pmccool's blog

I'm back from a week's vacation in the San Diego area with my wife, her brother, and his wife.  We did a lot of the touristy things, including the zoo, the Midway aircraft carrier tour, watching sunsets from the beach, whale watching, Balboa Park, museums, eating some fabulous Mexican food and seafood, horseback rides, and a vineyard tour/tasting.  Each of us came away with our own set of highlights from the trip but one of the best for me was spending a good chunk of this past Wednesday visiting and baking with Stan Ginsberg at his home.

I received a new My Weigh KD-8000 scale to replace the Oxo scale that developed some form of digital psychosis recently.  More capacity and an even easier to read display make it a pleasure to use.  It's already received quite a workout just since Christmas.

A couple of weekends ago, I was doing some test bakes to finalize recipes for a class that I will teach in December.

First up, Julekake, glossy with egg wash:

And the Julekake crumb:

And it tastes even better than it looks, what with the fruit and cardamom flavors.

My second bake from last weekend had more to do with some fresh figs that I had found than it did with bread.  Although I grew up on a farm and had plenty of first hand experience with many kinds of fruit, figs weren't part of the local scene.  I don't recall seeing a fig outside of a Fig Newton cookie any time prior to my high school graduation.  When I did eventually encounter figs in their whole form, they were dried instead of fresh.  The farm, by the way, is located in northern lower Michigan, which explains the dearth of figs.

Consistency has much to recommend it but a person needs some variety in life, too.  Hence the first bake from this past weekend - Hamelman's Whole Rye and Whole Wheat bread.  Mostly.  It seems as though I've had more than my share of white breads in recent weeks.  It wasn't the result of any grand plan, just happenstance.  And they were good breads, too.  They just left me wanting something browner and grainier.  

Two weekends ago, I brought some Portugese Sweet Bread dough home from a class I had taught about sandwich breads.  One weekend ago, I baked the bread.  This weekend, finally, I have an opportunity to post about it.

Between wanting a break from my GF experiments and my starter requiring a refresh, it was time to bake something different, something with sourdough.  For reasons not entirely clear to me, I keep going back to Leader's Local Breads in spite of its known defects.  It probably has something to do with the fact that the breads, when they work, are just so good.

This past week, I've been enjoying my lunchtime sandwiches made with my first-ever gluten free bread.  It's been a learning experience, in a good way.  The flavor is pleasant, albeit not the least bit wheaty.  I think I'd like it better without the buckwheat flour but that's purely a personal taste issue.  The crumb is moist and slightly spongy, with just the faintest hint of grittiness.  The texture is fairly close-grained, with plenty of small bubbles of fairly uniform size.

It's been two months since I last posted and I've scarcely gotten past the lurking stage here at TFL in that time.  The new project has kept me very busy at work, with more overtime than I care for.  The good news is that if the project progresses past the current stage, I'll get to work even more overtime for the next three years!  Yippee!  It's kind of like the airlines; if you fly with them often enough, they reward you by - wait for it - letting you fly even more!

January has been a busy month already and there is nothing to indicate that it will slow down anytime soon.  Consequently, I haven't posted much recently but I have been busy with baking.