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I hope it isn't too late to add a recipe? I see that TT loooooooves butter so here is a real artery clogger for you. I make it every year to give as gifts because it is easy and tastes wonderful. When I arrived in America in 1967 one of my first friends was a Scottish woman and this is her authentic shortbread recipe.

Margaret McLaren's Scottish Shortbread.

3 sticks butter, at room temperature, 1 heaping cup of powdered sugar, 1 egg yolk, 4 cups ap flour, sifted.

Sift the sugar into a bowl and work in the butter and egg yolk with your hands. Mix well and add flour 1 cup at a time. Make into a jelly roll shape and divide into 3 for 8" to 9" rounds. Pat out on waxed paper - I line a layer cake tin with a circle of paper - to 1/2" thickness. Prick all over and score into segments, then crimp the edges with the fork. Bake at 300* for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Should be very pale.

If my d-i-l hadn't scared me with salmonella warnings I could eat the dough uncooked, it is that good. Yes, I used to do just that! Margaret didn't specify salted or unsalted butter, your choice. I did cut it into squares one year but the rounds are much easier. Hope someone will try it, A.

Seems like everyone has their favorite soups to go with their breads this time of year. Well even an ol' carnivore like myself enjoys a nice soup and bread now and again.  So here ya have it. 

This recipe was given to me by my co-worker, so I do not claim ownership.  I do however, find it most excellent!!!

Black Bean & Ham Soup w/ Lime Wedges

1 Large Onion, chopped

1 Large Clove Garlic, finely chopped

1 Medium Stalk of Celery, chopped

2 Teaspoons Parsley

4 oz. Ham, chopped

1 (14.5oz.) Can Reduced Sodium Chicken Broth

1/2 Teaspoon Dried Oregano

1/2 Teaspoon Crushed Red Pepper

1 (15oz.) Can Black Beans, drained

Garnish with Lime Wedges

Drizzle a little extra virgin olive oil, or whatever you use to prevent sticking, into a large saucepan.  Add chopped ham and heat over medium heat until hot ( I like it a little seared).  Add the onion and garlic and cook for 5 minutes or until onion is tender.  Stir in chicken broth, celery, parsley, oregano, and red pepper.  Heat to boiling over high heat.  Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 10 minutes.  During this time remove 1/2 cup of the black beans from the can and mash with a fork or potato masher.  At the end of the broths 10 minute simmer add the mashed black beans and the remaining whole black beans into the broth mixture and heat through.  Serve with lime wedges.

And don't forget to have some of your favorite bread on the side....

TT

TT's Other Breads

On Fleur-de-Liz's strong recommendation, I made Hamelman's Mult-grain Levain yesterday - a double recipe, in fact. Not incidentally, this was the first bread I've mixed and kneaded using my new Bosch mixer. (See my previous blog entry for details.)
 I had a slice ... well, two slices actually ... for bedtime snack last night and some more, toasted, this morning.
 

This was a very heavy dough because of the high proportion of seeds and grains in the soaker. The calculated hydration was 98%. Once kneaded, it acted like a "normal" dough of 68% or so to me. It was still on the sticky side of tacky when I formed the boules.
 

The bread baked up with a nice looking crust, but, presumably because of the high water content, it softened during cooling. Toasting crisped it up nicely, though. The crumb was moderately open, and it was nice and chewy. The taste was very nice. It has 2/3 bread flour and 1/3 whole wheat, not counting the bulgar I substituted for 1/2 of the cracked rye called for in the recipe. It had a pronounced whole wheat flavor with an overlay of flavors from the sunflower and flax seeds. The rolled oats, which were in the soaker, contributed to the aroma more than to the taste. 
 

This is a very good bread, but I can't say it is going to be a personal favorite. Of course, the competition for places on my favorites list gets stiffer every week it seems.

Hamelman's Multi-grain Levain

Hamelman's Multi-grain Levain crumb
 

David

Just the other day, Tuesday, I attempted another loaf without following a recipe, but rather the instinctive artisan intuition.

Well, this is the bun that popped out of the oven. It is my most successfull loaf ever, though the recipe will remain a family secret.

http://flickr.com/photos/leviathonlevain/2127217008

Merry Christmas,

Parousia

I think I gave my new Bosch Universal Plus mixer an adequate first trial this afternoon.

