Blog posts

There are signs of life in my new starter. I fed it more whole wheat flour and water again today. On that note, I saw a professional baking blog post that irked me yesterday. Basically, when faced with a simple question about starters by an enthusiast new baker, Rose punts and says "it is too hard to explain to you.

I am trying to start another sourdough starter. I started it a couple of days ago. I looked at SourdoLady's starter recipe but didn't have any pineapple juice in the house, so I began with 1/3 cup whole wheat flour, 1/3 cup water, and a half a capful of apple cider vinegar. Day two (today) I added 1/3 cup water and 1/3 cup rye flour. I'm not seeing any signs of activity yet, but neither of the flours are particularly fresh so I may not have enough wild yeast in them to get started.

Tonight we are baking cookies for Santa. Lebkuchen and Sour Cream Sugar Cookies, two recipes that "Santa" is particularly fond of. :)

Today the start of my Christmas baking. First I will make the sponge and dough for the Blueberry Cream Cheese Braid. We're having that as part of our breakfast on Christmas morning. Then I am making Emeril's Cloverleaf Dinner rolls. I've made them once before and they are AMAZING! The best dinner rolls I've ever had. They have just a hint of sweetness to make them good with butter at dinner or jam at breakfast the next day. Those are for my Christmas dinner.

For my weekly batch of French bread, I tried autolyse again. This time I successfully combined it with a poolish. My overnight sponge was 8 ounces bread flour, 8 ounces water, and 1/8 teaspoon of instant yeast. My autolyse the next day was 10 ounces of water and 8 ounces of flour. I let that soak for 20 minutes, then mixed in the poolish along with 1 tablespoon salt and 1 heaping teaspoon instant yeast.

The raisin bagels turned out superb! Thank you, Floydm, for posting the recipe and instructions. I am already eating my second one! They came out with a good chew on the outside, and softer in the middle. Tastes just like a bagel! The 1 cup of raisins was just enough....each bagel has a good # of raisins throughout. I think next time I make them I will add another teaspoon or two of cinnamon. I used 1 TBS in this batch, and while I could taste the cinnamon, it was not as prominent as I wanted it to be.

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.