Blog posts

  I call these “Italian” style pretzel rolls.  These are made with a 2 build durum starter and with over 50% total fresh milled durum.  I also used some fresh milled whole wheat and just a little bit of KAF bread flour to add a little gluten strength but you could probably leave it out and sub more durum or whole wheat.

The durum and whole wheat flour was sifted twice and milled twice with my Mockmill 200.

Made a simple enriched Italian bread that is very versatile. My mom made this a lot growing up. One of my favorites for sure. This loaf was about 1000 grams.

This was a fun outcome. I tried out my new petite Fat Daddy loaf pans and they do fit into my roasting pan side by side,  thanks to the vertical sides and small rolled rims. The loaves merged together where the pans touched.

I preheated the roasting pan sitting on top of a pizza stone in the oven. Final shaped panned proof was only 15 minutes. I loaded them into the roasting pan, sprayed then with water,  and put the lid on.

This is the best oven spring I've gotten. The flour was 100% freshly milled spelt. No sifting.

For today's bake, I decided to take a page from Benito's book and make a whole wheat sourdough with 2% vital wheat gluten and a bran scald. I used freshly milled hard red wheat and sifted it with a 50 mesh sieve.

Scald:

• 141g bran (13.8%)
• 282g boiling water (27.6%)

Main dough

This was a nice flavorful bread made with fresh milled Durum, Rye and Rouge de Bordeaux whole wheat. I used some baked potatoes that were mashed up but still chunky so you end up with a rustic bread with pieces of potato throughout. 

The buttermilk was originally going to be used in my English Muffins but I forgot so I pivoted and used it in this bake instead. It adds a little extra tang to the final bread.

Another birthday get together this evening means another cake needing to be baked.  I had just enough cream cheese left over from the ginger breads so I decided to bake a popular southern US cake.  The Hummingbird cake has quite a few variations, but generally they all have bananas, pineapples and warm spices along with cream cheese icing as this one has.  Generally I don’t love a ton of icing on cakes, so I then to avoid layer cakes.  This one just has the drizzle icing on top.  Mine was a bit too thick so didn’t drip down the sides without some coaxing.

I am nearing the end of a batch of homemade red miso I harvested last May 2023.  Fortunately I have a full batch that has been fermenting for just over a year now so I decided to celebrate that with another bread using miso.  There rolls are delicious, soft, fluffy and super buttery, maybe not for those on a diet unless you do as I do and share most of the rolls with others.  The dough is a my standard formula that I use for sweet rolls with 15% whole wheat (or other whole grain) that is also the flour used for the tangzhong.

A year or so ago, Troy (aka HeiHei29er) posted a recipe for a Lithuanian bread.  At the time I baked it a few times, but it had been awhile, and I felt that a revisit was needed.  Besides, we have some neighbors down the street from Lithuania, and I wanted to bake them a loaf (but after baking one for my wife and me to reacquaint myself with the recipe).

I wanted to do a slightly different sourdough focaccia using my homemade red miso.  This bread has both miso and toasted sesame seed oil in it.  I also used 10% whole kamut along with bread flour just for a bit more complexity.  The toppings I kept pretty simple a drizzle of red miso with olive oil, rings of red peppers, yellow cherry tomatoes, onions and black sesame seeds. 

A friend of mine has made these for us many years ago and I remember them fondly.  His homemade versions were far better than any of the store bought ones I’ve ever had.  I finally got around to trying to make these myself.  Although they’re called cakes, they are really pastries with a pineapple jam encased in a short crust wrapping.  I purchased a mooncake press/mold to shape these. I can do a better job with shaping these before pressing them as several of them had cracks after baking.  As typical of Asian desserts, these are not too sweet but tasty.