is possible the differences I am seeing are due to differing microbes that inhabit each of the starters, or they might be purely related to the type of flour each is fed.

I’m not sure but I think it might have been more than a year ago that I made a 100% whole wheat bread of this sort.  I realized that I hadn’t even used my banneton this year yet so it was really overdue.  Since I am out of practice I decided to keep the same formula as my last loaf more or less but wanted to use my Ankarsrum Assistent to develop the dough.  As with my previous 100% whole grain hearth loaves that were successful, I sifted out the bran with my #40 sieve and then did a scald of the bran.  This was refrigerated overnight.