What are you Baking the week of May 3, 2020?

[Joan Simpson]

I baked another loaf of sourdough to give to my friend.

[BakerAunt]

Home baked sourdough bread is a wonderful gift, Joan.

Despite baking two loaves of the Millet-Sunflower Bread, I still have a lot of cooked millet left. While the internet was not particularly helpful for already cooked millet, I did find a couple of recipes. On Friday I baked “Lemon Millet Fig Cake with Walnuts and Candied Ginger” from The Daring Gourmet:

Lemon Millet Fig Cake with Walnuts and Candied Ginger

I actually have a couple of bags of dried figs in the house, so I was set. I followed the recipe exactly. It did not say what kind of pan; given the lemon juice—and previous experience with acidic ingredients eating into my USA metal pans—I used an 8x8-inch square glass baking dish greased with Crisco. I baked the cake on the third shelf up, as cakes do better there, and I left the oven temperature at 350F. The cake baked in the 30 minutes stated, and I made the lemon-honey glaze, poked holes over the top of the cake with a skewer, then poured the hot glaze evenly on top. We had some for dessert. The taste is reminiscent of Fig Newtons, only far superior. We ate it slightly warm, which the recipe recommends. If it is just as good at room temperature, it will be a keeper

[Joan Simpson]

BakerAunt that sounds so good.

[kimbob]

Half recipe each of crispy chocolate chip cookies and chewy oatmeal cookies from The Fearless Baker book. Thick soft sugar cookies from a recipe I wrote up yrs ago.

[Mike Nolan]

Today I'm making the 2nd test set of baguettes. I'm going to give this one a slightly longer bulk rise, its a few degrees colder in the kitchen today.

[Mike Nolan]

Today's bake was a D+ for appearance and an A- for taste.

The dough was even harder to slash than the previous batch, I tried a slightly higher hydration level, let the bulk proof run an additional hour and tried spraying the dough with water before final proof.

I think the 3rd change was the biggest problem, it seemed to have the opposite effect of what I wanted, making the dough easier to slash. The dough was quite sticky and loose at division, a couple of stretch-and-folds and a light dusting of flour on the work surface seemed to help both issues for shaping. The baguettes still flattened out a bit during final rise, but the oven spring nearly made up for it. They stuck down to the parchment, but it peeled off OK.

This batch was tastier than the previous batch, my wife thinks it was lighter and a bit less chewy. I'm attributing that mainly to the longer bulk rise.

I'll need at least one more test batch, I think.

[BakerAunt]

I'll be interested in hearing if you find the magical way to get the dough neatly slashed. I usually wet the blade before I slash, but that does not always work, depending on the bread.

To go with stew for Saturday night dinner, I remembered a sourdough biscuit recipe that I used to bake that came from Sunset magazine. Of course, I could not locate it among my recipe cards, and I'm not sure if I still have the magazine packed away somewhere. I turned to the internet, and after some frustration, this one came up:

http://www.samartha.net/sd/file-corner/rec.food.sourdough/FAQ/recipes/recipe803.shtml

It is close to what I remember. I did not have time to let the initial sourdough mixture sit for more than an hour. I replaced 1 ¼ cup of the AP flour with Bob’s Red Mill Whole Wheat Pastry flour. I reduced the salt to ½ tsp. and deleted the fennel. The recipe does not state where to add the olive oil. I decided to add the flour mixture to the sourdough mixture, then work in the olive oil. It is slightly messy, but it worked. (Adding the oil at the end seems to be best for my pizza dough and crackers as well.) The biscuits had good rise, and we enjoyed them. I will bake them again now that I have the recipe.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I baked more whole wheat bread. This has become a weekly staple. I was going to bake Sunday morning but, first my wife said "no scones we have enough other stuff" so no scones. I was going to try some sourdough bread but the furnace was broken so the house was too cold for anything to rise. It wasn't until about 2:00 in the afternoon until we broke 65 in the house. Although thinking about it now I could have built a proofer. I'll work on that for the future. I've put the rising bowl in a bowl of warm water before and that worked. I also want to build a box with a heating pad in it but I have to figure out how to adjust the temp down some.

We've talked about it before but baguettes are really hard because they are so simple. I worked on a six person crew and only the lead was allowed to slash them. But he was not a good teacher. The shift lead before him was much better about trying to teach us and allowing us to do other things. He's the one who patiently and with much practice taught me to shape a passable baguette. But I was making about 50 a night. He left to study in Germany which was good for him and bad for us.

[Mike Nolan]

For my 2nd test batch of baguettes, I used a second sheet pan as a lid and put a shallow pan of boiling water in with the dough. That seemed to work fairly well in terms of keeping the air moist, so I may try it again.

I think that batch of dough was just too high a hydration, the recipe calls for double hydration (and extra 5% water added towards the end of mixing, a mixing process I hadn't used before.) I should probably have done more stretch-and-folds to firm them up, one of them flattened a lot.

Taste-wise, they were excellent.

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