Blogs

Reverse Puff Pastry

Butter Block:
190 gr soft butter
75 gr flour

Dough:
175 gr flour
7 gr. salt
60 gr melted butter
70 ml water

First, you mix the first quantity of butter and flour together in a large mixer with the paddle attachment.  Mix until it is well combined.  Take this mixture and roll it between two sheets of parchment, as square as you can manage, until it is 3/4 of an inch thick.  Rest in the fridge.

Next, combine the second quantity of flour with the salt, water and melted butter using the dough hook.  Rest for 30 minutes in the fridge. 

After it has rested roll it till it is a little under half the size of the butter.  You will need to leave a border around the outside so you can fully enclose the dough in butter.  Use the parchment paper to help you enclose the package.  Removing the paper can be a trial, but just do the  best you can and repair any holes in the butter.

Allow this to rest in the fridge (this will become a trend if you had not already deduced that for yourself) until the butter is firm but not hard.

Roll out the packet until it is three times as long as it is wide.  Give the dough a three fold.  Rest for 15 to 20 minutes in the fridge and repeat this process 4 more times (for a total of 5 turns)

Roll out and make up as desired!

I found a recipe for Chinese Almond cookies in a 1914 cookbook.

I think this is one of the best versions I have ever tried; they are made with rice flour and have a nice sandy texture. They are also gluten-free and dairy-free

Ingredients

2 cups (320 g) rice flour + a little extra to form the cookies

1/4 cup (50 g) almond oil

1/2 cup (50 g) almonds, blanched

1-1/2 cups (180 g) confectioners’ sugar

2 eggs

To decorate: 10-12 almonds, blanched and split in half + 1 yolk mixed with 1/2 tbsp water

Preheat the oven to 325°F (160°C)

Place the almonds, rice flour, and sugar in the bowl of a food processor and process until the almonds are chopped very fine. Add the almond oil and pulse until the mixture resembles wet sand. Add the eggs and process briefly, until a soft dough forms.

Sprinkle some rice flour on a wooden board and roll small amounts of dough into balls about the size of a small walnut.

Press the balls with the bottom of a glass (floured), then brush with egg wash and place a split almond in the center.

Alternatively, you can roll the dough 1/4-inch (0.6 cm) thick, then cut the cookies with a round cookie-cutter.
Bake the cakes on baking sheets for 1 hour, making sure the oven temperature is not higher than 325°F (160°C)

Let the cakes cool on racks and store in an airtight container

I made wheat bread on Sunday. After my mild successes, I guess I was bound to get served a good lesson.

Weight is more important that volume. That finally hit home when I measured out the flour only to find 1 1/2 cups on Reinhart's flour is equal to 1 cup of my wheat flour. I was following his recipe blindly and ended up with an unsalvagable mess. Or at least, I thought it would be to much effort to salvage. Started over. Much better the second time.

I also learned, I absolutely suck at kneeding dough. I'm going to have to try a different method. The French fold, the streach and fold, or maybe I could try using the dough setting on my bread machine. Or, I buy a mixer.

Has anyone had any success making just the dough in a bread machine? Can I mix it by hand and then throw it in the bread machine to slap it around a bit? Or would I really just have better success with one of the folding methods?

In the end, the bread did turn out pretty tasty. I still need to work on shaping and also understanding how much dough needs to go in my bread pan.

Coming soon... Cornbread!

This weekend I made the Fresh Herb Twist from Daniel Leader's Local Breads. It uses 3 fresh herbs — thyme and rosemary (from my garden) and basil. It was delicious with my beef vegetable stew!

Fresh Herb Twist

Fresh Herb Twist crumb

It has been driving me crazy to just throw away the leftovers after feeding our wild yeast starter. Especially as it seems to be in perfectly good condition. I know it's just a couple of tablespoons of flour but still it just seems wrong even to compost it. So now, every time I feed the starter, I have been adding whatever is left over to biscuits or muffins or even bread that is made with commercial yeast.

At first, I was just going to make cheese baking powder biscuits. But then I suddenly thought that cheese pinwheels would be fun. I already knew that adding the left over sludge wouldn't disturb the biscuit dough at all. That's one of the great things about baking powder biscuits. They're so forgiving. Well, pretty forgiving, anyway...

Because there was plenty of cheese, these biscuits didn't need any butter, although a little butter was good too. Wheee! So much for adding olive oil instead of lard or shortening to the dough to make the biscuits better for us....

Here is what I did to make the pinwheels:

• cheese pinwheels recipe

I made the Multi-grain levain from Hamelman's "Bread" for the first time about 6 weeks ago on Fleur-d-Liz's strong recommendation. I found it very good, but it didn't blow my socks off. Strangely, it developed a more delicious flavor after having been frozen and thawed. I thought the many flavors of the grains and seeds melded.

