Blog posts

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.

A few weeks ago I accidentally got into baguettes. I liked the sound of alfanso’s baguettes with durum flour, fennel, pine nuts, and golden raisins, so I attempted them. They came out ok but I wanted to see whether I could improve my technique. 

Ok, so I'm not an artist in any way, shape, or form!  Lovely images that I can see in my mind's eye always turn out as stick figures, and not very good ones at that! :)  So, it's a bit surprising, then, that I decided to try some decorative scoring on my weekly loaves this week.  Back story.......we hosted our annual Halloween party on Monday, and one of our guests brought a loaf of bread that had a "Jack Skellington" skeleton face scored on the top of it.  I thought to myself, "Hey, this would be a cool thing for me to make next year to go with my BBQ Skeleton.....

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.

TFL is such a great community.  We share ideas, advice, recipes, and help each other, in general, along the way.  In some cases, we get to know each other at an almost personal level.  At least as personal as you can get communicating virtually with someone you’ve never met. 😁 Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to put a voice with a virtual face and have lunch with Paul (pmccool).

I made the Walter Sands white bread from King Arthur in October and tried doing a swirl. I rolled my dough a wee bit too thin in the middle, but it was offset by having a pocket of sugar peeking out at the end. It was gone in 3 days. The only problem I had was that the swirl kept separating from the bread. It was not fun to pull it out of the toaster.

 i was very fortunate to be gifted some flour that is grown locally by a farmer and stone ground on site. I wanted to do the Flour justice and was given the tip that it was exceptional by the owner of a very successful local bakery  that is doing great things here in Western Australia. Thankyou Lachie and Big Loaf.

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.

I have posted similar loaves in the past, but there's probably been enough change to the formula, I thought I'd add a new entry.  This bread is what I make every week about 90% of the time (my recent olive and cranberry loaves notwithstanding.) Over the past year or two, I've swapped the amounts for whole wheat vs durum, in favor of a higher % of durum in the mix.  All of the non-white flour is freshly milled in my Komo Fidibus mill.

Oh, and I've confused people in the past with the RWC abbreviation......it's the city I live in (Redwood City.) :)

FORMULA

When I read Ian's recent blog post, I put this one on my short list for bakes.  Not only because of the Guinness, but the blend of grains as well.