Blog posts

Today I prepared Italian rolls.  Tomorrow I will be making meatballs and Italian hot sausage and wanted a nice roll that would hold up to the fillings.  I have recently stocked up on my favorite Duram flour and Organic White Wheat.  I love Daniel DiMuzio's recipe for his Sicilian Semolina Bread useing the fine duram semolina flour.  But I also wanted to use some of my organic white wheat.  I used his formula and replaced one cup of the bread flour with one cup of the organic white wheat.  The rolls have a nice chew and crunch just perfect crumb for the saucey s

This is Major Tom to Ground Control!

My local grocery store have just started to stock buckwheat flour, a flour I'm completely new to. To try to figure out what it's all about, I pulled Whitley's "Bread Matters" from my shelf - a great book by a passionate baker with a separate chapter on gluten-free baking. On buckwheat, Whitley says:

Posted on EvilShenanigans.com on 6/19/09

Is there anything more comforting than the smell of warm cinnamon rolls?  If there is, I can't think of it right now.

"doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different outcome."

Then the counterpoint must be, "Sanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and getting the same results." If so, I'm sane! Well, maybe that's going a little too far.

Colors excite me.  Often I buy a book because the cover page takes my fancy.   Eric Kayser's "Rund Ums Brot" is one such book.  When I bought it, I knew it was not in English; but all I want was to look at the pictures.   There is an expression in Chinese, your eyes want to eat ice cream too, very crude (or, in English, feast for the eyes?).   It was when I saw this page (below) that I went to google translator for help:

I saw these luscious looking onion rings on YeastSpotting several weeks ago and just could not get them out of my head. After eating them only once, I'm more obsessed with them than ever!

What a terrific way to use up your sourdough discard! Heck, these were so good that I'd make sourdough starter for the express purpose of turning out these tasty little rings.

I saw a picture in "20 Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, L'equipe de France De Boulangerie", page 169. 

Many years ago I was in Hang-chow, China, 200 km south west of Shanghai, visiting their Tea Museum.  The museum is set in the beautiful West Lake where historically poets and artists gathered.  I bought a cookbook incorporating tea in dishes at the museum.  I thought at the time the idea was really clever, and why not, Oolong tea (a type of green tea) is so good for us.  Other than that, there's not much to speak of about the book, which is in its typical Chinese crude way of presenting cuisine.   

As promised, I have added another tool to my "Bread Baker's Toolbox" for anyone to use. I call this one "The Custom Batch Formula Tool". You use this one when you have a bread formula with the ingredient quantities already specified by weight and you want to create a custom batch size. The software does the math, calculating the Baker's Percentages and displaying the results for your custom batch in both grams and ounces (US). I chose these units because they are the most common used in bread formulas by the home baker.

California seems to have an abundance of fresh cherries in the markets right now. Since fresh cherry pie is one of my favorites, I just haven't been able to resist the urge to work on my recipe.

I assembled the pie dough first using the Vodka crust recipe from Cook's Illustrated. It was easy to work with. I thought the top crust came out very flakey and flavorful but was a little disappointed in the bottom which was a bit on the soggy side.

While the crust was chilling in the fridge, I pitted the cherries which took about 45 minutes.