Last week, when I was effusing about how wonderful Hamelman's Sourdough Seed Bread was, Fleur-de-Liz came back with something to the effect that it was okay, but Hamelman's Multi-Grain Levain is really good.

This intelligence merged with my wanting to give each of my office staff a loaf of home-baked bread tomorrow, which is our last work day before shutting down until after New Year's Day.

So, last night I mixed the levain, soaked the soaker and, this afternoon, started making bread.

Now this reportedly wonderful bread has a bit over a pound of levain, a pound and a half of soaker, consisting of mixed grains and seeds, and a pound and a half of flours (plus water, salt and yeast). It's a somewhat wet dough, although it doesn't act like the actual hydration level of ... ready? ... 98%. That's because of the water in the soaker. The dough is heavy with coarse grains and seeds. The formula weighs 4 lbs., 11 oz.

I subjected the Bosch to a double recipe. That's over 9 lbs of dough.

Well, it pretty much filled the bowl of the mixer. I got nervous. The mixer yawned and just did it's job.

Hamelman's instructions, which are for a spiral mixer, call for 3 min. mixing on 1st speed and 3 minutes kneading on 2nd speed to get "moderate gluten development," whatever that is, and a dough temp. of 76F. At 3 minutes kneading, the dough was nowhere near developed, so I kept going. I stopped every couple of minutes, checked the gluten development and took the dough's temperature. It seemed to have my idea of "moderate gluten development" and the right temperature after about 9-10 minutes of kneading.

After 2 hours fermentation (at 69F) with a folding after about 45 minutes, the dough was really nice and developed - smooth and tacky but not sticky.  I made 5 boules (5 at 1.5 lbs. and 1 of about 2 lbs, with the remainder.

I wonder if the kneading time with the Bosch is generally so much longer than Hamelman specifies for a spiral mixer. I thought it would be shorter than the KitchenAid, but then maybe 2nd speed on the Bosch is slower than on the KA. How much can I generalize from the bread I'm making to levains without such a high proportion of soaker?

Any comments, experiences and suggestions from users of Bosch or DLX mixers would be gratefully welcomed.

 Davd

P.S. Photos and review of the bread are pending cooling, slicing, tasting, posing, etc.

Well, after a bit of a break from baking I'm trying to get the hang of it all over again. I had a few loaves I wasn't happy with so I went back to the first recipes I used, namely the 1984 version of Laurel's. I came up with these, they're the best ones I've made, so obviously I could use some tips! I pretty much make only WW bread, this time with KA.

I've only had the pleasure of visiting San Francisco twice, and both times it was on business. But I made sure to stop by the ACME Bread Co. store at the Ferry Building to pick up a small boule of that famous local sourdough, or perhaps a walnut or olive levain.

I'd never tried their baguettes, however, and, since I've recently been very much in the mood for a baguette, and since I'd not made a single recipe from Maggie Glezer's well respected Artisan Baking, this seemed like a natural for the weekend.

I was mightily impressed. The flavor was excellent, just as good if not better than the single step baguettes I made last week. If only I'd gotten ears all over the bread like the one at the top of the bottom loaf!

The recipe makes 2 lbs of dough, which gets split into two 8 oz. baguettes and a 1 lb boule. But I just divided it into three and make three 10+ oz baguettes. Because I shaped my last baguettes a bit tool long for the stone and had them drooping off the ends, I erred on the other side, and made these a bit too short, so they ended up looking a bit more like sub rolls than baguettes ... but heck, I called them baguettes, so baguettes they are!



I was particularly impressed by the crumb, which I got a good shot of the next day, as I made sandwiches. The internal structure was remarkably open given that the overall hydration is just a notch above 66%, a hydration at which the dough is very easy to handle.


It's an unusual dough in that it uses two different pre-ferments: a poolish and a pate fermente (also known as old dough). It's worth the trouble though.

