What are You Baking the Week of September 15. 2019?

[BakerAunt]

On Sunday afternoon, I baked my lower-saturated fat, whole wheat, sourdough cheese crackers from the dough I mixed late last week.

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[Joan Simpson]

My company has come and gone and I'm getting ready to go to my sisters tomorrow for a few days,so I baked two loaves of Banana bread today and they stuck to my pans grrr,I used the pan grease liberally but I had to dig the bottoms off,needless to say I was pissed.Making two loaves of buttermilk half wheat half white as we speak,sure hope it works out.I'll catch up with you all when I get back home,wishing each of you well.BakerAunt I hope your company has a great time,I know he'll enjoy that pie!

[Italiancook]

I haven't baked anything yet, but I'm pondering a white sandwich bread. In the past, I've made the Amish bread, but it uses a lot of yeast, as I recall, and it rises super fast, and I must be using the wrong size pan or letting it rise too much in the pan. It tastes good, but I'm never happy with how high it is above the pan, baked. So I checked KAF's site. Have any of you ever made any of the breads listed below? If so, what is the texture of the bread, if you recall. I don't want to end up with squishy store-bought bread.

"Our Favorite Sandwich Bread"
"King Arthur's Classic White Sandwich Bread"
"Classic Sandwich Bread"

[Joan Simpson]

Italiancook the bread I make a lot is King Arthur Classic White Sandwich Bread I made this tonight but I sub one cup of whole wheat for one cup of white and I usually only do 3 cups flour total for each loaf and add more if needed.I made a double batch tonight and it was too dry so I just got some buttermilk out of the fridge and poured about a cup more in the bread to make it where it could mix well and I started with 2 cups of warm water.I guess that's why I needed more liquid probably needed 3 cups to start with a double batch.My bread baked up beautiful and very light and was 4 and a half inches tall baked in a 9x5 pan.This bread with the wheat added in tastes like Natures Own Honey Wheat which is the bread I buy for my husband he doesn't eat homemade bread smh.He is not a bread eater.I don't have a scale so I stir and fill my cup with a scoop method.I've never added the buttermilk to this bread till tonight but I think it'll only make it better.The recipe states to tent the bread after 15-20 minutes but I never do and it doesn't get dark,just right.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by Joan Simpson.

[Italiancook]

Joan, I don't know if you'll see this, since you're going to visit your sister, but . . .

. . . . thanks so much for your response. I haven't experimented with buttermilk yet to see if I can handle it (I do just fine with butter & sour cream). I'll try this bread, using nonfat dry milk. If I run into a dryness problem, I'll opt for the Lactaid milk, which is what I have on hand. I'm not big on tenting anything in the oven, so I'm glad you gave your good experience with not tenting. Hope you have a safe trip.

[Joan Simpson]

Italiancook you can add just more water and results will be fine,I did use the dry milk powder as I needed to use it up.

[Italiancook]

OK, Joan, thanks for telling me to just add water. I haven't made enough loaves of bread to know that intuitively!

[BakerAunt]

Joan probably needed less flour because she uses the scoop method to measure flour. KAF recipes are written for the "spoon it into a cup" method.

I distrust King Arthur on metric weights. I had baked their spelt bread and it was wonderful. I could not figure out why some people had a problem with it. Then I used their gram "equivalencies," as I wanted to avoid dirtying measuring cups, and I had the same problem as the other posters. The next time I baked it, I used cups but I weighed the flours, and the KAF metric weights (I didn't check the ounces) were significantly different. Whatever conversion they are using doesn't work. I recently baked another bread, and I tested it with metric and with the cups measurements on flour, and I noted the discrepancy as well.

It makes sense that KAF would focus on measurements by cups on their site for home bakers, because that is what their target audience uses, but they need to be more accurate if they want to give metric measurements.

[BakerAunt]

Sorry to hear about your banana bread, Joan. Usually the grease works well. I did have an issue with it once when I did not stir it up well after it had been siting for a while. Next time, you might want to try lining the bottom only of the greased loaf pan with parchment paper--and greasing and flouring the side next to the banana bread. It seems to me that particularly sweet breads--and maybe your bananas were extra sweet that day?--have more of a tendency to stick, which is why cake recipes specify parchment on the bottom.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by BakerAunt.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by BakerAunt.

[BakerAunt]

On Monday morning, I baked a new recipe, Almond and Apricot Biscotti, which the Mayo Clinic has as part of the DASH diet:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/recipes/almond-and-apricot-biscotti/rcp-20049600

I made two ingredient changes in that I used white whole wheat flour rather than regular whole wheat, and I added 3 Tbs. BRM milk powder.

I also created some of my own directions. After mixing the dry ingredients, I whisked together the wet ingredients before adding them. I used my “dough whisk,” which I find perfect for oil-based biscotti recipes. After I had mixed in the apricots and almonds, I shaped it by putting scoops of it onto a parchment-lined baking sheet, then using slightly damp hands (not floured hands) to shape it into a log, which I sprinkled with KAF’s sparkling sugar, after first spritzing it. After the first bake, I let rest the stated ten minutes, but I then spritzed it and waited another five minutes before slicing straight rather than diagonally. These were slightly fragile, so I might wait a bit longer next time, but they still sliced well. I stand them up for the second bake, which I did for the lesser time of 15 minutes, as my husband does not like them too hard.

I got 20 biscotti, and the end pieces are small. I tasted the crumbs and a warm end piece, and the flavor is good. We’ll see how they are when they cool. These will be good for calcium and potassium. Sometimes the Mayo Clinic recipes try too hard to be healthy and do not give what a lot of us crave: texture and taste in addition to the health benefits. If I like these, I could see perhaps substituting other fruits and nuts into the basic recipe.

[skeptic7]

The biscotti recipe looks great. I find it hard to believe that cookie recipes are part of a healthy diet. This recipe has less fat than most biscotti recipes, and could be made with all whole wheat flour. I'm going to have to look at the other Mayo Clinic recipes.

[BakerAunt]

Skeptic--It's funny, isn't it, after all the "health" lectures. Where a lot of healthy diet recommendations lose people is when they intone: start small by switching out dessert sweets for fruit. Most people will shut down at that point. We like our sweets. It's better to help people find ways to make more healthy a dessert that they consider dessert.

[skeptic7]

I don't think of desert as part of a meal --- I'm normally fairly full at the end of a meal. I like desert by itself a couple of hours later or as a mid afternoon snack. Biscotti are fairly low in fat as cookies go and there are very low fat biscotti recipes with only a little oil. If Biscotti get too low fat, I compensate by drinking hot chocolate with whipped cream with the biscotti. Or eat more biscotti. Its amazing how fast biscotti can disappear.

[skeptic7]

I did carrot bread yesterday. Unfortunately I use the fine ( ginger ) grater on half the carrots before I realized what I was doing and reduced the carrots almost to a pulp. I also used maple syrup instead of honey for the sweetener. The carrot bread is moister and denser than it would otherwise be if I hadn't use the wrong grater. It still works well for breakfast with cream cheese. If I put sweetened Greek yogurt on top I wonder if I could tell myself its a cake? The texture is more like a pudding cake than a bread.
This was cooked in a slow cooker for about 3 hours. Its now getting cool here and I'll soon be able to bake in an oven again.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making Vienna bread today. Most of it will go in the freezer.

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