One of the benefits of a cold house is that laminating dough is easier. Got a request for morning buns, and I haven’t had an opportunity to make some in the new house. This batch used Peter Reinhart’s all purpose sweet dough recipe in “Artisan Bread Every Day.” The dough was prepared the night before, and the morning buns assembled the morning off. However, given the rise time requirement, it was more of a lunch bun treat.
The bake was at 375 degrees for 20 minutes.
Christmas morning requires a special breakfast, and breakfast treat for me is pan perdu. While I did bake a day before so I had some boules to sacrifice, I don’t routinely stock the fridge with cream. As such, we were forced with a low fat, milk version. Not as decadent, but surprisingly good.
Since I didn’t go into work on Thursday, I had a box of Stan’s Glazed Donuts at my disposal. Since there was no way I was going to throw them away, I knew it was time to let necessity take action. The best donuts in California will beget the best bread pudding, right?
Ingredients:
Method:
With the refrigerator retarding the dough, weeknight baking is pretty easy. While these weeknight loaves aren’t super impressive, they do satisfy the baking itch. And as raisin pecan sourdoughs, they are pretty decent. These are 25% raisins, 15% pecan, and 5% whole wheat.
After spending some time with the Haussler, it was back to the combo cooker for sourdough bread baking.
Here are some batards.
And the cross section. Slightly overproofed, though it didn’t feel that way with the finger/pressure test. Guess I’m not as good as I think I am 🙂
Sometimes baking bread over the weekend simply isn’t enough. While my week night sourdoughs don’t have the same panache as the weekend loaves, they are still satisfying to bake and eat.
The week night boule also highlighted that my bread knife needed sharpening. Its cutting ability can only be called “tearing.”
The Haussler bread oven, food as mighty as it is, troche had been recently relegated to pizza parties. And to be honest, it only makes so so pizza (or more likely, I can only make so so pizza in it). This weekend, I decided to use the oven for what it’s good at – baking bread.
After last bake’s too quick browning, I decided to lower the temperature to the recommended manufacturer setting for the top – 290 deg. Celsius. For bottom, I raised to 200 deg Celsius from the recommended 190. This would promote the proper bottom browning of my bread as the recommended temp left them pail.
With 4kg of dough, I made a combination of large boules, small boules, and batards. The breads are too blond, but they had been baking for over 30 minutes so I thought to take them out.
Here’s the family picture. For my non-baguettes, still finding it difficult to produce pronounced ears. My shaping technique isn’t different from when baking with a Lodge Combo Cooker, so my issue is managing the oven to produce the same results.
I have a lot of bread baking books that I don’t bake enough with. To change that, order I opened Rose Levy Beranbaum’s “the bread bible” and selected her Raisin Pecan bread as it’s a “favorite” and when baked, shop it’s the “centerpiece of [their] dinner.” Unlike my usual bakes, approved this bread required more work – the grounding of nuts, to make pecan flour, and the presoaking of raisins and reuse of the liqueur.
Since I was baking with the Lodge Combo Cooker, I used the standards times for my oven as opposed to the book. The higher temperature resulted in the outside raisins turning into carbon charcoal, but overall the bread worked.
We had some left over country loaf from Sunday’s bake. After a two days of eating bread with dinner, find I thought it would be good to have bread for dessert. A few months back, we had been watching The Best Thing I Ever Ate’s Rise and Shine Episode. What caught both our eyes was the thick cut pain perdue.
We only used one 2″ thick slice of bread, so I quartered the recipe.
Ingredients:
Method:
While I have been baking every week or so, allergist I haven’t been as dedicated with taking pictures and posting. This is mostly because I’ve been baking my default two sourdough country loaves and they look more or less the same as previous bakes and posts.
This weekend, I did become more ambitious and I baked three 990g large country loaves, 2 495g small country loaves and 5 395g baguettes is the Haussler stone oven. Took two separate bakes, and I set the oven a little too high in temperature. Should have kept the top temp at 290 degrees C (per instruction manual) while raising the bottom temp to 200 degrees C. Instead, I bump the top temp to 300 degrees C and the bread baked too quickly.
Lots of technical issues with the bread. The lack of ear on the baguettes are particularly galling. Hopefully, it won’t take too long to get back into the groove.
A family shot, minus one loaf that we were eating.
You can see some proofing issues as well the thin crust. However, it was still a pretty decent tasting loaf.
Packing to give away at work
