Ooooh. For a moment I thought that might have been a riff on the croissant cube popularized by Bedros Kabranian. My eyes aren’t what they used to be. This looks much easier. This last weekend, other than fitting in some work with sick patients, I tried a few different recipes for Boston Creme Pie(Cake). The only thing I seemed to recreate was failure. Edible failure, but failure nonetheless. Here’s hoping for a better week in the kitchen for all of us. Happy Monday, Chef.
Happy Monday, everyone! Hey, I made the dark deli rye! Absolutely delicious. Where can I post a pic? Andrew, grateful you introduced us to the Ground Up folks, though next time I will purchase from them in person. I made a batch of dough for Kenji’s choc chip cookies and have now frozen cookie-size chunks of it to bake in the toaster oven in manageable quantities at a time. Maybe those would be good would some rye flour, hmm. But really the one thing I’ve been doing on repeat is homemade hot and sour soup. I hope this doesn’t put Chinese restaurants out of business.
Unfortunately there is no way to post pictures to comments, but I just had a great idea: Send them to me along with any useful biographical info (name, location, instagram handle, etc.) and I'll do a monthly Monday "round-up" of people's bakes.
Shaking up the routine is great. My typical bake is sourdough 100% whole grain, either wheat or wheat-like usually with sesame and/or flax in a clay baker or dutch oven. Or a dense 100% sourdough rye with lots of seeds done in a Pullman pan. But I do love a great baguette, with a crusty/crackly burnished exterior and chewy tasty airy crumb. Great baguettes are so difficult to find, so I went down the path of trying to make my own, encouraged by food porn on YouTube. I've now done three tries working from the straight dough formula/method in Daniel Leader's "Living Bread". I've nailed the crumb and taste, but the exterior is disappointing. I've modified the type of flour, temperature, and steam method, and am about to move on to other formulas/methods. Any favorites out there?
Funny story: when that book came out, Dan Leader visited ATK and did a baguette tasting, which included a bunch of "good" local bakery baguettes along with the recipe I developed for Cook's Illustrated. I consider it a personal triumph that he chose mine over the others.
My wife and I like the Pane Siciliano recipe in Peter Rinehart’s “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice”. It makes three small, S-shaped loaves. Wanting a larger loaf, I made Peter’s full recipe, but it came time to shape, I made a four-braid, round Challah-shaped loaf. It became to large to fit any covered baker in our kitchen, so I baked it on the pizza stone with a steam pan for oven bounce.
It turned beautifully. We will try other shapes, including the three “S” loaves, in future bakes.
I tried a new King Arthur recipe for Artisan Sourdough Bread made with a stiff starter (50% hydration). It turned out well, but I'm not sure that the extra effort resulted in a significantly different bread than obtained with 100% hydration starter.
Interesting to see the reference to Daniel Leader in the other comments. I have his book "Bread Alone" from 1993. It was a very useful introduction to different bread making approaches.
I tinkered with Avery wet pizza dough almost poured out of the bowl. It made a very crisp think pizza dough coupled with my pizza steel and the broiler on it was so good I think I’m finally achieving a pizza over effect in my simple home oven.
I messed around with a discard-replacing-buttermilk biscuit and didn't like it as much as the buttermilk one! It was denser and more greasy. I tend to think there is something special about the way soured milk products work in biscuits and similar things. I'm not saying it _can't_ work, but my feeling is that discard recipes should be as good or better than their non-discard counterparts. I do have a discard English muffin recipe in the works!
I’ve had good success with the Artisan SD English Muffin recipe Martin Philip recently posted on King Arthur Flour. The only change I made was to sub some Khorasan for the toasted cornmeal (too gritty for me). Can’t wait to see & try yours!
You said it: out of curiosity! Also, there are drawbacks to tangzhong when it comes to recipe development, since it ties up some of the water, making it a challenge to use large amounts of non-water liquids (eggs, for example)
After baking a lot of variations on The Loaf and Loaf Classic, I've been trying some of the other recipes out of Andrew's index. So far I made the Anadama sandwich bread (which had a nice, complex flavour) and the Chocolate-Cherry-Cardamom Sourdough, which was maybe one of the most delicious things I've ever baked.
On a different note, for fun I recently built a web app for a bread recipe calculator that others may find useful, which is at https://sourdoughcalculator.shinyapps.io/calculator/. The app works on mobile and desktop browsers, and there aren't any ads or anything.
It works how I like it (of course), which is that you specify a total flour weight and hydration, then enter any percentages of additional flours and the percent levain, and it gives you the weights of the water and each flour you need. You can also adjust the levain hydration and composition lower down.
It's meant to be simple to use rather than comprehensive, so there's currently no way to add a preferment/tangzhong or other ingredients (although the yeast and salt fields can be used for other items since they're just baker's percent times flour weight.) You can save recipes by clicking the "Bookmark" button and then copying the URL.
