Benito's blog

We are heading to my in-laws house this long weekend for a visit.  I wanted to bring bread because when we had our vacation from our vacation in Florida with them this past winter I didn’t have time to bake bread for them.  I still had some mashed purple sweet potato in the freezer from my stash last year so decided that this might be a good use of 100 g of it.  The only change from this bread from my previous bake is the addition of smoked paprika.  I was going to add cinnamon but wanted the bread to be more savory than sweet.

I wanted to bake something today that wasn’t too involved and didn’t plan for a bread.  I looked through my recipes that I have saved on my iPad and decided to make this zucchini cake.  The zucchini isn’t something that you’ll taste, but it adds fibre and liquid to the batter since you do not dry it out after grating it.  I love chocolate so the chocolate chips interested me.  finally, I still had some cream cheese in the fridge from my last cake that called for it so it was easy to decide on this cake.

We are having a mediterranean fish stew tonight for dinner and leftovers tomorrow so I decided to bake these spelt sourdough baguettes, which I haven’t done for almost 2 years.  Since I baked them last I’ve made some changes to how I develop the dough.  I now use my Ankarsrum Assistent which I find is as gentle as hand developing dough and I do much more gluten development than I used to.  The idea is that if I develop the gluten more than I used to, the dough should be able to be fermented for a longer time allowing better flavour development.

I hadn’t baked a cake in quite sometime and wanted something to share with the staff of our building.  I had this saved from quite sometime ago and never made it so it was overdue.

I continue to tweak my bakes even if the formula largely stays the same.  In the case of my SD baguettes, I have gradually (very slowly since I don’t bake baguettes all that often) been working on the idea that with greater gluten development I can allow more fermentation.  When we did the baguette community bake ages ago we came to the conclusion that less gluten development and less overall fermentation gave us a great baguette with open crumb and good ears/grigne.

I had just enough potato flakes to use at 12% so decided to use it up for this bake.  Once again, I didn’t make a tangzhong by cooking the potato flakes with milk, but in theory, you do not need to do that when using these dehydrated flakes.  Although the potatoes are dehydrated, the starches in them are already gelatinized so once they hydrate should give you the benefits of a tangzhong without the extra step.  I did find this to be the case as this bread is very soft and keeps from getting stale quite a while.

I thought I’d try something a bit different both in the dough as well as the shaping for these buns.  We are going to have fish burgers tonight so wanted buns for them.  The braiding was somewhat successful but could be better since this was my first time trying this.  A slightly lower hydration would have helped this immensely, but ensuring a bit more flour on the dough when making the knots.  The excess hydration was due to the egg being 11 g too heavy.  Next time I’d beat the egg and then add the correct amount.

I haven’t done this style of bread in sometime, I found a package of freeze dried strawberries in the back of a cupboard so it inspired me to use it.  Matcha and strawberries are great together.  Although I have made this style of bread before, I’d never done with with my mochi formula which uses sweet rice flour as the tangzhong.

I last made these around the holidays and wanted to make them again based on comments I received.  Essentially there wasn’t quite enough ginger in them, the cinnamon was dominant the first time.  I fix that I’ve increase the ginger by 50% and based on comments from people who ate them, I think I’ve got that right now.

My second go at this bread that uses sweet rice flour (aka glutinous rice flour) in the tangzhong.  Read my previous blog post for details as to why this type of rice flour is especially good as a tangzhong and prolonging the freshness of bread.  You’ll recall that this rice flour is also used to make mochi, which I have made before and it also delicious so it is a good thing to have around if you like Asian treats.