Blog posts

The lemon cheesecake has been trying to bust into other posts recently so we though it needed a blog of its own.

This is not the normal NY Style that we love to no end but one where the egg whites are whipped to nearly stiff peaks and folded into the rest of the batter. 

We really like kjknits SD English muffins and have made them several times.  This time we decided to make them circles instead of irregular shapes cut with a dough scraper and we wanted to get some YW working in there too.

Franko had me drooling with his post and kind sharing of his pate recipe.  No question about it I love pate - all kinds.  Now that the larder is full of some fine bread to spread some kind of pate on  - it was time to make some.  The French are masters of making what they have on hand into some kind of Pate Maison - and it tasting great - especially on bread or toast.

I think I did better this time, with the extra half-recipe - no deflating!

Someone made the very cool suggestion of using purple potatoes, so now I have to try that!

I did try to shape these, the second loaf worked just fine but this first one broke apart when I rolled it up. Probably just me being a bit too rough with the dough. There is a good reason for my username.

Sending this to Yeastspotting.

Index for my blog entries

Just thought I'd share a link because I always have a hard time buying banneton proofing baskets in Australia and when I do find them they are so expensive. I purchased these on Ebay for $13.00 ea with free delivery, they arrived in the mail 8 days later. They have a large range of sizes and I think they deliver free to the States also.

In an effort to practice my shaping techniques I decided to make Pain de Campagne from Peter Reinharts The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I think I've got shaping loaves down (as in shape and stick in a pan where the pan does most of the work), and I'm on my way to perfecting boules but I haven't really tried any other shapes. This recipe seemed pretty straight forward since it's basically just salt, flour yeast and water. I made a preferment 3 days before mixing the final dough, and used 1.5oz Rye instead of whole wheat. The book says the recipe makes 3 loaves or multiple rolls.

Every time I venture to Whole Foods I manage to find something interesting to add to my bread baking and last weekend was no exception.  I was already planning on making bread with some fresh chopped cherries so when I saw some 100% Cherry Juice on the shelf I couldn't resist buying it and using it in place of most of the water.

I made an enormous ciabatta weighing nearly 1 kilo. I used an 18hr-fermented biga starter and a combination of medium and weak flours. This thing was massive!

Biga:
400g '00' flour from Shipton Mill
160g cold water
1.3g Instant yeast

Final dough:
Fermented biga
320g cold water
200g plain flour (9.4% protein)
24g Extra virgin olive oil
12g Non-diastatic malt powder
12g Salt
2g diastatic malt powder 

olive oil for S&f.