Benito's blog

I unfortunately am sick, but running out of bread, so I decided I needed to bake a loaf of bread that wouldn’t require excessive hands on time and allow for some inattention.  This type of bread does require great gluten development since it is fully wholegrain, so I use the KA mixer to do that which takes some load off of me.  I don’t need to measure pH or rise really with this since I know what the dough should look like in the pullman pan when it is done final proof.  I think it turned out well considering my lack of attention to it yesterday during fermentation.

I baked another Sour Cherry Rhubarb Streusel Pie for dessert last night but this time not vegan and used my usual all butter pastry and butter in the streusel topping. This has quickly become my favorite pie this summer.  I love the tart sweetness of the cherries and the distinctive rhubarb flavour.  The almond extract brings out the cherry flavour while the lemon brightens everything up.

I plan to make a barley risotto with lemon ricotta, sun dried tomatoes and spinach for dinner and wanted a bread to go along with it.  It has been a long time since I made a plain old country sourdough so decided that would go well with dinner. I made small changes to my usual country sourdough recipe for this bake.  I went back to using a liquid levain instead of a stiff levain just because I hadn’t done a liquid levain in a long long time.

We have friends staying over tomorrow night.  I am planning on baking a strata for breakfast on Sunday morning.  Because the strata requires an egg bread I decided that I couldn’t possibly just buy a grocery store challah for our friends’ breakfast.  So the decision was made to bake a delicious 50% WW SD Challah and push fermentation further.  This time I pushed the fermentation until the aliquot jar showed a full 190% rise at the time of baking.  At this point the poke test showed that the dough just slightly sprung back.

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.