What are You Baking the Week of August 13, 2017?

[BakerAunt]

I am not baking today, as we are eating what I baked last week. However, I found some beautiful peaches at the local farmers' market yesterday, and the Peach and Ginger Turnovers recipe in KAF's Whole Grain Baking (pp. 513-514) has caught my eye for later this week.

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[cwcdesign]

I didn't bake yesterday, but I made chocolate mousse with the leftover ganache and cream from the Boston Cream Pie. Then I added mini chocolate chips.

And we agreed that the BCP tasted better after letting it sit for a day or two

[Italiancook]

I baked 2 loaves of Amish Bread for the first time. Used allrecipes.com recipe. I baked this one other time and turned it into Raisin Bread. Now that I've baked it just as white sandwich bread, I have some questions. Keep in mind that this is only my first time baking sandwich bread. Normally, I make Italian or Cuban Bread. Questions:

(1) How brown is a loaf of white sandwich bread supposed to be? Or, do you go by the temperature? If so, what temperature do you seek? The loaves I made are light brown, and I didn't think to check their temperature. The recipe said to bake 30 minutes, and I did, in a preheated oven.

(2) When I bake Italian and Cuban Breads, I don't temp them. I bake them the recipe-suggested time and make sure the bread sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. When I tapped this sandwich bread, there was no hollow sound. Instead, the bottom "gave" when I tapped it. I assumed this was because it's supposed to be soft bread, not crusty like the ones I usually make. Did I err?

(3) I have hot-burning under the cabinet lights. I used them to rise bread during cold weather. Today, being hot weather, they probably worked to my detriment. Both rises took half the time than the recipe suggested, because of the heat from the lights. I was working in the kitchen during the rises, so I kept on the lights.

The finished products have cracks on the ends at the top of the bread pan area. In other words, below the dome of the bread, but only on the short ends. Do those mean the bread rose too high while resting?

The bread is cooling, so I don't know what it looks like inside. The recipe calls for 2/3 cup sugar. I used only 1/4 cup, which one reviewer said makes a fluffy loaf. At any rate, I'd never use 2/3 cup sugar for plain white bread.

Thanks for any ideas you have on this.

[BakerAunt]

I think that 190-195F is the usual temperature for non-wholegrain breads, but it has been a long time since I baked a plain, white loaf. The bread may firm up as it cools, since a cooling loaf continues to "bake" out of the oven.

Wonky has an Amish bread recipe somewhere on this site that might be useful for comparison.

[Italiancook]

Yes, BakerAunt, the bread did firm up as it cooled. I've cut each loaf in half for the freezer. Inside, it looks and tastes fully cooked. I had one slice with boysenberry fruit spread. If I make it again, I'll use less salt. In the meantime, I'll search around for Wonky's recipe. Thanks!

[BakerAunt]

How much yeast did the recipe require? It may have used more yeast to counter the amount of sugar. When you reduced the sugar, the yeast could go about its work more quickly. You might be able to reduce the yeast a bit, since you reduced the sugar by over half.

Like you, I would find that much sugar in a loaf too much, unless it was raisin-cinnamon bread, but I think that Amish bread does tend toward the sweet.

[Italiancook]

The recipe calls for 1-1/2 tablespoons yeast, BakerAunt.

My first reaction, when I saw the loaves rising so fast, was to think there was too much yeast for the reduction in sugar. I put that idea away when I thought about the heat from the under cabinet lights.

I thought about the yeast when I saw the slight splitting at the ends of the loaves. I think, but may be wrong, that too much yeast would cause that. But, I think over-proofing would do that, too. Maybe I didn't test the proofed dough soon enough, but at the time, I was thinking, "There's no way these can be fully proofed in half the time."

I'm going to make these again, but reduce the sugar to 2 tablespoons. I'll reduce the yeast too, because I think you're right. One recipe reviewer said that with 1/4 cup sugar, it'd produce "fluffy" bread, which turned out right. Another reviewer said 2 tablespoons sugar nets a "classic farmhouse white bread." That's more what I'm looking for -- that would describe the white bread my dad made when I was a kid.

[BakerAunt]

Today I tried a new recipe: Peach and Ginger Turnovers, from KAF's Whole Grain Baking (pp513-514). It did not go well.

