Blog posts

About a year ago my wife, Carol, and I went to my favorite coffee store, Barefoot Coffee in Santa Clara (California). Carol doesn't like coffee so she picked out a pastry from the pastry display. It was something I'd never heard of before called a Kouign Aman. It was crispy, crunchy, sweet and buttery. It was so good that we started making trips to Barefoot just to get the pastry. We eventually found out they're made at Satura Cakes in Los Altos. Now, whenever we're in the mood for a really good pastry we go get a kouign aman.

Does anyone have a recipe for German brötchen?  These are breakfast rolls usually made in 3 to 3 1/2 inch ovals.  They have a hard crust and a soft chewy inside.  I prefer white over whole wheat for this roll.  I am especially interested in knowing which of the flours available in the USA come closest to the German flour used.

A recent discussion of Dan Lepard's Black Pepper Rye got me interested in this bread. There are enough interesting aspects of this mix and method I had to try it. I followed the steps outlined in Dan's blog and carefully examined the detailed photos he provided. The process calls for boiling coffee with half the rye, pepper and the seeds. I watched carefully as bubbles started to erupt off the bottom of the pan. I thought surely it isn't actually boiling, I'll let it go just a little longer.

For some reason my starter takes way too long for the second rise and I underestimate the time it takes to get a 'solid bread'. Solid I got this time.. brick (on the left). Don't know why I did not see that coming, didn't see the signs. I thought/hoped the oven would do wonders. From last time I learned to always make different kinds of bread, it increases my changes on a good result. See the improved starfish bread! (and the originator of the idea)

We started the day with Sourdough English Muffins.

After lunch I made my first batch of Anis Bouabsa's baguettes.

Getting ready for some Italian hoagies!  This is the recipe from the King Arthur bread recipes  http://kingarthurflour.com site type in scali bread in the recipes search box.  I hand mixed and did stretch and folds.  After my biga or starter they call it 'which can also be made with a 'biga naturale' for a little more chew...it was ready from a long night in my cool bathroom..this morning the starter looked perfect and I cut it up into the room temperature water, mixed it real good to start it dissolving added the olive oil a

Dan Lepard had a great recipe in The Guardian magazine back on 19 September 2009. I don't recall anyone here posting about it, but when I tried it I encountered a problem. Nothing insurmountable, though, thanks to Dan's forum.

Anyway, I wrote about it in detail at my blog. I'm putting this here in case anyone else comes looking.

And here's the warning: be very careful not to overheat the initial mixture of rye and coffee.

Happy baking

Jeremy

Jan Hedh, the Swedish bread, pastry and chocolate master, has recently put out his second bread book; the new one is titled "Bröd & kaffebröd" ("Bread and pastries"). I've just picked it up, and baked the first loaf from that book this weekend. It's an inspiring book, written in a style similar to his first bread book, but this one's filled with even more gorgeous photos. Hedh is passionate about bread, and provides detailed recipes for several European style hearth loaves and for breakfast pastries (mostly croissant, Danish and sweet dough oriented stuff).

These breads were made with my recently activated San Francisco Sourdough starter from sourdo.com. I used 100 gms of starter fed with a mix of AP, WW and Rye flours, 500 gms KAF Sir Lancelot flour, 360 gms water, 10 gms salt. The formed loaves were cold retarded for about 14 hours.