Benito's blog

I’ve never made hot cross buns before and have only had supermarket ones that I never liked. Having a new appreciation for candied peel I decided that I would try my hand at developing a formula for a sourdough 100% whole wheat version.

Tomorrow is Pie Day 3.14, what do you have prepared to celebrate? Instead of a double crusted pie I decided to bake a tart today (Pie day minus 1 = 3.13 ). The lemons looked really good yesterday at the market so decided upon a lemon tart which uses a pate sucrée pasty.

I like an extra lemony and tart curd so my curd has a bit more lemon zest and a bit less sugar than I usually see in the lemon fillings in recipes.

For the pastry - pate sucrée

I am presenting this bake of my 3.0 version of this bread to show how it does without any added VWG.  As I suspected the VWG really helps with getting the super tall loaf that I love seeing.  Without the VWG, the loaf is a normal profile, neither tall nor short.  I’m not mad at it.  It’s good to know that VWG isn’t absolutely required.

I’ve made my country sourdough recipe numerous times in the past, but I’m always tinkering with my formulas. This time I employed both a stiff sweet levain (I didn’t want this bread to be sour) and I also added an egg. The addition of the egg is said to improve oven spring and may help with achieving a thinner crispier crust given the additional fat.

I haven’t made a savory roll in quite some time and have always had in the back of my mind that I’d do one with pork floss.  Are you familiar with pork floss?  It is something my mother used to make for us.  You essentially fry pork with seasonings until it is dried out and stringy.  Sounds delightful doesn’t it?  Actually it is really delicious.

I haven’t been able to definitively find out what the difference between shokupan and Hokkaido milk bread is.  What I think is correct is that shokupan has less sweetness to it than Hokkaido milk bread.  If that is the case then I think my recent formulas for Hokkaido milk bread with the decreased sugar probably are more like a shokupan.  For this bake I wanted to know whether or not I really needed the VWG in the dough or not.  I also decided that I would also shape differently for shokupans than Hokkaido milk breads to further differentiate them by look.

This is the first time I’ve baked bread down here in Fort Lauderdale Florida while on vacation.  I wasn’t planning on baking so didn’t bring any starter with me.  I met with Alfanso while down here and he was kind enough to have given me some osmotolerant yeast from his stash that he got from Amazon.  So while having bread baking withdrawal I decided that I’d bake some bread.  We are having a small group of good friends over for dinner tonight and took the chance to bake buns to go with dinner.  Who doesn’t like freshly baked buns with their dinner?

I'm going to be on vacation and away from my starter for almost a month.  So no baking while on vacation.  So this is what I am doing to ensure my starter, John Dough is healthy and ready to go when I return.

I’ve been gradually making adjustments to my formula and in this case I’ve increased the hydration via increasing the proportion of flour in the tangzhong from 5% to 7.5% keeping the ratio of flour to milk in this tangzhong to 1:5. The resulting dough is a bit stickier to work with, however, I’m hoping that the crumb will be even more soft and tender yet still shreddable.  You probably have noticed that I love black sesame seeds so that was always going to be a good inclusion for this bread.

Still working my way through my 2 kg bag of stoneground organic spelt and hoping that I’ll figure this ancient grain out eventually.  I wanted to try again at using only spelt for a Hokkaido milk bread.  My first attempt was tasty but a bit squat for my liking.  Thinking that the gluten net just wasn’t strong enough to retain the pressure of the expanding gases during baking I though that I could improve the bake by increasing the VWG in this recipe.  I also increased the tangzhong to 5% and increased the milk.