Benito's blog

Tony’s recent beautiful rye loaf reminded me that I still had some whole rye flour in my cabinet.  So for this bake I used whole rye for the tangzhong which is 20% of the total flour and hydrated at 200% of the rye.  This creates a cement like consistency to the tangzhong that bakers who work with rye would be very familiar with so you have to get your pot soaking in water or else it can be challenging to clean.  I hadn’t baked a 100% Wholegrain bread in quite some time so I was overdue.

I’ve been busy in the kitchen recently and today had two things to bake.  For this SD Roman Pizza, I’ve made adjustments to my pizza formula to increase hydration by 3% and increase the PFF from the original 8% to 15%.  Next time I’ll up that again just so the dough will be ready for baking early enough for our typical early dinner time.

After my first rushed attempt at a naturally leavened panettone without much research, I decided to try again, but with more planning and using what I think is a more respected formula, with all due respect to Gluten Morgen. However, I am still reluctant to try to build a LM. I invigorated a new 50% hydration version of my starter over two days with feedings of 1:0.5:1 at 82°F to ensure that it could triple in 4 hours. To deal with the overnight, I decided to try using a sweet 50% starter by adding sugar to equal 50% of the water (not the flour).

I know panettone really does require quite a lot of planning and research as well as knowledge, so my first time doing it and attempting it last minute probably wasn’t going to turn out well for all involved.  On top of that, I didn’t use a well-regarded recipe.  Also, I didn’t create a LM and didn’t get good panettone flour.  So many strikes against this turning out well.

A friend of mine on Instagram was kind enough to share her formula for sourdough and hybrid sourdough cruffins/croissants.  My first attempt at making a laminated dough was my Danish loaf.  I unfortunately fermented the shaped dough in its pan at slightly too high a temperature so the better melted and was absorbed by the dough.  With that in mind, I chose a season with cooler weather, kept my range hood exhaust fan on, and opened my balcony door a bit to keep my kitchen temperature around 72°F.

I believe I found this recipe in Bake From Scratch if I’m not mistaken.  I love the idea of emulating a jelly filled dough in a cake.  The filling is homemade and although I increased the fruit in the recipe significantly and dropped the sugar by 50%, the filling I think could still be less sweet.  I like making extra jam for my morning yoghurt which is why I doubled the amount of fruit.  I also used frozen fruit since fresh is very expensive this time of year.  I haven’t sliced the cake yet since it is for a dinner party tonight.

I loved my last loaf but when I made it, my starter hadn’t been refreshed enough times to rev it up after my time away.  I loved the bread but thought it would be better with a more vigorous fermentation.  Things went much more as expected with this bake.  This took a total of 3 hours less time despite the same temperatures for fermentation. As well, the rise was much greater despite the shorter time, no surprise.  The final rise at the time of baking was 115%.

More Christmas baking today, I baked a pair of apple cranberry holiday cakes with lemon icing for more gifting.  I had a little extra batter that didn’t fit in the loaf pans so put that in two ramekins so we could taste this cake.

Now that I’ve finished my last locum of the year I finally have time to get some Christmas baking done for the people I like to thank each year.  Today’s bake was for the staff in our condo.

I’m using my standing sweet roll dough, which doesn’t have any added sugar to the mix other than that in the Stiff Sweet Levain.  As usual I use a stiff sweet levain in order to reduce the sourness of the bread.  The filling has cinnamon along with Chinese five spice and my homemade miso.  The frosting is a cream cheese frosting with a bit of miso for colour and umami.

I mentioned in my cake post that I was making purple sweet potato sourdough milk rolls, here they are.  Utilizing a stiff sweet levain to reduce the sour tang once again and adding a tangzhong to ensure fluffiness and to delay staling.  These turned out really well.  I love the colour of the soft shreddable crumb along with the small blisters on the crust.  For convenience I did a cold retard at the end of bulk so I could start these the day before our dinner party and then bake them the day of.