What are you Baking the week of January 26, 2020?

[BakerAunt]

Len--I only add baking soda for quick breads or cakes, if they do not already use baking soda. If they have only baking powder, I substitute 1/4 tsp. baking soda for 1 tsp. of the baking powder, since as Cass told me, baking soda has four times the rising power of baking powder. Of course, it disappears faster, so the batter needs to get into the oven quickly.

[skeptic7]

BakerAunt;
The Bischofsbrot sounds very very tasty. Congratulations!

I baked a cheese pizza last night which turned out well, fluffy and tender with plenty of cheese -- mozarella and cheddar.

[chocomouse]

Len I was wondering if you meant soda, not powder. I do the same as BakerAunt.

[RiversideLen]

I baked a new batch of buns this afternoon, again using buttermilk. I was going to omit the baking soda but just bring myself to it, lol. Maybe next time. Once again, they got wonderful oven spring and are golden brown. One thing I didn't mention before, lately I have been adding a tablespoon of vital wheat gluten to it and that might account for some of the rise. But, the buttermilk ones are still taller than the buns made with regular milk.

[Mike Nolan]

I got 8 pounds of triticale berries from the UNL wheat breeder this week. I'm working on cleaning it and probably won't start doing any testing with it until next week.

I'll start a separate thread for that, which will have some pictures of what the grain looks like (and compare it with wheat and rye) before and after grinding.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm trying the Frisian Black Bread recipe from TRB next, but I'm tinkering with it a little, because instead of using just a small amount of rye sour to inoculate the flour and water in the sponge, I took the flour from my discards bowl in the refrigerator and added a little recently refreshed sour starter to make sure it was fully active. (Some sources say that refrigerating a starter tends to favor certain cold-loving lactic acid producing bacteria over others and might kill off some of the wild yeasts.)

I've also been experimenting with using some silicone tubing (from a home brewing supplier) to see if I can produce steam in my oven without opening the door. The tubing leads to a 9" cast iron skillet on the lower shelf. It looks like I can add about 20ml of water fairly easily and it seems to function as I expected, I still have to test it with a bread recipe, and the Frisian recipe is not one that uses steam, it is a recipe that starts out in a cold oven.

[skeptic7]

Mike
Can you bake the bread in a covered container like a Dutch oven to provide a moister atmosphere especially as you are doing single loaves. I have an oval Dutch oven that takes bread pans without problems.

[Mike Nolan]

I haven't tried the Dutch oven method and that would be a major departure from the instructions. I also don't have a Dutch oven big enough for most of the rye recipes I've been making. (The first several recipes made two large loaves.)

Putting a pan in the oven as it heats and throwing water in it is a fairly common way of trying to create steam in a home oven. Another way is to spray water on the side walls of the oven. Sometimes I do both. A heavy pan like a cast iron skillet works better than a lighter pan because it has more mass so it vaporizes the water faster.

The tubing should enable me to create steam after the oven door has been closed, so most of it stays in the oven as opposed to coming out the door into my face. Whether this will generate more or less steam is something I'm not sure how to measure, maybe I'll see a difference in performance. I don't have any experience baking with a commercial steam oven, so I don't have a real reference to compare it against.

[skeptic7]

Mike;
I didn't realize that your recipes made two loaves instead of one. Good luck with the steam. Would it help to have a full frying pan of water in the oven so the oven would be constantly bathed in steam instead of just having a short burst of steam at the ccritical points? What do rye rolls taste like steamed anyway?

[Mike Nolan]

Steaming affects the outer crust, how much that affects the taste of rolls is pretty subjective. I think shape is a major influence on taste, I'm still not sure how much impact steam has on it.

The Munich Penny rye rolls were pretty good, but the crust was not very crunchy at all, firm but not crunchy. There are several other rolls recipes in the book.

[Mike Nolan]

The thing about having a full pan of water in the oven is that it doesn't boil off very fast. Putting some water in a dry hot pan gives a short burst of steam.

[Mike Nolan]

The recipes make a range of sizes, some just one loaf, some a larger loaf, some two loaves, and there are several recipes for things like rolls or flatbreads that make a dozen or more.

The recipe I'm working on now should work in one standard size loaf pan, one I'm thinking of doing soon makes a pretty big (2.5 pound) round loaf.

[RiversideLen]

I made cupcakes from a Bobs Red Mills gluten free cake mix. The package calls for 3 eggs, I used two eggs and 2 ounces (by weight) of buttermilk to sub for the 3rd egg. They turned out pretty good. Topped them with chocolate frosting.

[BakerAunt]

On Friday, I fed my sourdough starter and made dough for my Whole Wheat Sourdough Cheese Crackers. I'll bake them some time next week.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm getting ready to make two apple pies tomorrow, one for us and another for a baby shower. I made and scaled the pie crust this evening. The pie filling is from the freezer, I got it out to thaw in the refrigerator a couple of days ago.

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