Our weather is still cool, so Wednesday was another baking day. I started the morning by adapting a recipe, "Cherry Almond Muffins," from The Baking Sheet 20.4 (Summer 2009), p. 13. [Remember how fun it used to be when issues arrived in our mailboxes?] I wanted to try using a jar of my blackberry jam, since I make a lot of jam, but the reality is that we are not big jam eaters, so I need to find other ways of using it. I substituted in 1 ½ cups whole wheat flour and reduced the sugar from ½ to 1/3 cup and halved the salt. As always, I added 2 Tbs. milk powder and 1 Tbs. flax meal. I replaced the milk with buttermilk and so reduced the baking powder from 1 Tbs. to 2 tsp. and added ¼ tsp. baking soda. (Cass taught me that!) I deleted the nuts and the almond extract. I baked the muffins as six large ones for 20 minutes. The texture and shape are great. The taste is fine, but I think that they need perhaps a bit of some kind of spice. I might also use white whole wheat flour next time.
My second bake on Wednesday was a Sourdough Boule recipe from King Arthur that I tore out of one of their more recent catalogs, where it is included in an add for their bread baking bowl:
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/sourdough-boule-recipe
I adapted the recipe to bake in my Romertopf bread bowl with the cloche lid from the set I bought from Skeptic. That means using a cold oven start. I also changed the recipe by replacing 2 cups of the Artisan bread flour with that much whole wheat flour and using the Bob's Red Mill bread flour for the rest I added 2 Tbs. special dry milk, and reduced the salt from 2 tsp. to 1 ¼ tsp. I baked it for 50 minutes in the cloche, then baked it without the lid for another 3 minutes because I wanted it to reach 200F. It smells great and is cooling on a rack. I look forward to slicing it at lunch tomorrow.
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