What are you Baking the Week of February 12, 2023?

[aaronatthedoublef]

Mike, the rye is cool. It looks like a quick bread loaf which you might be able to call it if you hadn't just gone through a multi-day process to make it.

BA - Dorie Greenspan writes wonderful cookbooks. I have two she wrote - one in her own voice and one with Pierre Hermes. I love to look at these but I have used them very sparingly. I am not sure why. The one thing I picked up from her is using brown sugar in my shortbread which adds a nice flavor and snap to the cookie. I'm not sure how you could make a shortbread cookie with oil unless it was one like coconut oil. I'm going to work on finding this for you.

Thanks for the pointers on writing up and scaling starter recipes. I'm going to work on it today. My starter is 100% hydration but then I mix it with flour and water. The last time I made this bread I used
Starter
250 g starter at 100% hydration
125g flour
90g water

Dough
Flour 500g
Water 300g (this needs to be higher I think)
Salt 7.5g

Should my starter mixture be higher to be 100% of the flour? The original recipe came from Serious Eats at the start of COVID.

[BakerAunt]

Aaron--Deb Perelman has a recipe for "Olive Oil Shortbread with Rosemary and Chocolate Chunks" (p. 210), in her second cookbook, Smitten Kitchen Every Day. I have not tried baking it; I'm not sure about the rosemary, (1 tsp. fresh rosemary) and she also specifies mild olive oil, which is not an ingredient that I have in the house. She does say for a milder flavor, replace half of the olive oil with a neutral oil.

I could try it with 75% neutral oil and the rest olive oil, I suppose. However, I think the rosemary might be a no-go with my husband.

[Mike Nolan]

The BBGA has some Excel templates including for a multi-stage bread, but they have a lot of stuff in them that might not be relevant.

I'm starting to learn Python, it has an interesting set of tools, including ones for building Excel spreadsheets. But it is a slow process.

The pumpernickel bread probably needed to be a bit moister or packed into the pan more solidly, that's why it has all those cracks in it. We'll know this afternoon if that had much impact on the interior or the texture.

[Mike Nolan]

We cut into the Westphalian Pumpernickel, or perhaps I should say I tried to cut into it.

The outside is pretty hard, especially where it has cracks, and the interior is soft and kind of wet, and the knife stuck. I'm not sure if the center is under-done, but I would call it under-dried out.

I tried making the first slice with with my everyday bread knife, you can see how it got gummed up.

The Japanese bread knife my son gave me a year ago seems to do a better job slicing it. I normally keep that knife in the box because it is really sharp and I've cut myself on it more than once already.

You can also see where a chunk of it broke off as I was trying to slice it, I suspect that's due to the cracks and harder exterior.

The taste is interesting but it is different than what I was expecting, and quite different from the bread I had in Germany. The odor is very much that of molasses.

I need to some research before I try making it again, and maybe cut the recipe down a bit, it makes a loaf that weighed in at well over 3 pounds.

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[chocomouse]

I made a dozen bagels today.

[Mike Nolan]

We tried some of the Westphalian bread with the Cabot Seriously Strong cheddar cheese that we used for the fried cheese sandwiches, it was kind of an odd pairing, the bread just overwhelms the cheese.

[Author]

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