What are you Baking the Week of June 18, 2023?

[Mike Nolan]

I think I'm going to try making honey wheat bread today using the whole meal durum/semolina I bought a while back instead of whole meal hard red wheat.

I did order a 50 pound bag of semolina from Webstaurant recently, it should be here as early as tomorrow. The shipping was more than the cost of the flour, but even with that it still is less than half what I'm paying for BRM semolina locally.

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[BakerAunt]

I made the mistake of making an oatmeal pancake recipe that had arrived a few weeks ago from Bob's Red Mill. It used 3-cups of oats, two cups of which were ground into oat flour, and no regular flour was used. The recipe called for using a blender. What I should have known is that I would end up with a batter (?) that was of a thick, pasty consistency. Not even maple syrup could rescue them, although we gamely ate some. Never again! I should have realized that they were focused on gluten-free, and that rarely ends well.

[cwcdesign]

No baking yet, but Will found my long baker so I hope to try the semolina bread that BakerAunt if I can find the recipe. Will pulled the starter out of the fridge -it was last fed on January 15th! But just coming to room temp it's already active - he did pour off some of the liquid and will probably add in some rye flour to kickstart it. When I made the starter 3 years ago, I started it with rye flour.

[chocomouse]

This is the Blackberry Braid I made yesterday - it is delicious! I'm pleased that none of the filling oozed out between the braiding sections. It made three 12-14" braids.

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[Mike Nolan]

Nice work, Chocomouse!

I'm doing a chocolate lava cake from Trader Joes for dessert tonight.
Followup: The lava cake was good, nice dark rich chocolate, like a devil's food cake; the 'lava' sort of leaked out one side but that didn't really hurt the flavor.

We shared one, that was plenty for each of us.

[BakerAunt]

CWCdesign: here is a link to the recipe. It does require pumpernickel flour.

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/chewy-semolina-rye-bread-recipe

Chocomouse: What recipe did you follow for the braid?

[chocomouse]

BakerAunt, I used the KABC recipe for Braided Lemon Bread for the dough, as I couldn't figure out what recipe from my files I have used in the past (I save and annotate all recipes I use, even if they are "bad"; that reminds me to never make it again!). I subbed sour cream for the yogurt, reduced the salt to 1 teaspoon, and skipped the Buttery Dough Flavor. This made a nice dough, easy to handle, although it was way too much. I made the sponge and let it sit in the fridge for about 6 hours before I continued. I used the same recipe for the cream cheese filling, but subbed 3 tablespoons of lime juice (from a bottle) for the lemon juice. I used my usual blackberry jam recipe, with added lime juice. The braid is really tasty, not too sweet; blackberries are perhaps my most favorite fruit. Don't be intimidated by the looks of the finished braid (and the ends of these braids don't look great, I had to crowd all three of them onto my rimmed (in case of leaks) baking sheet. The braiding is so simple - I've never had one come out not looking great. The first time I made one, it was so perfect, the folks at the potluck where I shared it insisted I tell them which bakery I used.

[chocomouse]

Mike, did you buy a finished cake or a boxed mix at Trader Joe's for the lava cake? The nearest TJs to me is about 2 hours away, but I shop there about once every couple of months. Years ago I tried the KAF mix, and was not impressed.

[BakerAunt]

Thank you, Chocomouse. I looked at the recipe. The 8 Tbs. of butter are an issue for me, since my husband and I would be the only ones eating it. I need to think about whether I can substitute about 1/3 cup avocado oil. The cream cheese is also an issue. I have plenty of blackberry jam and could pick up a lime at the grocery.

I also own the "cheat" mat from King Arthur that has the instructions for both challah and this other kind of braid,

[Italiancook]

I baked pancakes for the first time this morning. I used my go-to pancake recipe, (1-1/4 cup flour, 1-1/4 cup buttermilk) and added a diced banana. It was perfect amount of batter for my 1/4 sheet pan. I baked at 400*, because online recipes I checked used that temp. Took about 25 minutes to reach browning on top, but that length may have been the result of using the lower-middle rack instead of higher.

Baking these was wonderful. I didn't have to stand at one spot in front of the stove. While they baked, I cleaned up the kitchen & had a short rest. I'll definitely bake all future pancakes.

Mike, would you please explain to me the heat in an oven. Since hot air rises, and I am guessing the heat in my oven comes from the bottom, will a baker obtain quicker and better browning by raising the rack?

[Mike Nolan]

These were finished cakes, you just put it in the oven for 15 minutes. Some Sams Clubs have a mix for making lava cakes, others have frozen ones ready to go in the oven, I don't think our club has either of those.

I haven't made lava cakes, but the proper way to do them is to make ganache, form it into balls or cylinders for the center, freeze them and put them in the batter for the cake just before it goes in the oven. That way the center thaws and liquefies as the cake bakes without much of the liquid being absorbed into the cake. So freezing the whole thing is a bit of a shortcut. (If you've seen the film Chef, making lava cakes is one of the early plot devices. The chefs I know LOVE this movie!)

In most ovens the heat source (gas or electric) is at the bottom, so the heat rises and there's a convection air flow in the oven. You can test your oven for hot spots (every oven has them) using the bread test: Put slices of bread on a shelf, run the oven to toast them, and you'll get a pretty good visual picture of where it is hottest on that shelf. Done properly this has to be done shelf by shelf at several different temperatures, though testing several shelves at once is also useful if you bake multiple pans at a time. (A chef friend told me this was the first thing he does in a new kitchen, using several loaves of bread.)

It is often hottest on the bottom rack because that's closes to the heat source, but it is also generally hotter at the top than in the middle. Something on the bottom shelf gets more heat on the bottom than the top, the reverse is true for the top self. If there's a convection fan, then the heat is a bit more even throughout the oven. (In the really fancy convection ovens, the heat source is at the back and the air flow is how the oven gets heated.)

[Mike Nolan]

I made honey wheat bread on Sunday using the whole meal semolina/durum instead of whole meal hard red wheat. It has a lot of similarities with the original, but the fact that the durum has been ground into a uniformly fine flour makes for a different texture and mouth feel, normally when I mill wheat berries I use as coarse a setting as I can get on my Nutrimill, so yesterday's bread is less toothsome. (I sometimes add a quarter cup of cracked wheat to the honey wheat bread, I think that would have helped here.)

I also think the bitterness of the bran permeates the bread more this way. I don't think it'll replace either the semolina bread made with mostly endosperm semolina or the original honey wheat bread in the repertoire here, but I may make it from time to time. It may be better with a little peanut butter on it or with other sandwich fillings.

[chocomouse]

BakerAunt, I'm pretty sure I have used several different dough recipes for this braid. I also believe I've used my basic go-to pizza/calzone dough, using a few tablespoons of butter instead of olive oil, adding a few tablespoons of sugar, an egg, etc to enrich it. Do you have a rich, sweet dough recipe that you've used?

[Mike Nolan]

In pastry school, they called that kind of braided sweet bread a jalousie. (The term refers to horizontal shutters or window blinds, which the alternating layers of the braid resemble.)

In school we made it with puff pastry, but almost any pastry dough that works with a sweet filling would work.

[BakerAunt]

Chocomouse, I am wondering about using the dough that I use for my cinnamon rolls, which I adapted from the "Snails" recipe that my husband's aunt got from a lady she knew, who I think must have been Scandinavian. I have successfully replaced butter in that recipe with avocado oil.

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