Blog posts

In a few weeks it's time to celebrate chinese new year and this means getting pineapple tarts baked well in advance, since there's way too much cooking to be done leading up to the day itself. In Singapore these are consumed in the weeks leading up to the new year and as kids they had to be hidden from us to ensure that there were some left for visiting guests during CNY itself! I've continued baking these tarts ever since I left, and my kids and family here have grown to like them.

This is a simple thing to make (depending on how you get your puff pastry) and such a fun tradition. I used an almond as the fève, trying to keep it kind of rustic. Recipe from David Lebovitz, but with extra vanilla, of course!

Tony’s recent beautiful rye loaf reminded me that I still had some whole rye flour in my cabinet.  So for this bake I used whole rye for the tangzhong which is 20% of the total flour and hydrated at 200% of the rye.  This creates a cement like consistency to the tangzhong that bakers who work with rye would be very familiar with so you have to get your pot soaking in water or else it can be challenging to clean.  I hadn’t baked a 100% Wholegrain bread in quite some time so I was overdue.

I really like the effect that using a Tangzhong has on the bread. It helps the bread stay fresher longer and I find the crumb to be a little more moist.

I usually use water to make the Tangzhong which is typically 5 parts water to one part flour. I decided to try something new and used a nice Merlot wine in place of the water. It worked out great and gave the final dough a subtle wine flavor but not overpowering.

This was a very high hydration dough I probably could have cut the water down 20% and still had an excellent overall bake.

These are our "I want a sweet treat but I'm really not supposed to be eating sweet treats so what can I do to have a sweet treat without having too much sweet" go to cookies. Around here we tend to call them our "hippy cookies"

Sugar free and no butter.

Ingredients

I’ve been busy in the kitchen recently and today had two things to bake.  For this SD Roman Pizza, I’ve made adjustments to my pizza formula to increase hydration by 3% and increase the PFF from the original 8% to 15%.  Next time I’ll up that again just so the dough will be ready for baking early enough for our typical early dinner time.

Hi! This is a post regarding the site refresh (that I'm cross-posting to the old site as well so I don't have to keep recreating it every time we do a migration)

As you are likely aware, Floyd's been working on a site upgrade for the past several weeks (months!).

I hope everybody had a good holiday. Welcome to 2025. :)

As I've mentioned before, the software that this site runs on is being put out to pasture. No more security updates, the development community has moved on. I've held this site back as long as I've felt like I could, but it has come time to get the site onto the newer platform.

After my first rushed attempt at a naturally leavened panettone without much research, I decided to try again, but with more planning and using what I think is a more respected formula, with all due respect to Gluten Morgen. However, I am still reluctant to try to build a LM. I invigorated a new 50% hydration version of my starter over two days with feedings of 1:0.5:1 at 82°F to ensure that it could triple in 4 hours. To deal with the overnight, I decided to try using a sweet 50% starter by adding sugar to equal 50% of the water (not the flour).

I recently bought some stone milled flour from a local mill and also came back from a trip to Japan where I visited a few sake breweries, which renewed my interest in sakadane (a starter made from koji rice, which is also sometimes called malted rice). So I thought, why not combine the two all at once? That was not the brightest idea I've ever had, but here we are lol.

As mentioned in my intro post, I finally managed to sort it all out and just need to fine tune the things.

To start, this was attempt #1: