Benito's blog

I have a new jar of yuzu tea.  So yuzu tea (or citron tea since it is Korean) is a marmalade like jelly made from yuzu that when mixed with boiling water makes a lovely drink.  I decided I wanted to make some sweet rolls and I wanted to have yuzu flavour to it so I would use the yuzu tea as the filling and I have a bottle of yuzu extract that I would use as the liquid for the drizzle/icing. Despite the name of these rolls, they aren’t very sweet.  Other than the sugar used for the stiff sweet levain, there isn’t any sugar added to the dough.

For the dinner party last night we had one guest who won’t eat cooked vegetables!  What to prepare that he will eat?  Pulled pork sandwiches as the main, along with coleslaw.  For appetizers I served pork, shiitake mushroom and Napa gyoza that I made a while ago and froze.  These are great to have frozen so you can save prep when having a dinner party.  The pulled pork was made using my Instant Pot.

We had guests over last night for dinner so wanted to make a pie for dessert.  As you might know I love sour cherries and love rhubarb so decided to make a pie with both but this time with a streusel topping.  For pate brisée recipe look at this previous post.

I'm really enjoying making this style of pizza.  It is quite filling and one pizza makes two dinners for us.  This time I didn't have my usual all purpose flour so used bread flour.  I also used whole wheat flour this time instead of either spelt or kamut just to try something slightly different.  I don't find that I can taste much difference between the pizzas made with the different flours since the toppings really are the most prominent flavour of the pizza. 

So I needed a dessert for brunch so decided to bake a cake.  This recipe interested me because 25% of the flour is whole rye (the recipe calls for medium rye but I used whole rye) along with olive oil.  Both gave this cake more complexity than straight AP flour and a neutral oil would.  Also, in a nod towards making it lower fat I substituted Greek yogurt for the sour cream.  This is still acid enough to leaven the cake, although a bit more acid might have given it just a bit more of a boost.  This cake delicious and will keep for days given the olive oil in it.

We had friends over for brunch this past weekend and decided that a savory strata was going to be served.  So of course, I needed to make a challah for this, but didn’t have enough time for a sourdough challah due many other things happening.  So here is my recipe for a IDY fast all in less than a day delicious challah with some whole wheat.

We are visiting my partner’s sister this long weekend so of course I want to bring a loaf for them.  I was back working this week, I’m semi retired so I’ll do locums to cover for my old colleagues at the clinic when they go on vacations.  I get to pick and choose how much I work and I enjoy doing this kind of work since people are happy to be able to see a physician when something urgent comes up and theirs is away.  Anyhow, because of work, I had to compress my prep time, so instead of a pure sourdough leavening for this loaf I did a hybrid with 0.2% IDY added.

It was really strange that I had stopped adding nuts or seeds to my bread for quite a long time.  Now that I have started to add inclusions again, it reminds me how much I love them.  Running low on bread, this is what I decided to do for this all wholewheat loaf.  The lobes didn’t come out that evenly when baked, this does happen sometimes when they are shaped a bit too fat, it doesn’t affect the flavor but does make the mountains of Hokkaido look a bit wonky LOL.

My partner requested another Roman Pizza so how could I say no?  I wanted to use up a bit more of the whole Kamut that I have left so changed the spelt to Kamut.  Also having made this once I wanted to improve it, the last time the crust didn’t brown as well as I would have expected for the baking time.  So I added a tiny amount of sugar and some diastatic malt.  This worked well to improve the browning of the crust so I am happy with that.

I needed more bread, so what’s new?  Wanting some whole grain bread though I decided to use some spelt with the whole wheat for some variety.  I also wanted some seeds in this bread because I love seeds so decided to add pepitas and sunflower seeds at 10% each.