What are you Baking the Week of December 17, 2023?

[Mike Nolan]

Holiday baking plans?

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[chocomouse]

I have already made, and in the freezer ready to bake: Best Chewy Peanut Butter, Oatmeal Lemon Sugar, Molasses Ginger, Orange Cinnamon Chip, Cranberry Coconut cookies, and will be making Buckeye Bars and Chocolate Toffee this week. Christmas Eve (when we have our family gathering here for dinner and gifts) I'll make some kind of rolls, not sure exactly what yet.

[cwcdesign]

Today I made Reindeer Chow for quick gifts for coworkers and neighbors. All I actually cooked was the pecans which I toasted. I'll make a second batch tomorrow.

I kept putting off buying the ingredients because they were so expensive - the cereals for example. Well, yesterday I decided to bite the bullet and pick them up on my way to work. I got lucky - just about every ingredient was BOGO 😁 the M&Ms weren't but they were discounted a little. Harris Teeter is one of the stores where you do not have to buy two items to get the discount which is really helpful when you need only one box.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm working on another batch of croissant dough, I'll make some chocolatines and some croissants.

I've got my 3 turns done (1 simple fold, 2 letter folds for a total of 37 layers) and I rolled it out to the point where I need to divide it into two parts for final rollout to 2 or 3mm thick. I'll make some chocolatines in the morning, bake them in the afternoon, and do the croissants on Thursday or Friday.

[Mike Nolan]

Today's chocolatines came out much nicer looking.

And less butter leakage, too.

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[skeptic7]

I did the bread part of the Taiwanese Bao.
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/taiwanese-breakfast-bao-recipe
I was looking for the simplest steam bread to eat with Cantonese style roasted duck. My father had been looking at the desert pizza last week and wanted to know if it could be steamed. They turned out fairly well. However cooking with my father around has unplanned digressions. Half of the first batch were eaten as sort of sandwiches with a pork vegetable mixture for supper, and the other half was eaten just plain with soup for lunch. My father's idea both times. I'm going to make another batch which hopefully will be eaten with duck.
Hopefully if all goes well I can get to steamed bao stuffed with roast pork. How long can I let a meat filling sit around while the bread dough rises? Roast pork is a little less of health hazard than raw meat but still worries me. I might put more baking powder in the dough and cook it a little earlier.

[Mike Nolan]

How long can I let a meat filling sit around while the bread dough rises?

Meat and egg fillings should be OK with a 2 hour final proof after shaping and filling, are they cold, room temperature or warm when you fill the bao?

[skeptic7]

The raw meat ones -- hamburger or ground pork -- are room temperature by the time the vegetables and seasonings are mixed in. The roast pork fillings would probably be slightly colder as it would require less handling, just dice cold roast pork and mix with sauce.
So you would think a 2 hour final proof would be fine under those conditions?

[skeptic7]

Mike the chocolatina looks great. Do you use sticks of dark chocolate for the filling?

[BakerAunt]

Mike--ah, practice makes perfect, a great reason to make them more often!

[Mike Nolan]

I've been using sticks I made from Callebaut semi-sweet chocolate (54.5% cacao) but most of the bakeries use pre-made sticks, so I bought a box of 300 Callebaut croissant sticks (44% cacao).

The pre-made ones are a bit smaller, 3 inches long and 5.3 grams each vs 4 inches long and about 10 grams for the ones I made, so I used 2 per chocolatine.

I had enough of the home made chocolate sticks left to make 2 croissants, the other 7 were made with the pre-made sticks. I tried some of both, and found it hard to pick a favorite.

[Mike Nolan]

So you would think a 2 hour final proof would be fine under those conditions?

If I was answering a question on the food safety certification exam, I'd hesitate before saying yes, but I think as long as the fillings are cooked to at least 180 degrees they should be fine, and with most breads the internal temperature is more like 190-200.

The general rule of thumb is 2 hours in the danger zone (40-140) is the upper limit, 1 hour if at 90 degrees or hotter.

Would proofing in the refrigerator be possible?

[skeptic7]

I don't know if it would rise in the refrigerator. I'd probably try proofing in the refrigerator and hope that it would rise in the steamer while cooking. I'll probably double the baking powder in the hopes that would help.

[Mike Nolan]

Today's croissants, about 40 grams each:

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[RiversideLen]

Those croissants look great!

Last night I made a batch of dough for Martha Stewart's Noel Nut Balls. I have them portioned and frozen, to be baked probably on Friday. Today I made a batch of Alton Brown's chocolate chip cookies, The Puffy, again, portioned and in the freezer now, I will bake some of them on Friday and leave a few in the freezer for another occasion.

Also am making a batch of my sandwich/burger buns, they are waiting to go into the oven. I had both of my KitchenAid mixers going at the same time. I used the flex edge beater on the mini KA in which I made the cookie dough, that did a real good job, I didn't have to scrape down the sides of the bowl at all.

For yesterday's baking I needed 2 sticks of room temp butter but my butter was straight from the fridge. So I went on YouTube to look for tricks to soften it without melting it. I found several variations of this. You take a glass and pour very hot water in it and let it sit for a few minutes (to warm up the glass). Then you dump the water and stand the stick of butter up and then the empty but hot glass over it (don't let the butter touch the glass). Wait about 5 minutes and then you have softened but not melted butter. I tried it and it worked.

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