ph_kosel's blog

A nice desert bread! My newly invented recipe, a successful experiment.

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Bread with trail mix

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150 g orange juice
150 g milk
enough water to make soft dough
450 g bread flour
generous handful of nice trail mix
1.5 teaspoons yeast
1 teaspoon salt
spiced sugar for sprinkling

mix dough
let rise
shape loaf
second rise
slash loaf on cooking sheet
sprinkle with spiced sugar
bake at 450F in steamed oven for 25 minutes

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My friend Leo died earlier this year.  He was pretty sick towards the end.

Leo loved Choreg, a sort of Armenian holiday bread his mother used to make.

To try to cheer him up a bit I found a recipe on the web and made up a loaf for him, the first time I'd ever made Choreg.  

The recipe I used was this one: http://www.food.com/recipe/armenian-easter-bread-198715

I decided to use up the last of my surplus eggnog and try to improve over the recipe in my previous post.

Here's the recipe I used:

Ingredients

for the dough...

450 grams all purpose flour

450 grams eggnog (Southern Comfort brand)

1.5 teaspoons instant yeast

1.5 teaspoons salt

100 grams raisins

for the icing...

1 cup powdered sugar

2 tablespoons orange juice

0.5 teaspoons dried lemon peel

Procedure

I first warmed the eggnog to around room temperature.

I had some eggnog in the fridge approaching it's ""sell by" date and nobody in the house is a big eggnog fan.  

I looked at the ingredients list on the bottle (milk, cream,sugar,corn syrup,skim milk,egg yolks, and a bunch of mysterious flavoring and additives).  It sounded like the stuff somebody might put in sweet rolls or coffee cake.

Rather than throw the eggnog out I decided to try making sweet rolls out of it.

I had a hand at making a sourdough Limpa loaf similar to something I had at a potluck recently.  The Limpa I had at that party was very moist, around 50% rye, and flavored with molasses, fennel, caraway, anise and perhaps orange zest.  I found a recipe that may well be the same one HERE, and followed it.  I decided to bake it as a pan loaf instead of as an artisan loaf because the dough is extremely moist and (because of the high rye content) incredibly sticky.

After recently making spice buns using the recipe for "multipurpose sweet dough" on page 130 of Crust and Crumb by Peter Reinhart with so-so results I tried a modified version of the recipe.  Others almost universally include eggs in recipes for similar doughs, but Reinhart does not.  Assuming eggs might have have been inadvertantly left off Reinhart's ingredient list, I included 2 eggs (~100g) in my latest batch.  This resulted in a much nicer dough, soft and kneadable where the previous by-the-book dough was so dry it wouldn't come together in the mixing bo

I had a hand at making spice rolls using the recipe in Peter Reinhart's book "Crust and Crumb"

Ingredients (per Reinhart)

454 grams un-bleached all purpose flour

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1 Tablespoon instant yeast (see below)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 cup butter

8 ounces (227g) buttermilk at room temperature (see below)

1/2 teaspoon ground allspice

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

2 cups raisins

Procedure

I recently got some emmer (farro) flour from bluebirdgrainfarms.com ( link ) and have made 3 loaves with it so far.  I got interested in emmer after researching biblical era bread making. This post includes photos of my most recent loaf and a recap of my experience so far with this flour.

I recently got a $20 bakers couche from brotform.com and tried it out for the first time today.  I floured it up liberally and whomped up a couple of sourdough loaves with sesame seeds for tomorrow (Thanksgiving). 

In recent weeks I've been kibitzing a friend who's starting up a new restaurant where he's been trying out a recently purchased, second hand, commercial "combo oven".  The oven is proving a bit cranky and he's working out the bugs and tinkering with bake times and temperatures.  I got a chance to bake a couple test loaves in the oven and was very impressed with the "jump rise" achieved in "combo" mode (heat with superheated steam in the oven).