dabrownman's blog

Our tradition has always been, since my daughter can remember, to have pizza on New Year’s Eve.  This year my daughter’s boy friend wasn’t able to attend so we put off the pizza until he could – on New Year’s Day.

So pizza was the first bake of 2013 and after Pure Ugly Panettone for the last bake of 2012, we wanted to start off right.  We went back to our real old non SD, non whole grain dough at the daughter’s request.  Seem’s like kids get anything they want now a days.

The last bake of 2012, panettone, was supposed to cap off a year (actually 11 months) of usually decent individual and different bakes with different formulas that numbered well over 100 – quite an achievement that deserved a year end spectacular panettone.  But alas, it was not to be.

Sadly, baking gremlins worked their evil spells as soon as the fine looking, up to that point, panettone, hit the oven.

We made these the same way as always but these I would have to call a failure compared to: 15% Whole Wheat Bagels with YW and SD Desem Combo Starter   Use that post for the method with the changes listed below.

Ihe been 6 weeks since we wrapped up the stollen in a cotton tea towel and put it on teh back patio to age gracefully in a tin here:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/30996/not-so-stollen

and here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/31088/not-so-stollen-thanksgiving-take

Our take on Breadsong’s fabulous Christmas Rose was to make it Green with basil pesto and Red with home made sun dried tomatoes.  We used our combo yeast water, rye sour and Desem sourdough starters with our 30% whole gain multi-grain mix of Kamut, dark rye, spelt and whole wheat.

We were struggling with our normally robustmRye sour and Desem mixed SD starter.  It had been left for dead after its last feeding and storage about a month ago.  I had baked 4 loaves of bread from the 80 g stored and had 40 g left and it was looking the worse for wear.

Continuing on with her Puff Paste adventure, my apprentice decided to do a take off on rugelach.  Rugelach has cream cheese in the dough and are just fantastic with any filling imaginable.  If you aren't making them for the Holidays then the Holidays where will be slightly less festive than they should be ;-)

Now that the AZ weather has turned off the 6 month oven time bake, we can get back into puff pastry and other laminated dough like croissants – Yeaah!!

I took some paper and cut squares with scissors until I got a shape I liked.  You fold the square corner to corner first.  Then you make 4 cuts from the long folded edge toward the opposite point but don’t cut all the way.

The last two bakes were a lower and then a higher percentage of whole grains  and more complex that this one at 48% whole grains.   We also used the KA mixer on speed 3 to knead the dough for 8 minutes instead of using French slap and folds and we baked the bread in a DO instead of on a stone with steam.

This is another take on a multi-grain bake we did not s long ago that you can find here;

60% Whole Grain SD / YW Bread With Caraway, Rye Chops, Coffee and Cocoa