The recipe uses a "blitz puff pastry" dough using whole wheat pastry flour and bread flour. This technique is somewhat new for me, so perhaps I just did not do it right. However, I think this is pastry recipe is similar to the KAF blueberry turnover recipe I tried a few years back with similar frustration. I threw the KAF recipe over for Ken Haedrich's blueberry hand-pie cruss. (Thank you to Dachshundlady for bringing Ken's recipe to our attention on the Baking Circle.) His hand-pie crust is a lot easier and gives nicer results. If I get more peaches, I'll try this filling with his pastry recipe.

The peach and ginger filling is wonderful, although I do think that the recipe should tell you to make it the day before and refrigerate it, as that improves its texture and makes it easier to enclose in the dough. As for the blitz puff pastry, if I am ever crazy enough to try it again, I would cut the dough into four pieces before refrigerating it. That way, the baker only has to roll out an 8x8-inch piece each time and cut it into four squares, then fill the turnovers and seal closed. The cookbook specifies rolling it into a 16x16-inch square, and as I was doing so, I realized that my parchment (used Reynolds) has a maximum width of 15inches. (Oh, why did I trust KAF?! Well, because usually their recipes work.) Rolling out that much dough at once also makes it more likely that it will be overworked. The directions should have taken that into consideration.

My dough stuck, in spite of flouring the parchment. I ended up cutting the parchment in half, and putting each half onto a cookie sheet (I did not have a cookie sheet wide enough to handle a 16-inch square) and putting it back in the refrigerator to let it chill again before shaping, and it was still hard to handle. I did get some triangles, but I got more blobs and a lot of spilled filling. It was so frustrating that if I'd not used such expensive ingredients, I might have just thrown it all away. I ended up baking it in two batches. At least the taste is good but very few are the nice little turnover triangles, and most are blobs of various shapes.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by BakerAunt.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by BakerAunt. Reason: corrected error

[Mike Nolan]

I've never had much success with blitz puff pastry, so I make the real stuff, a batch takes me 3-4 hours for 4-5 turns. Roll out, fold, refrigerate for 15 minutes, etc. I generally divide a batch in half for the final roll-out.

I've seen some puff pastry recipes that recommend an overnight rest between turns, to let the flour continue to hydrate and give the dough time to relax. If you do that, you need to let the dough warm up for 15-20 minutes before starting the next step so the butter isn't rock hard.

[BakerAunt]

Thanks for your comments, Mike. KAF has promoted the blitz pastry as an easy alternative, but the result was anything but easy when I tried to work with it. The taste of the so-called turnovers (maybe four of the sixteen actually look like turnovers) is excellent. I've been eating the blob ones--someone has to destroy the evidence 🙂 --and the taste is also excellent. If I try this blitz pastry again, I'll only make a half recipe and leave the butter in larger chunks than I did. The recipe says, "about the size of a thumbnail," but that is a two-dimensional rather than a three-dimensional description. I also think it would be helpful if the recipe specified the thickness to which the dough is to be rolled out. I could then use my pie wands so it would be even. If I make the blitz pastry again, I would also note that figure.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by BakerAunt.

[Mike Nolan]

The eye-opening experience for me was watching Susan Reid of KAF make a near-perfect batch of puff pastry under what had to be about the worst possible conditions. Most of her tools and ingredients didn't make it to the site, a motel in Kansas City, so she had to improvise, she was using a motel room card as a pastry scraper! And though the books usually tell you to treat the dough gently, she'd pick it up, flop it around and stretch the corners until she got a good rectangular shape. When I went to pastry school a few years later, we spent about a day on laminated doughs, and the instructor commented that I wasn't afraid to work with my dough.

When I do a 'turn' I want to roll the pastry out to about 3X its current size, since I do letter-fold turns. If you do book-fold turns, you want to roll it out to 4X its current size.

Most puff pastry is rolled out to 1/4 inch at the end, or possibly a bit thinner, depending on what you plan to make. Keep in mind the dough will shrink a bit after it has been rolled out and as it is cut.