Old dough

• Instant yeast: 1/4 tsp
• Water at 110 to 115 F: 1/2 cup
• Unbleached all-purpose flour (I used Giusto's Baker's Choice):3/4 cup or 115 grams
• Salt: 1/4 + 1/8 tsp or 1 gram

• Instant yeast: 1 Tbs of the yeasted water
• Flour: 1 cup or 150 grams
• Lukewarm water: 2/3 cup or 135 grams

• Flour: 2.25 cups or 340 grams
• Instant yeast: 1/4 tsp
• Lukewarm water: 3/4 cup + 2 Tbs or 180 grams
• All the poolish
• All the old dough
• Salt: 1.75 tsp or 9 grams

This morning I proofed and baked  Jeffery Hamelman's "Sourdough Seed Bread" from his book, "Bread." This is basically a pain au levain with toasted seseme and sunflower seeds and a soaker of flax seeds. Hamelman is clear that this bread's flavor benefits from slow fermentation. You can spike the dough with commercial yeast, but it's better not to. You can bake it the day it's mixed, but it's better to let it cold-retard. I went for all the flavor I could get, and I got it in abundance!

 This bread is really full of seeds. The fermenting dough is lumpy with 'em. It rose pretty well during bulk fermentation, but, after overnight in the frige, the boules rose maybe 30% in 3.5-4 hours, so I dumped, slashed and baked. They had amazing oven spring and bloom. After cooling, I sliced and had some with freshly made Italian bean soup for lunch.

I really expected this to be a rather dense bread. I thought all the seeds would wreck havoc with the gluten strands, and the minimal rise seemed to confirm that. It turned out to have a much more open crumb than I expected and, while certainly a substantial, chewy bread, it was lighter chewing than expected. And the flavor! The toasted sunflower seeds really came through. The seseme seeds were just an overtone.  Flax seeds baked into bread have a flavor I love, especially in a whole wheat sourdough. The bread itself had a nice tang and sweet, crunchy crust.

 I

Hamelman's Sourdough Seed Bread

Hamelman's Sourdough Seed Bread

Now Fleur-de-Liz claims Hamelman's multi-grain levain is even better tasting than this one. It's hard to imagine, but, if she says so, I'm going to have to bake that next. (Hey! No crowding in line!)

David

My grandmother used to make this back when I was a wee little runt.  She called it Peek-a-boo.  So thats what I call it.  It has a very simple list of ingredients and the kids love it (and so do I).

This is a Cherry Peek-a-boo

The ingredient list-

2 Sticks butter  = 226.8 Grams = 8oz.

2 Cups Sugar   = 426 Grams    = 15oz.

3 Eggs

1 Teaspoon Vanilla Extract

3 Cups Flour    = 492 Grams    = 17.3oz.

And then 2 cans of your favorite pie filling

20-21oz. Cans  = 567-595 Gram Cans

Directions are just as easy.

1) Cream butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla.

2) Mix in flour until all incorperated

3) Spread 2/3 of dough into a 12x18" greased cookie sheet

Spread both cans of pie filling across top of dough.  Then take remaining dough from bowl and flatten little pieces across top of filling.

Bake at 375' F. for 30 minutes (tops should be lightly browned)

Final product is kind of like brownie consistency. The Peek-a-boo is named from the fruit kinda peeking through the dough on top.

Not very fancy, but goes good with vanilla icecream or as a stand alone dessert.

Blueberry and Cherry Pieces

Total prep time - 10 minutes and thats doing everything by hand (Remember, I dont use a mixer for anything)

Bake time- 30 minutes

Cool time- 10 minutes

Time for kids to realize its done- 5 minutes before it even comes out of the oven... ;)

TT

Daniel Leader's Pain au Levain formula in "Local Breads" is a mixed white, whole wheat and rye bread. I have made it once before with sunflower seeds, but I thought I should try the "straight" recipe at least once. It turns out, I like it better without the seeds. The whole wheat flavor comes through better, at least fresh out of the oven (cooled for 50 minutes).

 I followed Leader's instructions, except i didn't knead at Speed 4 for 8-10 minutes. I did run the KitchenAid at 4 for bursts of up to 2 minutes. After 9-10 minutes, I got my first window pane! Woo-Hoo!

 We had the bread with dungeness crab cakes, a green salad and a domestic pinot gris. I'll definitely make this bread again. My wife announced I'm having it tomorrow morning as French toast. I think I can stand it. ;-)

Leader's Pain au Levain

Leader's Pain au Levain - Crumb

Preview of coming attractions: I have another Pain au Levain, Hamelman's levain with 3 seeds, in the refrigerator to finish proofing and bake tomorrow.

 David