What are you Baking the Week of January 15, 2023?

[Mike Nolan]

I'll be making banana muffins soon, possibly later today.

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[Joan Simpson]

I made another batch of sourdough tonight,this time I weighed everything and I did 3 cups white ap and 1 cup wheat.It's sitting overnight on the counter.I still had to add more water than called for.

[BakerAunt]

Joan, I agree with you that the amount of water partly depends on the whole wheat flour, which usually requires more liquid. I think it also depends partly on the sourdough starter. Everyone's starter is different. Also, I have noted that mine is sometimes thicker and sometimes less thick. That's what makes baking, with sourdough, fun.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I made more challah. I should have let them rise and bake on two pans. They started out less wonky than they looked at the end. I included a picture of them with the egg wash since we talked bout that last week. My main concern is for the eggs wash not to pool in the cracks. That gets funky during the bake.

I just baked off what began as a dozen brown butter short bread cookies. Not sure why they had this spread. Maybe I should have chilled or forzen them before they went in the oven. This is only the second time I've made these and it did not happen the first time. I have a little dough left so I made try to make them and chill them before going into the oven. Anyone else ever tried or seen this?

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[chocomouse]

Today I made bread using the KAF classic white sandwich bread recipe. I changed it to use half whole wheat, and added a half cup of Harvest Grains plus 2 tablespoons of flax meal. I also increased the recipe to make two 700 gm loaves.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't see evidence of egg wash pooling in the cracks of your challah, so I think you did well.

I find adding a little salt to the egg when whisking it helps break up the viscosity of the egg a bit, which I think makes it easier to keep it where you want it. I've wondered about using an ultrasonic cleaner to see if that helps create a more homogenized liquid. I seem to recall the packaged egg we used in pastry school was easier to use.

As to your shortbread, I find it usually spreads a lot, compared to something like a sugar cookie or gingerbread, but freezing it might help.

Baking it in a mold with sides might help, but that sounds like another pan that would only get occasional use, and I've already got too many of those!

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. And thanks for fixing my account!

I am very careful not to let the egg wash pool having done this before.

I have tried salt in the past but these days I just add some water.

I was going to bake the short bread yesterday but Kate took apart the ovens for cleaning and has not finished so we have no working ovens. I think the brown butter may be part of the culprit in making in spread. I've used brown butter for short bread before and it adds a great flavor but I don't remember if I chilled the cut cookies or not. I will try and write down the results this time.

Worst case, I can bake it in round cake pans. I was told by Kate's granny that the Scotts did it this way.

[Mike Nolan]

I had to undo a couple of things I had added to help deal with bogus registrations. (I had to delete over 40 such registrations a week ago.) As soon as you find something to keep the hackers out, they find a way around it!

I don't see how brown butter (vs regular butter) would make much difference in how much the dough spreads, though.

[BakerAunt]

Well, wouldn't melted butter--which is what browned butter would be--change the texture? Or did Aaron chill the browned butter before making the shortbread dough?

I had to give up shortbread, alas, but back when I was baking it, I found that the colder cookies held their shape and the pressed designs better. I usually formed them into small balls, then stamped them with a ceramic cookie stamp.

I own several large ceramic shortbread molds. I baked in one of them once or twice, but I found it more convenient to make more smaller cookies. I need to figure out what else I could use them to bake.

[Mike Nolan]

Butter is a fascinating substance, and the more I read about it, the less I'm sure I know about it. I recently read an article that claimed that creaming butter and sugar has no impact on a recipe, I'm not sure I believe that.

But my instructor at SFBI pastry school was absolutely convinced that freezing butter changes it in a way that impacts making laminated pastries, and I've seen several articles that appear to refute that claim. I did raise this question on the BBGA Forum, most of the professional bakers there say freezing butter has no impact on laminated pastries. It also appears to be the case that butter is often frozen by suppliers for long-term storage, so the butter you buy at the store may have been frozen long before you bought it.

When you melt butter, it separates into (at least) three components: Butterfat, water and milk solids. As far as I know, once you melt butter, there's no way to get it back to its churned state, which is a suspension of water and milk solids in butterfat.

Removing the milk solids produces clarified butter. Removing the water (and chilling it) produces ghee. I'm not sure if ghee has the milk solids in it or not, I suspect not. Ghee never gets very hard, even if chilled. I've never tried freezing it, though.

Browning butter is basically toasting the milk solids in the melted butter. I think the act of browning butter usually boils off the water.

It would be interesting to study the impact each of the over a half dozen different states of butter has on recipes, but I doubt I have the tools to do a serious scientific study along those lines, and the number of different sets of states to test is quite large. Even just testing the impact of butter that has never been liquified vs ghee would be interesting.

This is probably not that helpful to Aaron's shortbread issues, though.

[Joan Simpson]

I cut the sourdough this morning and was very happy with the taste and crumb.

Chocomouse I like that recipe and when I make it I sub a cup of wheat too,makes it so good.

Sorry about your cookies Aaron ,they almost look like the lace cookies you roll on a tube when they come out of the oven.They were probably good anyway.

[BakerAunt]

On Tuesday, I used the King Arthur "Sandwich Rye Bread" recipe as my starting point to bake a pumpernickel loaf that was half whole grain. I did that by using 2 ½ cups Bob's Red Mill bread flour, 2 cups KABC pumpernickel, and ½ cup BRM whole wheat flour. I cut the salt to 1 tsp. and used 1 cup of dill pickle juice from our favorite German pickle brand in place of that much water. I also increased the yeast to 2 ½ tsp. and used 4 Tbs. olive oil. I baked it in a hearth pan and shaped it in a kind of football shape, so it is smaller at the ends than in the center. It needed 40 minutes to bake. We will slice it tomorrow, first for lunches, and then to use for ham sandwiches at dinner. When I add up the weights of the flours, it is not half wholegrain, but if we like the result, I will probably push it toward that goal by using a full cup of whole wheat flour next time and reducing the bread flour to 2 cups.

[BakerAunt]

A bit more about butter--does it need its own thread? 🙂

About six years ago, I baked some Nordic Ware pan gingerbread houses for a church Christmas market. The recipe called for melted butter rather than creamed butter. I was surprised at how well the details stood out, compared to when I had baked such cakes with creamed butter. A non-baker thought that I had created the detail after baking!

Now that I am baking with oil, I do not get that level of detail, although with some recipes, it does seem to come out clearer.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I baked the last of my dough and it was chilled but not frozen... Same, flat results. I'm going to figure this out because it tastes really good.

I'll make more dough and freeze it this time. I may also reduce the amount of butter.

Maybe I'll ask the folks over at the BBGA, too. I added a picture of my brown butter. It is unsalted, Trader Joe's. I wonder, too, if a different brand would work. In my laminated dough class they talked about about fat content. In Cook's Illustrated (this is going back MANY years) I remember articles about the shape of the crystals in the butter and how they were aligned. As you all has said, this stuff is complicated.

Thanks for your help and patience!

Like you all

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[aaronatthedoublef]

Okay! I was looking at some recipes and then at my own and I figured out at least one problem. I converted measurements from volume to grams and I used the g equivalent on 1 cup instead of 2... Oops. I will adjust, try again, and let you know the results.

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