1/4 inch is about the height of 4 pennies. I have my suspicion that most of us are poor judges of how thick pastry dough is and wind up with something that's 3/8" thick or thicker. Even in pastry school, where we were using a sheet roller, most of the students had to be told to keep rolling it thinner at the end.

When I was testing Peter Reinhart's laminated dough recipe (in the Artisan book), I used a laser leveler to check how thick and even the dough was, I even took pictures! Peter got a kick out of them.

[BakerAunt]

Mike--What recipe do you use for puff pastry?

I cannot roll dough evenly without my pie wands. I was delighted to find that I had packed them with my stand mixer. I'm still looking for those two packages of dates....

[BakerAunt]

The last of that giant loaf of Clonmel Kitchen Double Crusty Bread that I baked last week was eaten today at lunch. My husband was impressed that the bread had not gotten moldy and that it still had great taste. I decided that I would bake it again on Wednesday. This time, I added an extra tablespoon of buttermilk (substituted in 1 cup buttermilk and added a tablespoon more) and used 2 Tbs. of oil, rather than 5 tsp. (That is laziness on my part so that I only have to measure out twice instead of five times.) I substituted in a cup of regular whole wheat, mixed with white whole wheat flour (so I would not have to open another bag of whole wheat flour), and I used a cup of the Irish Whole Meal flour. As I did last time, I added 1/4 cup of flax meal, reduced the salt to 2 3/4 tsp., and deleted the vinegar, since I used the buttermilk. I used up my regular yeast (last 1 tsp. in the container) and used 2 tsp. of the gold yeast. I held back a bit of the flour, but I ended up needing it, and an additional tablespoon. (Humidity is high here today.)

The first rise was about 45 minutes. I decided to try baking the dough in my French bread pan, which accommodates two loaves, each using about 3 cups of flour. The second rise was a little less than 40 minutes, but I slashed the loaves after 30 minutes. I baked the usual 40 minutes, but I spritzed them when they went into the oven, and I spritzed them again after five minutes, then after another 5 minutes. When I checked at 40 minutes, one tested at 197F, so out they came. The loaves look and smell great. I look forward to sampling them tomorrow!

[Mike Nolan]

The last several times I made laminated dough I used Peter Reinhart's recipe (in the Artisan book), but I've also used the recipe on the Food Network site for Danish Kringle, which makes a really SOFT dough, so the first two turns are a bit challenging, though refrigerating the dough more might help. The lemon extract is pretty strong in the dough, but more subtle in the final product. The butterscotch filling is excellent. I've used a couple of other recipes, including one on the King Arthur site.

Peter says that the dough and the butter block should both be about the same consistency. How you enclose the butter block in the dough varies from author to author. Something I'd like to try making some time is a reverse laminated dough, the butter block goes on the OUTSIDE (with some flour beaten into the butter to make it less messy.) Most books that talk about reverse laminated dough say it is intended for use with a sheeter, but I have seen a website that says you can do it manually at home.

The main difference between croissant dough and puff pastry is that the croissant dough has yeast. Some dough recipes have egg in them, others do not. Personally, I prefer the ones without egg.

I may try to scale down the puff pastry recipe we used at pastry school, it used a 5 pound butter block, because it was designed to be rolled out on a sheeter and it filled 3 full-sized sheet pans. (Peter's recipe uses 3/4 of a pound.) It also had some lemon juice in it, though I'm not sure if you could tell it was there in the finished product. The acid in the lemon juice may help condition the dough. There was a blitz puff recipe in our classroom material, but we never made it and our instructor wasn't too keen on it. I think she felt if you're going to through the effort of making a laminated dough and have a sheeter, why not go all the way?

[Mike Nolan]

I can't use a traditional wooden rolling pin with handles to save my soul, but the ones that are just cylindrical rods work well for me, and that's what we used in pastry school. I now have 4 of them, 3 different diameters of wooden ones and one that is silicone-coated. I also have one of the French tapered rolling pins, I've never figured out how you're supposed to use it.

I have some 1/4 inch square wooden sticks that I sometimes use to help with the thickness on final rollout, they're for model makers and most hobby stores should have them, in several sizes, they're a lot cheaper than the guides the baking sites sell. The rubber bands that go around a rolling pin never worked for me at all, my wife found them clumsy as well.

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