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This afternoon, I baked the Brown Sugar Sour Cream Pound Cake from the KAF site. It's a favorite that I have baked before, and we will have it with fresh strawberries mixed with sugar and drizzled on a slice. I made two changes in the recipe: I cut the salt from 1 tsp. to 1/2 tsp. (With the sour cream, I figure it will not be missed.) I also substituted in 1/2 Cup whole wheat pastry flour for 1/2 cup of the KAF flour. I used the Bundt Vintage Star pan (10 cups). As it is a deeper rather than a wider Bundt pan, I baked the cake for the full 60 minutes.
With this cake I used the "grease" for the first time. I used 1/2 cup each of Crisco, Pillsbury unbleached flour, and canola oil. I used my immersion blender to blend it in the tall cup container that came with the blender. It mixed up very nicely. I used a silicone pastry brush to coat the pan; think of it as a paint brush and paint. I have stored the remainder in a container with a tight lid. (I have a lot left, as I intended, so that I can use it for other baking projects.) The cake baked nicely and released beautifully. I did not have the overbrowning that seems to happen with the Baker's Joy spray I've been using. The grease is also very inexpensive to make, and it allows me to reduce waste by never buying those spray cans again.
Thanks to S. Wirth who first wrote about the grease on the old Baking Circle. Thanks also to Mrs. Cindy who wrote about it with evangelistic fervor in a memorable thread from the second Baking Circle that now likely exists only in my head.
For dinner tonight, I'm making soup, mostly on the wood stove--a good recipe for a cold day that has had intermittent snow. I started by sautéing a package of ground turkey in a bit of olive oil, then added some chopped onion and celery, then sliced mushrooms. I peeled, then diced a butternut squash and added it. I had a container of about 6 cups turkey stock from the freezer. I used the Bob's Red Mill Vegi-Soup mixture of lentils, split green peas, and split yellow peas with barley (1 1/3 cups). I added an additional 1/3 cup pearl barley. I seasoned with 1 tsp. rubbed sage. I moved the covered pot to the wood stove at this point, and it should be ready in an hour. It will go nicely with the cheese crackers I baked yesterday.
What I get out of it is, kosher salt is more pure, 99.83 percent sodium chloride v 95 - 97 percent (is that significant?) and that it is affordable. Not sure I understand his objections.
addendum, In reading the comments on that article I see that the author owns an artisan salt company. Alright, I get it now.
Thanks, Mike and Wonky.
Bernard Clayton does not give weights--no one did back then. I'll list the ingredients:
2 1/2 Cups water
1/3 nonfat dry milk (I'll probably replace with a cup of buttermilk, and reduce water to 1 1/2 Cups)
1/4 Cup molasses
1 Tbs. salt
1/2 Cup wheat germ
1/2 Cup buckwheat flour
2 pkgs. yeast
2 Tbs. shortening (I'll probably use butter)
1 Cup rye flour
3 Cups whole wheat flour
1 to 1 1/2 Cups bread or AP flour.My mixer is listed at 1000 Watts. It does have an automatic shut-off, but I've never had it do so. I've done some three loaves recipes in it: Grandma A's Ranch Hand Bread (with about 60% whole wheat and additional flax meal) and Marilyn's Oatmeal Bread (KAF) with 2 cups whole wheat flour substituted.
I usually proof the yeast, mix the liquid ingredients, and then mix in the whole grains with the paddle. I do a rest period of 15-20 minutes before switching to the dough hook and adding the white flour with the salt. I adopted that technique after making the Grandma A's bread, and it seems to help the mixer incorporate all the flour more easily, and it gives the whole grains a chance to hydrate, so that I do not add too much additional flour.
I have found that when making bread dough with my mixer, I initially need to stop it and use the dough scraper to turn the dough over to make sure all the flour gets incorporated, but that does not seem unusual to me.
Bernard Clayton adds the salt with the yeast mixture. I usually hold it back and add it in with whatever white flour I'm using. I'll probably do that here.
I'll likely try this recipe, which makes two loaves, on Friday or Saturday, by which time we should be finishing up the last loaf I baked.
I've spent part of this drizzly day paging through Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads. I found a recipe that I would like to try, Dark Grains Bread, in the Blended Grain Breads chapter (223-225). He says of this bread--which has wheat germ, buckwheat flour, rye flour, and whole wheat flour, along with some bread flour--"It must be kneaded by hand, being too heavy for a dough hook or food processor."
The book was published in 1987. I'm thinking that 31 years ago, no home mixer could handle such a dense dough, but is that still true today? We now have the modern spiral kneaders that have replaced the former dough hooks. We also have more powerful mixers. My mixer is the 7-quart Cuisinart. I am thinking of trying this recipe with the mixer. I'd do the initial mix that creates the "batter-like" dough using the flat paddle. I'd then switch to the kneading spiral for the bread flour.
Any thoughts on that?
