Benito's blog

I still have a bag of whole buckwheat flour from Anita’s Mill that I am finding hard to use up. I decided to try it in a milk bread for something a bit different.  Then because buckwheat has no gluten I decided I’d use it in the tangzhong and also as half the flour in the levain.  Buckwheat is neither a grain nor a grass, in fact it is a flowering plant related to rhubarb and sorrel.  It is considered a pseudo cereal.  The seeds of buckwheat are what is used to make the flour and it is becoming in vogue at the moment in French bakeries for bread. 

Heading to some friends for a celebratory lunch, one of whom is retiring. We cannot possibly arrive with only some flowers and a card, so what better to bring than some home baked bread. In this case I wanted to use fresh Canadian grown blueberries and enhance them with lemon.

Inspired by a recent post by Eric Hanner’s daughter, I decided to have another go at the deli rye recipe that Eric has shared with us.  As you may know he passed away before his time and although I didn’t know him, I know many of you did here on TFL.  Based on my previous bakes of this recipe, I’ve made small changes which are reflected in the spreadsheet and instructions.  If you’re worried that the onion flavour will be too much, you can just used filtered water instead of the water used to rehydrated the onions.

One of our closest friends are vegan so it is a fun challenge to have them over for dinner.  I still have frozen rhubarb from another friend who lives in the countryside so decided that the sour cherry rhubarb combination was so good it needed to be repeated, but this time without my all butter crust.

I had a bit of mashed sweet potato leftover from a previous bake and wanted to use it up. I decided to try adding it to a Hokkaido Milk Bread done with 30% whole wheat and this is what I came up with.

I’ve had this bake on my list for sometime.  I saved the recipe when I read through his book months ago along with a couple other of his recipes.  I have to say that we quite enjoyed the texture and flavour of this bread.  Very rustic with a new chewiness and that nutty sweet flavour that durum semolina has.  I used semola rimacinata flour as is typical for this bread from what I’ve read.

I hadn’t made a pizza in half year so it was high time that we had pizza.  I decided to try baking another Capricciosa pizza (capocollo, mushrooms, olives artichokes and tomato sauce) and ensured that the mushrooms were pre-cooked so that they didn’t flood the pizza with their liquid during baking.  To that end I dry sautéed the mushrooms after slicing them in sixths until they were nicely browned.  The artichokes I allowed to drain in a sieve so that they didn’t too much liquid to the pizza.

We are going to a BBQ at a friend’s home and I wanted to bring something for dessert.  I’ve only made these types of sweet rolls a couple of times so thought I would make sweet rolls.  I’ve been baking with whole grains more and more so decided I’d make these at 50% stoneground organic whole wheat.  With even 50% whole wheat these should still be fluffy, shreddable and soft.  We love cardamom but I wanted to add another flavour, I’ve recently been using orange zest a lot and thought orange and cardamom should go well together.

I’m joining my partner in Newfoundland to visit his family there. Working from home I was able to squeeze in a bake so I could bring some bread with me. Since my dinner guests all seem to have enjoyed my brioche, I decided to bake a 50% WW SD Brioche, but this time with the addition of dark chocolate chips to make it a bit more decadent.

Another variation on my 100% WW SD Hokkaido milk bread, this time with orange zest and poppyseeds. The weather is much more humid this time of year and as a result my flour isn’t able to absorb quite as much water as during the winter. I forgot to take this into account so the dough was stickier and more challenging to shape. Ultimately it baked up just fine, giving it a good couple of hours in the fridge would have helped a bit but I didn’t do that since I was out of bread so that is an emergency around here!