There's also a DDT calculator based off of Andrew's formula, which I mostly included to make it easier for me to try using DDT more often.
I hope some of you find it helpful (it was fairly popular on the r/Sourdough subreddit), and if you have any feedback or suggestions you can reply here or contact me through my email on the Help tab of the app. Oh, and the code is available on GitHub, also linked on the Help tab.
I'm excited to try this! Mostly I've been crazy busy these days with regular old sourdough....my little home bakery has exploded in popularity and I'm generally sold out within an hour of posting my week's offerings. VERY grateful - and thank you for the great methods and recipes, my customers love them! The Hot Cheesy Bread has been probably the biggest frenzy of late.
We are still playing a bit with the best doughs for the Ooni, have mostly settled on the version that starts with the poolish. Have another pizza party this week when my siblings and spouses visit Jacksonville from the Midwest. Trying the Miyoko's plant based mozzarella on a couple of pizzas since my SIL can't do cows milk. That will be fun! Any advice you have for plant-based cheeses would be welcome!
Taught my first cooking class last week - Carnitas and Carnitas Fried Rice. Sourdough 101 classes will be held in March. Just got a test recipe from ATK for a bread item so I'm looking forward to trying that as well.
King Cake season is upon us and I'm committed to 12 of them for my customers, so the next couple of weeks will be pretty insane! But they are so tasty, it's a labor of love for sure.
I downloaded the baguette class and got through most of it, also ordered the additional supplies and tools I needed. Now I just need to put it on my baking schedule.
It took, me a year to dial in my pizza dough for wood fired cooking. It’s so different than in an oven! I have served up pizzas with Miyoko’s and as a dedicated cheese lover, I really liked it. It’s not the same as mozz, but still delicious.
You will LOVE it! Being a PM for Healthcare IT projects for decades was awesome work but now I'm having a ball with my forever passion of baking and cooking! If you ever get to Jax, give me a shout!
I’m a home baker who tends not to tinker with recipes because it takes a long time for two people to eat through a bread (except the Spicy Cheese Bread, which disappears in a day). I’d love a recipe for honey wheat bread that has the softness and longevity of using a tangzhong, but I assume I can’t just apply the technique to part of the flour and water from any recipe, because part of the point is to up the hydration but keep the dough manageable. Happy to receive pointers or a link if any such thing already exists.
80° today, 40° Wednesday, so I guess I’ll be making more hot cheese bread soon. It makes me sad to eat soup without it these days.
I started the week with the same two loaves of the everyday bread I make every week (a multigrain porridge sourdough, my own formula), but I stuck the extra loaf in the freezer so I’m freed up to experiment with something new (open to suggestions!).
I have Leader’s two first books checked out from the library and I’m going to spend my day off poring through those.
I’m using my backrahmen (wood baking frame) to make Irish Batch Bread. I love Patrick Ryan’s (Firehouse Bakery) recipe. Interesting how many different countries/cultures use frames for baking. Looking for Scottish recipes now.
Julie - thank you for reminding me of this and for giving me the opportunity to mention that I am working on a batch bread recipe to share here this year, along with info about the backrahmen you sent me! For others who are interested here's a link to the same one Julie generously sent for me to try out: https://www.etsy.com/listing/872059758/maple-backrahmen-for-bread-baking-wood
Thanks for the shout out. This is really what I have been baking. I watched a fun City Bakes Dublin with Paul Hollywood which led me to Patrick Ryan’s Batch bread. Easy and tasty!
“Sourdough English Muffin Bread 2.0” has become a staple in our house. Easy to make; freezes well; and toasts up beautifully. I make it in a Pullman pan. Currently trying a variety of focaccia recipes to decide which one we prefer. Wordloaf’s is at the top of the list now. Amazing how quickly a pan of good focaccia disappears.
Ooooh. For a moment I thought that might have been a riff on the croissant cube popularized by Bedros Kabranian. My eyes aren’t what they used to be. This looks much easier. This last weekend, other than fitting in some work with sick patients, I tried a few different recipes for Boston Creme Pie(Cake). The only thing I seemed to recreate was failure. Edible failure, but failure nonetheless. Here’s hoping for a better week in the kitchen for all of us. Happy Monday, Chef.
Happy Monday, everyone! Hey, I made the dark deli rye! Absolutely delicious. Where can I post a pic? Andrew, grateful you introduced us to the Ground Up folks, though next time I will purchase from them in person. I made a batch of dough for Kenji’s choc chip cookies and have now frozen cookie-size chunks of it to bake in the toaster oven in manageable quantities at a time. Maybe those would be good would some rye flour, hmm. But really the one thing I’ve been doing on repeat is homemade hot and sour soup. I hope this doesn’t put Chinese restaurants out of business.
