Blog posts

Banana Bread from Crust and Crumb

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Banana Bread Banana Bread In addition to all the yeast breads, including sourdoughs, Peter Reinhart has also provided us with recipes for other types of baked goods. In Crust&Crumb, he has a Banana Bread recipe I tried for the first time yesterday. Reinhart gives two methods of mixing: one if you use butter as the fat("Creaming method"), the other if you use oil ("Batter method"). I had an attack of self-restraint and used oil.

Home Milled with Malt Experiment

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As promised I did a test loaf with my home milled high extraction flour.  I used .01% of diastatic malt by weight of the flour and baked using my standard "test loaf" formula.  Once again, I went by the numbers - strokes, folds, dough temperature, and fermentation times as for my other loaves.

The results of the .01% malt are posted here: http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii183/proth5/Homemilledmalt1.jpg

chicago style pizza

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I grew up in the chicago area, and a staple in college was the deep dish stuffed pizza. Now I live elsewhere, and it's harder to find. Plus, the whole challenge of making your own is hard to resist. I've been happy enough with varios thin crust pizzas, but the other day on a whim searched on recipezaar for the ubiquitous stuffed pizza.... and I found it!

http://www.recipezaar.com/88044

SD Starter - Starting or flopping?

Well, it's day 6 and I have no idea what's going on with my little buckaroo. I stir it up, dump all but 1/4 cup, add 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 cup water, stir it up again, and all it does is make a layer of hooch after a few hours. I could swear that it grew to about 3 times its size on day 4, but I'm basing that on the residue on the sides of the container. I never actually saw it grow. I've kept a closer eye on it since then, and all it does is bubble some -- not a lot -- and form a layer of hooch. If it grows, it does it in the 10 minutes I'm not looking.

baking naan on the stovetop

[center]naan[/center] At some point not long after turning the oven on to preheat our bread stone, a fuse blew. We didn't notice until after putting the first two naan in the oven. Luckily for us though, we remembered that we had once made pita on the stovetop. So we quickly grabbed the tava (shallow pan in photo) and started heating it on the big burner. And disaster was averted.

Chinese steamed sweet pastry (Bok Hong Tay)

OK, so I just posted a recipe for Mochi, which is a non-yeasted dough.  This is "The Fresh Loaf," so I should also give a recipe that is at least yeasted.  Here is my Mom's version of bok hong tay, a sweet steamed rice cake.  Its name is literally "white sweet pastry" in Chinese.  You sometimes see it in Chinese restaurants for dimsum.  My Mom always made it on the thin side, but the restaurants tend to make a thicker version. 

Norwich Sourdough

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I decided to bake a version of the "Norwich" Sourdough I found on the Wild Yeast blog and think it turned out pretty well.  Obviously I need some practice slashing but I was happy with the taste and crumb.  I substituted 150 grams of whole wheat flour for some of the white and an extra 70 grams of water to compensate. I'm going to have to try making it with all white flour, I just can't make myself like whole wheat bread no matter how hard I try.

SD Starter - Day 4 - Tiny Bubbles

3/11/08 - 9:30 pm -- My little buckaroo didn't do much after last night's feeding -- he grew a tiny little bit for a little while, then went back to his original size. When I went to feed him tonight, he had a gajillion itty bitty bubbles all through him. The growth and the bubbles were actually more than I expected since I've read that after the early bacterial activity, the starter might go flat and do nothing for a couple of days. So happy to see activity. Stirred him up, dumped all but 1/4 cup, then fed with 1/2 c each of KA AP flour and water.