Benito's blog

I first saw this type of shaped steamed bao when I borrowed Kristina Cho’s book called Mooncakes and Milkbread from the library.  My brother in law then emailed me a recipe for them out of the blue so I decided to make them.  Unfortunately my brother in law is no where near us so I’m unable to share this with him.  I’m pretty happy with how they turned out even if I didn’t do the twisting of the strips of dough prior to shaping them.

So I’ve gradually noticed differences between my two starters, one fed only white bread flour and the other whole rye starter.  The white starter I got from Alan (thank you Alan) and the whole rye is my own now what, four years old?  It is possible the differences I am seeing are due to differing microbes that inhabit each of the starters, or they might be purely related to the type of flour each is fed.

I’m not sure but I think it might have been more than a year ago that I made a 100% whole wheat bread of this sort.  I realized that I hadn’t even used my banneton this year yet so it was really overdue.  Since I am out of practice I decided to keep the same formula as my last loaf more or less but wanted to use my Ankarsrum Assistent to develop the dough.  As with my previous 100% whole grain hearth loaves that were successful, I sifted out the bran with my #40 sieve and then did a scald of the bran.  This was refrigerated overnight.

I have a new jar of yuzu tea.  So yuzu tea (or citron tea since it is Korean) is a marmalade like jelly made from yuzu that when mixed with boiling water makes a lovely drink.  I decided I wanted to make some sweet rolls and I wanted to have yuzu flavour to it so I would use the yuzu tea as the filling and I have a bottle of yuzu extract that I would use as the liquid for the drizzle/icing. Despite the name of these rolls, they aren’t very sweet.  Other than the sugar used for the stiff sweet levain, there isn’t any sugar added to the dough.

For the dinner party last night we had one guest who won’t eat cooked vegetables!  What to prepare that he will eat?  Pulled pork sandwiches as the main, along with coleslaw.  For appetizers I served pork, shiitake mushroom and Napa gyoza that I made a while ago and froze.  These are great to have frozen so you can save prep when having a dinner party.  The pulled pork was made using my Instant Pot.

We had guests over last night for dinner so wanted to make a pie for dessert.  As you might know I love sour cherries and love rhubarb so decided to make a pie with both but this time with a streusel topping.  For pate brisée recipe look at this previous post.

I'm really enjoying making this style of pizza.  It is quite filling and one pizza makes two dinners for us.  This time I didn't have my usual all purpose flour so used bread flour.  I also used whole wheat flour this time instead of either spelt or kamut just to try something slightly different.  I don't find that I can taste much difference between the pizzas made with the different flours since the toppings really are the most prominent flavour of the pizza. 

So I needed a dessert for brunch so decided to bake a cake.  This recipe interested me because 25% of the flour is whole rye (the recipe calls for medium rye but I used whole rye) along with olive oil.  Both gave this cake more complexity than straight AP flour and a neutral oil would.  Also, in a nod towards making it lower fat I substituted Greek yogurt for the sour cream.  This is still acid enough to leaven the cake, although a bit more acid might have given it just a bit more of a boost.  This cake delicious and will keep for days given the olive oil in it.

We had friends over for brunch this past weekend and decided that a savory strata was going to be served.  So of course, I needed to make a challah for this, but didn’t have enough time for a sourdough challah due many other things happening.  So here is my recipe for a IDY fast all in less than a day delicious challah with some whole wheat.

We are visiting my partner’s sister this long weekend so of course I want to bring a loaf for them.  I was back working this week, I’m semi retired so I’ll do locums to cover for my old colleagues at the clinic when they go on vacations.  I get to pick and choose how much I work and I enjoy doing this kind of work since people are happy to be able to see a physician when something urgent comes up and theirs is away.  Anyhow, because of work, I had to compress my prep time, so instead of a pure sourdough leavening for this loaf I did a hybrid with 0.2% IDY added.