Unfortunately there is no way to post pictures to comments, but I just had a great idea: Send them to me along with any useful biographical info (name, location, instagram handle, etc.) and I'll do a monthly Monday "round-up" of people's bakes.
On it. You’re the best!
Shaking up the routine is great. My typical bake is sourdough 100% whole grain, either wheat or wheat-like usually with sesame and/or flax in a clay baker or dutch oven. Or a dense 100% sourdough rye with lots of seeds done in a Pullman pan. But I do love a great baguette, with a crusty/crackly burnished exterior and chewy tasty airy crumb. Great baguettes are so difficult to find, so I went down the path of trying to make my own, encouraged by food porn on YouTube. I've now done three tries working from the straight dough formula/method in Daniel Leader's "Living Bread". I've nailed the crumb and taste, but the exterior is disappointing. I've modified the type of flour, temperature, and steam method, and am about to move on to other formulas/methods. Any favorites out there?
Jeff - I recently taught a baguette workshop and the recording/recipe is available for sale here: https://tinyurl.com/Janjigian-Baguette
Funny story: when that book came out, Dan Leader visited ATK and did a baguette tasting, which included a bunch of "good" local bakery baguettes along with the recipe I developed for Cook's Illustrated. I consider it a personal triumph that he chose mine over the others.
I made Scottish cock-a-leekie soup and added nontraditional farro
My wife and I like the Pane Siciliano recipe in Peter Rinehart’s “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice”. It makes three small, S-shaped loaves. Wanting a larger loaf, I made Peter’s full recipe, but it came time to shape, I made a four-braid, round Challah-shaped loaf. It became to large to fit any covered baker in our kitchen, so I baked it on the pizza stone with a steam pan for oven bounce.
It turned beautifully. We will try other shapes, including the three “S” loaves, in future bakes.
I tried a new King Arthur recipe for Artisan Sourdough Bread made with a stiff starter (50% hydration). It turned out well, but I'm not sure that the extra effort resulted in a significantly different bread than obtained with 100% hydration starter.
Interesting to see the reference to Daniel Leader in the other comments. I have his book "Bread Alone" from 1993. It was a very useful introduction to different bread making approaches.
I tinkered with Avery wet pizza dough almost poured out of the bowl. It made a very crisp think pizza dough coupled with my pizza steel and the broiler on it was so good I think I’m finally achieving a pizza over effect in my simple home oven.
Discard crackers! It’s a KAF recipe. So simple… looking for more discard recipes. How about a biscuit recipe with discard?
I messed around with a discard-replacing-buttermilk biscuit and didn't like it as much as the buttermilk one! It was denser and more greasy. I tend to think there is something special about the way soured milk products work in biscuits and similar things. I'm not saying it _can't_ work, but my feeling is that discard recipes should be as good or better than their non-discard counterparts. I do have a discard English muffin recipe in the works!
I’ve had good success with the Artisan SD English Muffin recipe Martin Philip recently posted on King Arthur Flour. The only change I made was to sub some Khorasan for the toasted cornmeal (too gritty for me). Can’t wait to see & try yours!
Martin is my pal, and that's a great recipe. Mine is a little different, since it uses discard + yeast, but I borrowed some things from it.
that said: https://wordloaf.substack.com/p/sourdoughbisclava?utm_source=url
I have some basic pain de campagne in process right now, and in thinking of trying the kubaneh rolls recipe that was in the NYT recently.
Out of curiosity, why are you trying to develop a recipe without tangzhong? It seems like a pretty easy and useful technique.
You said it: out of curiosity! Also, there are drawbacks to tangzhong when it comes to recipe development, since it ties up some of the water, making it a challenge to use large amounts of non-water liquids (eggs, for example)
After baking a lot of variations on The Loaf and Loaf Classic, I've been trying some of the other recipes out of Andrew's index. So far I made the Anadama sandwich bread (which had a nice, complex flavour) and the Chocolate-Cherry-Cardamom Sourdough, which was maybe one of the most delicious things I've ever baked.
On a different note, for fun I recently built a web app for a bread recipe calculator that others may find useful, which is at https://sourdoughcalculator.shinyapps.io/calculator/. The app works on mobile and desktop browsers, and there aren't any ads or anything.
It works how I like it (of course), which is that you specify a total flour weight and hydration, then enter any percentages of additional flours and the percent levain, and it gives you the weights of the water and each flour you need. You can also adjust the levain hydration and composition lower down.
It's meant to be simple to use rather than comprehensive, so there's currently no way to add a preferment/tangzhong or other ingredients (although the yeast and salt fields can be used for other items since they're just baker's percent times flour weight.) You can save recipes by clicking the "Bookmark" button and then copying the URL.
