Benito's blog

I’m a bit out of practice making pastry. I usually only bake a pie when we have friends over for dinner. So with the pandemic it has been a while since I made one. For this pie I decided to try Kate McDermott’s all butter pastry from her book Art of Pie.

Traditional Art of the Pie All-Butter Dough

An all-butter crust is not as flaky as a butter and leaf lard crust, but the flavor can’t be beat.

FOR ONE DOUBLE-CRUST PIE OR TWO SINGLE-CRUST PIES

INGREDIENTS

2½ cups (363 grams) all-purpose flour, unbleached

½ teaspoon (3 grams) salt

Back from two weeks off without any baking. My starter was refreshed two weeks ago at 50% hydration, given 1 hour at room temperature then refrigerated. The pH had only dropped to 4.4 or so when I returned so there was plenty of food left. I discarded some, then brought the hydration up to 100% and did a small feed. He tripled in 3 hours but had not yet peaked, so I discarded and fed him again. 5 hours later he had peaked at 3.5-4x with the dome just starting to flatten. He was ready to build a levain for this bake.

Slowly working my way up in the percent whole wheat in my Hokkaido sourdough milk breads.  75% is the highest so far and I think it was quite successful.  I’m not sure how much higher I can go and still get the result that I’d like.  I did change things this time to add an autolyse because a majority of the flour is stoneground whole wheat.

This was a partially successful experiment using pandan extract and coconut milk.  The final bake leaves something to be desired, but my first attempt was a major fermentation fail.  In the first attempt, I failed to account for the reduction in hydration caused by replacing all the skim milk with full fat coconut milk.  The increased enrichment and decreased hydration caused fermentation and rise of the dough to go extremely slowly.  At first I thought that something must have gone wrong with my levain but in the end I don’t think that was the primary problem.

This is the same recipe as the recently posted 50% whole wheat Hokkaido sourdough milk bread except that the total dough weight was reduced to make 8 buns in a 9” cake pan. These are going to my sister’s house for our Canadian Thanksgiving dinner tonight, the first time having a family dinner since the pandemic started.

 8 rolls in a 9” round pan or

9 rolls in a 8” square pan

Ingredients

Sweet Stiff Starter 

Working with a new whole wheat flour now, this is a local organic stone ground flour that I’m hoping will taste great. I’m also hoping that the thinner crust I achieved recently by not baking in my dutch oven wasn’t a fluke so I’m baking open in my oven with steam using the Sylvia towel and a cast iron skillet again.  

You might recall that I made homemade miso that completed its 1 year fermentation in August.  I finally got around to using it in a sourdough bread.  I’ve made miso sourdough with various inclusions in the past but hadn’t made one in some time now.