Blog posts

Finished with my bagels for the night. They are now resting comfortably for 20 minutes or so on a sheet pan in a plastic trash bag. When my kitchen timer beeps, I will put them in the fridge for the night. A few interesting points: 1. I am aiming for a somewhat normal cinnamon-raisin bagel. I combined the recipe from this site with the cinnamon-raisin bagel recipe from fooddownunder.com, in hopes of achieving a balance between the two. 2. I could not for the life of me get that last 3/4 cup of flour into the dough. I think this might have to do with the addition of the 1 cup of raisins.

I'm working on some bagels right now, using the recipe on this site and a few ideas from the fooddownunder.com website. My sponge is rising at the moment. At 7pm I can move on to step 2. I love the idea of beginning bread at night and then making something fresh in the morning. One of my favorite recipes is for buttermilk bran muffins. They keep for 3 weeks in the fridge and you can scoop just what you need to make a few fresh muffins every morning.

Homemade pizza is a major comfort food for my husband and me, and we really need it today. The holidays are wonderful and all, but sometimes they come with a little too much family strife. The family politics this year are pretty bad, and we're both getting down about it. So I decided a little dough-kneading and cheesy wonderfulness was in order. My pizza dough is rising right now. I started making my own crust several months ago, after I finally got sick of the cardboardy taste of those prepackaged "just-add-water" mixes.

OK, here we go! I have avoided trying a lot of gluten free recipes till now, because they required the addition of xantham gum. This replaces the stretchiness of the missing gluten. Not that there is anything wrong with this additive, but it is fairly expensive and just seemed "unnatural". Attempting recipe for Cinnamon Rolls from a book given to me by my daughter last Christmas - About time! Picked up some sorghum flour and tapioca flour - had the xantham gum. Recipe went together well and is on first rise as I write this.

Just thought I'd post my first entry to introduce myself. My current baking projects include a selection of cookies which I am baking as gifts for my family, and several breads for Christmas. I plan to use the Blueberry Cream Cheese braid recipe from this site for my Christmas morning bread. Things I bake the most often are: homemade pizza crust, biscuits, and cloverleaf dinner rolls. I also like to make a couple of loaves of bread on the weekends. One of my baking struggles is sourdough bread.

Schiacatta with grapes. Used star-anise instead of anise.. Added a lil fennel seeds too. If a touch of Chiati was added, it'll be more remarkable. Nevertheless, a nice crisp bread. Best eaten fresh out of the oven. :)

I'm back from Texas. Afraid I didn't find the time to go bakery hunting. The closest thing to an artisan bakery I found was the Au Bon Pain sandwich shop in the DFW airport. I did get to try one of the cakes from Collin Street Bakery, their pecan apricot cake. I'm not a fruit cake fan, but I have to admit it was darn good. Glad to see that folks were able to help each other out here while I was out.

Hi all you busy bakers, I have been struggling for a while with just not getting that beautiful light open airy texture to my doughs. Its come close at time with Pizzas and flatbreads but no cigar yet. For some reason I just brought up baking breads with someone and they told me about using water that had been purified by reverse osmosis. Never to use just tap water. Recently I was at my wits end as I always proof the yeast first and saw very little activity after 10 min. everything was done up to par. Threw it out the batch 2x's. I opened a brand new yeast packet same result.

Since we had another half a pot of soup leftover for dinner, I tried the autolyse approach again today (see yesterday's post). Much better results this time. My dough was real basic again:

13 ounces bread flour 9 to 10 ounces water 2 teaspoons salt 1 heaping teaspoon active dry yeast (activated in 1 ounce of the water for 5 minutes).

I changed my technique a bit. I mixed the bread flour (all I had in the house) and 9 ounces of the water together in a bowl until the flour was all moist.

I, too, had a doughy disaster today. I was trying to make a simple French/Italian bread using both a poolish (a wet, yeasted, overnight pre-ferment) and an autolyse (a flour and water quick pre-ferment). The poolish was too wet, the autolyse too dry, and when I tried to mix them together I could not get the chunks of autolyse dough to combine with poolish. It ended up having the consistency of chicken and dumplings.