There's also a DDT calculator based off of Andrew's formula, which I mostly included to make it easier for me to try using DDT more often.
If you're looking for a more comprehensive calculator, there's https://foodgeek.dk/en/bread-calculator/ and breadcalc.com among many others you can find by searching, though I haven't used either one much.
I hope some of you find it helpful (it was fairly popular on the r/Sourdough subreddit), and if you have any feedback or suggestions you can reply here or contact me through my email on the Help tab of the app. Oh, and the code is available on GitHub, also linked on the Help tab.
You’re a genius!!!
Haha thanks, but the actual geniuses are probably the R Shiny folks who made the web app easy to build and host
I'm excited to try this! Mostly I've been crazy busy these days with regular old sourdough....my little home bakery has exploded in popularity and I'm generally sold out within an hour of posting my week's offerings. VERY grateful - and thank you for the great methods and recipes, my customers love them! The Hot Cheesy Bread has been probably the biggest frenzy of late.
We are still playing a bit with the best doughs for the Ooni, have mostly settled on the version that starts with the poolish. Have another pizza party this week when my siblings and spouses visit Jacksonville from the Midwest. Trying the Miyoko's plant based mozzarella on a couple of pizzas since my SIL can't do cows milk. That will be fun! Any advice you have for plant-based cheeses would be welcome!
Taught my first cooking class last week - Carnitas and Carnitas Fried Rice. Sourdough 101 classes will be held in March. Just got a test recipe from ATK for a bread item so I'm looking forward to trying that as well.
King Cake season is upon us and I'm committed to 12 of them for my customers, so the next couple of weeks will be pretty insane! But they are so tasty, it's a labor of love for sure.
I downloaded the baguette class and got through most of it, also ordered the additional supplies and tools I needed. Now I just need to put it on my baking schedule.
Keep the fun new stuff coming!!
It took, me a year to dial in my pizza dough for wood fired cooking. It’s so different than in an oven! I have served up pizzas with Miyoko’s and as a dedicated cheese lover, I really liked it. It’s not the same as mozz, but still delicious.
So glad to hear that the Miyoko's was good! I'm so loving the Ooni, ours is gas, but wood fired would be amazing.
I put in a giant wood fired oven a few years ago! I love it but if I didn’t have that I’d be all aver the Ooni.
p.s. Sharon - I’m a not-quite-yet-retired project manager (soon, soon), and I’ve got a cottage license but don’t sell with regularity.
You will LOVE it! Being a PM for Healthcare IT projects for decades was awesome work but now I'm having a ball with my forever passion of baking and cooking! If you ever get to Jax, give me a shout!
I’m a home baker who tends not to tinker with recipes because it takes a long time for two people to eat through a bread (except the Spicy Cheese Bread, which disappears in a day). I’d love a recipe for honey wheat bread that has the softness and longevity of using a tangzhong, but I assume I can’t just apply the technique to part of the flour and water from any recipe, because part of the point is to up the hydration but keep the dough manageable. Happy to receive pointers or a link if any such thing already exists.
80° today, 40° Wednesday, so I guess I’ll be making more hot cheese bread soon. It makes me sad to eat soup without it these days.
I started the week with the same two loaves of the everyday bread I make every week (a multigrain porridge sourdough, my own formula), but I stuck the extra loaf in the freezer so I’m freed up to experiment with something new (open to suggestions!).
I have Leader’s two first books checked out from the library and I’m going to spend my day off poring through those.
Yay for getting cookbooks from the library, at least to determine whether or not you really want to own them
I'm using the long weekend to try the chocolate-sour cherry-cardamom sourdough loaf. It's in the fridge now, and will bake later this morning.
I’m using my backrahmen (wood baking frame) to make Irish Batch Bread. I love Patrick Ryan’s (Firehouse Bakery) recipe. Interesting how many different countries/cultures use frames for baking. Looking for Scottish recipes now.
Julie - thank you for reminding me of this and for giving me the opportunity to mention that I am working on a batch bread recipe to share here this year, along with info about the backrahmen you sent me! For others who are interested here's a link to the same one Julie generously sent for me to try out: https://www.etsy.com/listing/872059758/maple-backrahmen-for-bread-baking-wood
Thanks for the shout out. This is really what I have been baking. I watched a fun City Bakes Dublin with Paul Hollywood which led me to Patrick Ryan’s Batch bread. Easy and tasty!
“Sourdough English Muffin Bread 2.0” has become a staple in our house. Easy to make; freezes well; and toasts up beautifully. I make it in a Pullman pan. Currently trying a variety of focaccia recipes to decide which one we prefer. Wordloaf’s is at the top of the list now. Amazing how quickly a pan of good focaccia disappears.