What are you baking the week of October 27, 2019?

[Mike Nolan]

No baking here yet, I need to make some Halloween goodies this week, though. We found a Wilton mold with skeleton parts, I'm going to try it first with white chocolate, and then maybe with ossi dei morti dough.

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[BakerAunt]

I'm not baking today, but I am thinking about Halloween. I pulled out some Halloween muffin papers and may try a new muffin recipe tomorrow. I also may experiment this week with Halloween cookies that I can eat.

[BakerAunt]

On Monday morning, I baked Fig Muffins, from Dimetra Makris’s Delicious Quick Breads and Muffins (New York: Fawcett Columbine: 1986), p. 44. It is lovely having my cookbooks close at hand. These are an oat muffin, and I used old-fashioned oats, as the recipe did not specify. I switched regular AP flour for white whole wheat and substituted buttermilk for regular milk, and so reduced the baking powder to 2 tsp. and added ¼ tsp. baking soda. I reduced the salt from 1/2 to 1/4 tsp. I used Halloween paper liners (with a bit of nonstick spray) and sprinkled orange and black sugar on top. I chose the recipe because I have some dried figs—bought for a homemade fig newton recipe that I can no longer try, since the butter is prohibitive. I like the taste of the figs in the muffins. [Note: I baked them for 18 minutes, using the rack I use for cookies and crackers.]

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by BakerAunt.

[skeptic7]

Yesterday, I did whole wheat cheese bread -- a whole wheat bread with milk and egg and 1 cup of diced cheddar folded into it. I was going to go to martial arts practice and was bringing this to share with friends, when someone from work called and told me I needed to phone into a 6:15 pm meeting in an hour. The bread turned out beautifully! And I couldn't take it with me to impress friends. I had used some very good Cabot Cheddar, as well as some only good Cabot Cheddar. I am freezing half of it and eating the rest and it is very tasty.
Sunday I baked gingerbread.

[chocomouse]

I made peanut butter brownies with chocolate chips and a ganache topping.

[Mike Nolan]

I made two Texas Chocolate Sheet Cakes, one 10 x 10 that is for my wife's office and one 8 x 8 for us.

To decorate them, I found a silicone mold for skeleton parts and made two skeletons with white chocolate.

I also made a recipe for ossi dei morti that is different than the one I made a couple of years ago. It doesn't have any leavening in it so they're really solid almond cookies with some cinnamon and clove in it, and a bit darker in color. I made a variety of Halloween shapes, including some tombstones that I hoped would go in the cake, the rest will probably go on a plate for people to eat. (Couldn't find space for the tombstones.)

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[BakerAunt]

Wow! That's a neat cake, Mike!

On Wednesday, I made up another batch of my Lower Saturated Fat, Whole Wheat, Sourdough, Cheese Cracker dough. I’ll bake them sometime next week.

I also experimented with “Easy Italian Whole Wheat Honey Breakfast Cookies,” a recipe that I’ve been adapting since last year. This time I used ¾ cup white whole wheat flour and ½ cup barley flour. I used the full teaspoon of vanilla, but I had no orange zest, and so omitted it. After I mixed the dough, I refrigerated it, covered, for about 2 ½ hours before I could get back to it. I divided it into 9 sections, formed each into a ball, then used my Nordic Ware Halloween heavy cookie stamps. The designs came out clearly, and I didn’t have an issue with the dough sticking to the stamps. I baked for 14 minutes on a parchment covered sheet. The designs held up, although the pumpkin is a little faint. That stamp is not as deep as it could be. It may be that the dough was a bit warm, since I stamped the three pumpkins last. I seem to recall reading in a molded cookie book that cookies sweetened with honey hold designs better than cookies that use sugar. I’ll have to look that up. I’m pleased that I could bake a special Halloween cookie and could again use my stamps. I may try this recipe with cookie cutters as well.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Mike, that is an AWESOME cake!

I made some more rye bread. This time I used part bread flour and part first clear with the rye. In "Secrets of a Jewish Baker" all the recipes use first clear and rye flours exclusively. But then reading the Rye Baker website here it said to only use about 40% first clear. I used less than that but it was mostly because I ran out. In "Jewish Holiday Baking" the author uses bread flour exclusively.

I think the loaves had a higher rise. I need to wait a while before I cut them but I want to see if they are less dense. I'll let you know how they taste.

Also, the problem with using a rye starter for other breads is they all seem to have caraway seeds. So if I can figure out a way to add the caraway seeds when I build the bread dough instead of adding them to the starter I can probably get away with one.

While I was waiting for the loaves to rise before baking (I still need LOTS of practice shaping - I have one half-decent batard) I also made some brownies so as not to sit idle. Something isn't quite right. I think I use too little chocolate and too little flour. It's a little confusing sometime carrying things between home and the restaurant but, I have access to a restaurant kitchen at no charge so I am pretty happy about that.

BTW, does anyone have a good conversion from volume to weight. As I scale up my batches it will be easier and more accurate to use weights.

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by aaronatthedoublef.
• This reply was modified 5 years ago by aaronatthedoublef.

[BakerAunt]

Not only does baking brownies while waiting for the loaves to rise keep you from sitting idle, it also gets the oven warmed up so it is ready for the loaves. Good thinking.

I admire your ability to shuttle ingredients from one location to another. When I took along my bread machine and ingredients for cinnamon rolls for my husband's cousins reunion, I premeasured all the ingredients, except for the oil, and packed each into its own rising bucket. I worried about not having a bit of extra flour, in case it was needed, but the weather cooperated.

