Blog posts

This year we will be away until just before Christmas.  As a result, I need to do at least some of my Christmas baking before we go.  I’ve been eyeing the mazanec recipe from Maurizio Leo since Easter.  I realize that Mazanec is an Easter bread, but the recipes for Mazanec and Vanocka are so similar and since Vanocka is a christmas bread I thought I would try making these.  The Mazanec seems to be shaped as a boule and given a cross scoring.

I have posted similar loaves in the past, but there's probably been enough change to the formula, I thought I'd add a new entry.  This bread is what I make every week about 90% of the time (my recent olive and cranberry loaves notwithstanding.) Over the past year or two, I've swapped the amounts for whole wheat vs durum, in favor of a higher % of durum in the mix.  All of the non-white flour is freshly milled in my Komo Fidibus mill.

Oh, and I've confused people in the past with the RWC abbreviation......it's the city I live in (Redwood City.) :)

FORMULA

When I read Ian's recent blog post, I put this one on my short list for bakes.  Not only because of the Guinness, but the blend of grains as well.

Please see here and here to learn more about concentrated lactic acid sourdough (CLAS). 

This pumpkin bread is made with fresh 100% white whole-wheat flour. Pumpkin puree makes up approximately 85% of the liquid in the bread.

No egg or butter is used. Instead, mascarpone cheese is used to achieve a "cleaner" pumpkin taste.  

This is my first bake using my new Ankarsrum Assistent to develop the dough.  What they say is true, there is definitely a learning curve and I am at the beginning of that slope.  This would usually take 30 mins from start of mix to the end of kneading in the KA mixer, not that I could safely do two loaves though.  With my being totally new to this mixer and wanting to try both the dough hook and the roller, it took me 60 mins!  Much of it was me f’ing around though so I can’t blame the Ankarsrum Assistent.

I just unboxed, cleaned and setup my new Ankarsrum Assistent, I’m loving the build quality and this gorgeous orange we picked.  I can’t wait to try it out.  I plan to bake two Hokkaido milk breads tomorrow.  Hopefully I’ll have a glowing review and I hope I can learn to use this quickly with tomorrow’s bake.  In the meantime here are the photos.

I’ve had this loaf on my list to bake for sometime.  I’m still not sure that I love high percentage rye breads, this one is 59%, but wanted to try a different recipe to find out.

We have friends coming into town this week, so I needed more bread on hand.  Seemed like a good time to take a run at Holiday Cranberry v2 (now BASED on Trevor Wilson’s formula, but tweaked more to my starter/process.)  Everything went very well with this bake EXCEPT for a hydration issue……. After I got all the water, levain and flours into my Ank, it was dry as dry could be!!

As part of my search for some new formulas to work with (with an eye toward the holidays), I spent some time perusing PiPs blog posts.  If you haven't had the time to look through his content, I have to say, I could spend a month or two just baking some of the absolutely delicious looking breads that he presented here!  Lovely stuff!

Having friends over gives me an excuse to bake dessert.  Bags of lemons were on sale so I decided to bake a lemon tart.  I hadn’t tried lemon curd with chocolate before so decided to bake my chocolate pate sucrée for this tart.  Since the curd recipe leaves me with 4 egg whites I decided to make Bravetart’s marshmallow meringue to top the tart and then torch the meringue for a nice finish.