Buns!

09Mar08

Spring is in the air, which usually puts me in the mood for hot cross buns. Little lightly-sweetened rounds of yeasted goodness, flavored with citrus and dried fruit, just bright-tasting little snacks. Yum.
I decided to concoct my own version of the hot cross bun. I had a recipe from Epicurious that [...]

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Testing the limits

27Feb08

A little while ago, I was reading in Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking that the notion of holding bread in the refrigerator (or some other cold place) was formalized by the Viennese bakers at the turn of the 20th century.  They did this because (in a nutshell), working all night baking bread for the morning rush [...]

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Tags: experimentation, long rise, potatoes

Cha-llah!

14Feb08

This week felt like a rich bread week, one without the trappings of good health (whole wheat) or specific purpose (pizza dough). I couldn’t bring myself to go for the full-on brioche– too much butter and eggs– but something along those lines seemed appropriate. I wanted something that would go well with marmalade, [...]

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Tags: Challah, precision

Whole-wheat bread

29Jan08

Sometimes, what I crave is something grainy and substantial, and at that point, only whole wheat bread will do. There are quite a few variations on this theme, some seeming to be of the opinion that simply using some whole wheat flour makes a whole wheat bread. It’s true that only using the [...]

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Tags: pre-ferment, whole wheat

Pizza dough, take two

21Jan08

Failure should be a learning experience, so I decided to tackle the pizza dough again. Things went seriously south on the first attempt (weak dough that held no air, general cracker-like result), and I needed to see why. For best narrative results, read about the failure first. Then the story seems more [...]

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Tags: pizza dough

Pizza dough failure

13Jan08

Well, if all of the bread turned out perfectly, I would never learn a thing. Usually, I don’t experience catastrophic failure in the bread realm; I can generally make it work through some tricky bit. Not this time, however. I’ll give the recipe and point out the several possible points [...]

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Winter oatmeal bread

10Jan08

This sounded like a good recipe to begin with, since (a) it is winter and (b) this is a fairly simple recipe. Before introducing bread baking terms like “windowpane” and “pre-ferment,” I thought I’d try something easy.
One way that I think about baking is how much time the recipe will require. For [...]

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Tags: oatmeal bread, spray oil, wet weather

Hello world!

04Jan08

One of my new year’s resolutions involved creating a blog. This resolution was on a list that included things like “See a dentist” and “Be a kinder, better person,” and I also wanted to do something fun. Not that getting one’s teeth cleaned isn’t fun, per se, but I wanted to be creative [...]

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