Blog posts

23Feb

I love adding cheese to my bakes. Usually, I cut the cheese in small pieces or chunks and fold them in, but I decided I wanted to use shredded cheese and added some to the starter. I used Parmesan and smoked cherry cheddar cheese. The combination really imparted a noticeable cheese flavor and when the bread is toasted or grilled it smells amazing.

Just out of curiosity started an experiment with some no name(*) white flour (soft wheat) from the supermarket, protein 11%-12%. Nothing special, I assume the amount of gluten is rather below average.

I'm curios, how far I can go. Started with 5% whole wheat, 5% rye, 65% hydration, cold final proof. I'd prefer warm final proof, but was not possible because of time constraints.

I had half a bag of fine cornmeal left in my pantry, and thought of making some corn bread. I consulted Ian's 2014 post on Broa de Milho before baking, and decided to use rye (10%), cornmeal (40%) and bread flour (50%).

Another recipe from the Gluten Free Gastronimist this time without the rice flour and now using quinoa and chickpea flours. So, no grains!

This is their grain free bread:

I'll be the first to admit to having multiple gluten free failures! Many kinds of ugly monster breads, in fact.

Nearly a year ago, Martadella wrote about making a lovely gluten free bread.

This is the recipe:

A back to basics day with two simple bakes.

First - gluten free crunchy-outside-chewy-inside almond cookies that take 5 mins to mix and another 13 to bake.

To make 30 small cookies

Arthritis threatens me with an eternity of store-bought bread unless I can find a stand mixer that can knead dough.  I have 2 Kitchenaids that are only good at teaching dough to pirouette. 

I was looking for an easy way to make a slab of butter for laminated dough, and this worked a dream. I used the two sizes of vac bag in the first pic to plan out how big I wanted to roll the dough out. Then I vac sealed the butter (straight out of the fridge, no need to soften), flattened initially by hand, then used the rolling pin to fill all the corners of the bag with butter. 

To remove, put the bag in the freezer for 30-45 mins until it is frozen hard. Cut open and peel away the bag. It is soft enough to work after 10-15 minutes sitting on the dough.

It's been awhile... I've started venturing out again beyond my weekly sourdough. This was primarily spurred on by starting to get my whole grain from Barton Springs Mill instead of Azure. I cannot heap enough praises on the flavor and aroma from everything I've got from there. The ryes, in particular, are stunning. More on ryes down the line, I've had some good successes there.