 Well, I made this bread for the third time this morning. I did two things differently: The first was that I gave it an overnight cold retardation. The second was that I tried a new oven trick. I steamed the oven (using Peter Reinhart's method), as usual, except, this time, I removed the cast iron skillet with water after 5 minutes and switched the oven to convection baking with the temperature lowered 20 degrees.

 The bread had a really carmelized, crunchy crust and the flavor was ... well, I can't think of a better word than the one Hamelman used ... delectable.

 Liz, now I get it. This is a fabulous bread! It has definitely made my favorites list.

Hamelman's Multi-grain levain

BTW, the really dark loaf up front is the one we ate with dinner. That very dark crust had a marvelous taste.

Hamelman's Multi-grain levain - Crumb

David

I made the Whole Wheat Levain from Hamelman's "Bread" this weekend. It turned out just okay. The taste and texture are fine, but, although there was pretty good oven spring, there was disappointing bloom.

 I score the loaves as I would a mostly white flour batard but didn't get the result I expected. I'm wondering if one needs to score a whole wheat loaf deeper. I haven't found any advice in this regard in any of my bread books. However, looking at the photos in Reinhart's "Whole Grain Breads," it does appear he is scoring those loaves deeper than he does a white flour loaf.

Hamelman's Whole Wheat Levain

Whole Wheat Levain - Crumb

Any advice regarding scoring whole wheat levain batards would certainly be appreciated.

David.

Jewish pumpernickel is one of my favorite breads. I have made it only a couple times before, once from Greenstein's recipe in "Sectets of a Jewish Baker" and once from Reinhart's recipe in BBA. But I've never really followed Greenstein's recipe to the letter, because I've never had any stale rye bread with which to make altus.  Well, a few weeks ago, I put what was left of a loaf of Greenstein's Sour Rye bread in the freezer with which to make altus, and this weekend I made "real" Jewish Pumpernickel using altus, pumpernickel flour and first clear flour.

For those not in the know, altus is stale rye bread with the crust cut off, cut into cubes and soaked in water, then wrung out and incorporated into the dough of a new loaf of rye or pumpernickel. It is said to have a beneficial effect on the texture of the bread, and my experience certainly corroborates this.

 Greenstein uses cold water and lets the altus soak overnight. My schedule did not permit this so I used hot water, and it saturated the rye bread cubes in 10 minutes. Wringing it out only resulted in first degree burns.

Greenstein's Pumpernickel

I'm not uploading a "crumb shot." The crumb was very handsome, but it was the texture that was remarkable. It was a bit chewy but with a "creamy" mouth feel. It was simply the best pumpernickel of this type I have every had the pleasure of eating.

My idea of a good time is a slice of this bread, smeared with cream cheese and eaten with eggs scrambled in slightly browned butter. It's pretty darn good with a slice of lox, too.

 Anyone into baking Jewish rye breads who hasn't made Greenstein's Pumpernickel using the ingredients he specifies is missing a real treat!

David

We don't really watch the superbowl, and in fact don't have a tv this year (don't ask) but why not eat silly food anyway?

Not my greatest photo, but we ate all the pretty samples so there's no chance for a re-shoot. In the bowl (impossible to make out) is homemade nacho cheese sauce. I made a simple white sauce with cheddar and monterey jack, and added some chopped whole jalapenos that I froze from the garden last year. Could be thicker but WAY tastier than the kind you get at the cafeteria!

These are from Daniel Leader's Local Breads (newest cookbook acquisition) and the dough was lovely to work with.

Also have my first ever batch of baked beans in the oven. May have to post a picture (they are baked so that counts, right?) because I'm quite smitten with them--they take forever though and your house smells good ALL DAY.

Anybody else making fun food for super sunday?

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2332/2240462432_cacffac8be.jpg

Hi, it's raining here in San Diego, how about where you are? Here are some photos of things I've made in the last couple of weeks. Last weekend, we had our neighbors over for dominoes, and I made a king cake. They're from New Orleans (pre-Katrina), so I thought I'd bake the traditional Mardi Gras cake and see how close it got to the real thing. They said, 'yep, that's it'. I thought it came out rather dry, but I guess that's why you dump a box or so of powdered sugar icing on it. The recipe I used is here.

This weekend, I finally made Essential's Columbia, which so many people here have done. I read lots of the previous posts to glean all the helpful hints first. This was a real lesson in letting the dough get ready in its own sweet time. Almost five hours fermenting, and about four hours in the brotforms (my Xmas presents!). I came upon a method to help getting the loaves out of the forms when they're sticking a bit. I put parchment on top of the brotform, then the peel on top of that, and quickly flipped it over. Then I tapped briskly on the bottom of the basket several times to loosen the dough. It really helped.

The flavor of this bread is wonderful! Just enough whole wheat and rye to deepen it...very satisfying, and pretty too.

Sue