Blog posts

I’ve never made a tart with a chocolate pastry before so decided it was time to try.  The first recipe I tried must have had a typo in it as it was more like a loose batter than pastry dough.  After tossing that attempt in the bin I decided to modify the pâté sucrée recipe that I’ve had success with by adding cocoa powder and a bit of vanilla.  It certainly baked up well so let’s hope it tastes good too.

I came across this video while surfing YouTube.  I love the way she degasses and pre-shapes.  Seems effortless.  Besides that, the black cumin and feta cheese combination intrigued me.  Had to give it a whirl and decided to try it with my Country Blonde sourdough recipe.

Made my latest batch of panettone using the Roy recipe from Chambelland's Sourdough Panettone and Viennoiserie. This is my third attempt, and my first successful attempt, with this recipe. It succeeded very nicely this time, producing a remarkably moist, light, delicate and springy result. 

Fine tuning this bake will perhaps include slight modifications to the second impasto mixing process. This recipe is different from most, in that it includes both yolks and water added after the butter. This is like lightening an emulsion; it made me think of baking mayonnaise. 

This is a sourdough bread made with chakki atta whole wheat flour from costco. What a nice tasting delicious bread 😋

I used my standard grandma style procedure 🙂

Evening:

2 cups rye flour 

2 tablespoons rye starter from the fridge 

Enough lukewarm water to made a relatively stiff ball of dough 

Let ferment overnight,  until you are ready to make dough 

Next day:

All preferment minus a small ball of it (goes back to the starter jar)

4 cups atta flour 

1 tbsp of salt

Going back to earlier on in the year we did some posting on Red wheat which is fairly scarce ihere in Australia, and following up on an article that JonJ  noticed in South Africa  managed to track down a local grower here in Western Australia who was very kind enough to gift us several sacks of two different red wheats that he was growing mainly as a crop in his rotation. We have posted some of the resulting breads and everyone has so far been quite impressed,

While bread dreaming about the pages of TFL, I came across a forum about a rye loaf with carrots.  I loved the idea and still had a few pounds of mini winter carrots needing to be used up, so I went for it.  I don't make rye heavy loaves often enough (though I should because I love them) to have a set recipe.  Rather than do the wise thing and research, I did the lazy, middle of the week thing and just made it up as I went along.

300g dark rye flour

300g water

some ground flax seed

some whole fennel seed

50(ish)g leaven

After a few years of consistently baking bread, I finally pushed myself to make an occasion to try making baguettes.  I've partly avoided it because I usually make bread once a week for toast and/or sandwiches during the week and because don't really work well with home baking equipment.  

When I was back home in February, I borrowed a baguette shaped pan from my mom.  With this sitting around, I finally conceded.

I still had some anko (red bean paste) in my freezer from over a year ago and decided it was time to use it up.  Since I hadn’t made mochi in so long I thought it was high time to make Daifuku Mochi again but this time with matcha.  So I followed the same recipe except this time added 5 g of matcha powder.  I forgot how dark the matcha becomes when water is added and would probably try only 3 g next time.  The trade off might be the matcha flavour though which was perfect with the 5 g.

My first attempt at a Gluten Free bread.  I used a recipe I found on the net, since I needed somewhere to start and wanted to bake a hearth loaf.  I think I had some success but overfermented a bit.  I would certainly reduce the IDY more than I did already to slow things down.  By the time the oven was ready, there were quite a few holes in top of the dough in the banneton.

Paul (pnguyen951) recently posted a recipe for a spelt loaf, and I decided to give it a try.