Blog posts

NECTA Competition, April 12th and 13th 2011

The North East Culinary Trades Association hold this competition in a local venue every year, and the College has always played a full part in it.

Having just begun what could be a long adventure with rye breads, I may not be an expert yet.  But I've developed a formula that replicates the texture of 40% rye dough.

800 g warm water

750 g rye sour

150 g quick set cement

50 g Epoxy

1/2 cup Altus (optional)

1 Tbsp Caraway seeds (optional)

Once you mix the ingredients (I recommend a mason's trowel) and scrape as much as you can off the spatulas, your hands, the bowl and the work surface, you have enough for a small dinner roll.

Glenn

This is my version of a local speciality:  squid ink baguette.  Actually, I am not even sure if this kind of bread was first made in Taiwan, or even in Asia for that matter, but nowadays you can find it in almost any bakery. It is often sold as a sandwich with a seafood filling.

I'm still having some home-grown apples that I wanted to use and I was thinking about apple bread. Originally, I thought about making apple and oats bread from Bourke Street Bakery cook book. However, I bought quite a few new bread-making books that I should use. So turning to Dan Lepard's books, I saw a promising apple bread recipe.

These are a couple of 755 gm bâtards of Hamelman's Pain au Levain I baked today. I think they illustrate the points made recently in discussions of scoring, ears and bloom, for example in Varda's topic To ear or not to ear.

To quote Michel Suas from Advanced Bread and Pastry again,

I was eating a bowl of Cream of Wheat for the first time in ten years. That is the only inspiration for this loaf. I think a souerdough starter would work well with this recipe. 

My partner's father and sister are here to visit. They each occupy one of the downstairs rooms that I meticulously cleaned before they arrived, so much so that I drove myself into hand-wringing worry over each minute detail in their rooms. Then the cobwebs in the other corners of the house laugh at me.

Easter is almost here and it means the long weekend is not far away. Easter is the longest holiday in Australia and it is even longer this year. The Easter Monday falls on our national public holiday, Anzac Day. So, we end up with 5-day long weekend. I'm so looking forwards to the short break and mini getaway.

I have been making bread from Tartine Bread, basically a naturally leavened bread.  The flavors have been outstanding, as well as the crumb.  I have experiemented with various hydration percentages (75% and 80%).  The 75% seemed to spring a bit better than the 80%.  The 80% was raised at a bit higher ambient temperature and probably for a bit too long; the dough seemed too puffy and sloppy.

Ron's post about these crackers is as thorough as they come, so please get the recipe there if you are interested. I added 20% of cheddar cheese to the dough, turned out perfect, so much better than store bought. And easy to make too!