Thanks for the link to The Rye Baker. I have Ginsberg's book, but I had forgotten that there is a blog. I've now subscribed.

[Joan Simpson]

Loved the cake Mike and I love reading about everyone's baking.

[Mike Nolan]

I have always thought that the reason first clear flour was used for rye bread was that it isn't pure white (more of a pale yellow or cream color) but when mixed with rye flour that didn't matter since the rye flour is much more towards brown. First clear flour was once less expensive than patent flour, though that's not true today, at least not unless you can buy a big bag of it, and maybe not then, either. This may be because flour milling has changed over the years, clear flours used to be important intermediate stages in the milling process, I'm not sure that is true any more.

Another thing to be aware of with first clear flour is that everything I've made with it has been prone to go moldy quicker than if made with patent flour. I'm not sure why, something to do with increase bran or germ, I suspect, or maybe higher ash levels. But unless I'm concerned with having a white color, I do like the taste of products made with first clear flour.

I don't see what the point to having caraway in a rye starter would be. A starter is all about enzymes, yeasts and bacteria, and caraway isn't really contributing to those.

The challenge with standardizing volume to weight measures is that nobody agrees on how much a cup of flour should weigh. King Arthur uses 4.25 ounces for AP flour, the USDA database uses 125 grams (4.41 ounces). Other authors use a number anywhere from 4 ounces per cup to 5, and I've seen a few that appeared to use 5.25 ounces per cup.

Other ingredients have similar problems.

For example, while table salt is fairly standardized, kosher salt is not, because the crystal sizes vary from one brand to another. A tablespoon of kosher salt is about the same weight as 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons of table salt. Morton Salt advises against using kosher salt in baking. About the only advantage I see to using kosher salt in baking is that it isn't iodized. Some people can detect a bitter metallic taste with iodized salt though I can't say I've noticed it.

I've been building a tool for entering recipes that has baker's math capabilities, so I've been trying to decide on what standard volume-to-weight measurements to use in it. I need to do some work on it, I updated the PHP software on my server a while back and that broke some things in my program, which is mainly a proof-of-concept tool at this point, I need to expand the food database it has, too.

Another challenge is rounding errors. Consider table salt. USDA says a teaspoon of salt weighs 6 grams. It also says a cup of salt weighs 292 grams. 6 x 48 = 288, so there's a 1.3% difference. But nobody is likely to want to measure 6.0833 grams of salt. (Many of our small measuring spoons are grossly inaccurate, but that's a separate problem.)

A lot of bread formulas in baker's math format specify 2% salt. I suspect that's another form of rounding error. I've not checked the scientific literature to see if anybody's done a study of how much salt bread 'should' have, but 2% is a convenient number to use.

The nutrition labels required in the USA exacerbate this problem, both because of how they round to whole integers and what they say a portion size is. For flour, a single serving is usually 1/4 cup, which is generally either 29 or 30 grams. So a cup of flour would weigh either 116 or 120 grams. (As noted earlier, the USDA database says a cup of flour weighs 130 grams.)

People have done studies of how much yeast to use, but that gets into time vs flavor trade-off issues, which are separate from volumetric concerns.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. Subtle differences in colors are usually lost on me as I am color blind and various shades of white look mostly the same to me.

I like the flavor first clear adds and that it adds some extra bran too. And it's more traditional too which I like.

I guess I'll have to figure out the weights. I'll start with the KAF weights and adjust as I go I guess.

[Mike Nolan]

I think I'm currently using the KAF weights in my tool for flour, but the USDA weights for most everything else.

I'm not color blind, but my wife says I'm color indifferent. I do know that my left eye see somewhat different shades of color than my right eye, and I honestly don't know which one is 'correct'.

One of my college friends applied for a summer job at a paint factory. They gave him a color matching test, 100 color samples that you had to match up correctly. He said it was really challenging as it went along, as you weren't allowed to change any of your previous choices so your subsequent matches got strange as you had to pick the best choice from the remaining colors, because you couldn't pick the same 'matching' color twice.

[BakerAunt]

I'm not sure what KAF uses for converting its recipes to metric weights, but when I made a mostly spelt bread, I discovered that it only comes out well if I use their volume measurements. When I checked, volume against grams, the grams listed were much lower than what the flour actually weighs. Thus, the bread didn't work with the gram measurements and the dough was too wet, but when I used the volume measurements, I had a nice loaf of bread. Here's the recipe.

https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/honey-spelt-sourdough-bread-recipe

I posted a comment, but KAF did not respond to it. Although another person mentions no problem with weights, I wonder if that person was using the English (used to be listed) rather than the metric weights. I seem to recall that I noted a discrepancy with metric measurements in another recipe as well. So, for KAF recipes, I don't trust the metric weights, and I measure by volume.

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by BakerAunt.
• This reply was modified 5 years ago by BakerAunt.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Well, converting from volume to weights also probably depends on how you fill your volume, particularly with flour. Do you scoop and level or do you fill the measuring cup and level? I wonder, too, how much it varies from scale to scale. My first job out of college was writing code for mail room scales and even units from the same company could have different results. But

The correct term for people like me is "color deficient". It's a lack of cones that causes me to see things the way I see them. All of my kids have thought I was playing a joke on them when they were little and I would say something was a different color from what it was. My brothers share this condition and apparently somewhere in the range of 40% of all men suffer from this.

Tech trivia - the reason Outlook allows you to determine what color you want tasks to turn when they are overdue is because I pointed out that I cannot see the difference between red text and black text on most white backgrounds including printer paper and computer screens and the large number of men who had similar challenges during an early demo of an early version of Outlook.

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