[aaronatthedoublef]

Back to challah. I made enough dough for six this week and realized that to get to 12, to paraphrase "Jaws", I'm gonna need a bigger bowl!

I can bake at least eight at one time and maybe 12 if I use full sheets instead of half. I'm also working with my temple to give them away. I tried a couple new braiding techniques and I'm still doing four strands.

I have the date wrong on the baked challahs. And I really do need to start the dough on Thursday night instead of early Friday morning.

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[aaronatthedoublef]

Mike, the color and crumb look good. Free form shaping is so much harder than I ever anticipated. It took me about six or seven times at Uncle Matt's before I was happy with my batards and my baguettes were still hit or miss. And you all have seen some of my wonky challahs.

I have to make sandwich bread and challah and pizza dough this week.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Mike, the rye is cool. It looks like a quick bread loaf which you might be able to call it if you hadn't just gone through a multi-day process to make it.

BA - Dorie Greenspan writes wonderful cookbooks. I have two she wrote - one in her own voice and one with Pierre Hermes. I love to look at these but I have used them very sparingly. I am not sure why. The one thing I picked up from her is using brown sugar in my shortbread which adds a nice flavor and snap to the cookie. I'm not sure how you could make a shortbread cookie with oil unless it was one like coconut oil. I'm going to work on finding this for you.

Thanks for the pointers on writing up and scaling starter recipes. I'm going to work on it today. My starter is 100% hydration but then I mix it with flour and water. The last time I made this bread I used
Starter
250 g starter at 100% hydration
125g flour
90g water

Dough
Flour 500g
Water 300g (this needs to be higher I think)
Salt 7.5g

Should my starter mixture be higher to be 100% of the flour? The original recipe came from Serious Eats at the start of COVID.

[aaronatthedoublef]

That is a lot for a loaf of bread. I'd like to see how bakeries make it in production.

In baker's math, how do I scale starter? I want to build out my spreadsheet for my starter bread. I mix starter, flour, and water and then mix that into my flour, water, and salt.

Thanks

[aaronatthedoublef]

Glad you could salvage the cake BA. And with some creative frosting work no one will probably even notice the difference.

Mike I am anxious to see your rye bread. I saw a spoof on the Great German Baking contest where every week is bread week but I cannot seem to find it again.

I made two dozen scones. I over baked the second dozen but they are still being eaten. I meant to take a dozen to our florist but...

I need to make sandwich bread this week. I going to try something with oven heat they've been talking about over on the BBGA which is to start with a cooler oven to see if it gives me more oven spring.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I've never heard of Katherine Hepburn brownies before but from Mike's description they sound like what I make. A lot of melted chocolate and butter, a bunch of eggs, and a little flour. Lately I've started to add in a little coffee and cream some of the butter instead of melting it all. It started as a recipe from a Boston baking legend, Rosie's and then I modified it over the years.

After my mom died we were going through her recipes and mine was almost exactly the same as the one she learned from her aunt which my mom called "fudge pie". Since it came from Auntie - Mom's great aunt from Louisville, the recipe has to be close to 150 years old at this point. Classics are classics.

Alton changed somewhere between the first and second seasons of "Feasting on Asphalt". In the second season he was much more arrogant and would do things to humiliate people on his crew because he could (he said that). I don't know about the ticket price because they were a gift but watching him bake a giant pizza using an oven made with massive klieg lights was worth the price of admission.

Guy Fieri is another one. He purports to be a champion of the small mom&pop restaurants and then started opening up ghost kitchens here at the start of the pandemic. So just when local small shops really needed our business he used his big name to compete with them.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Yes. Happy Birthday to your husband Joan.

Well, Violet and I cut and baked the checkerboard cookies. Our are 4x4s instead of 3x3s. I could not figure out Duff's method nor could Violet for putting these together so I pulled out my KAF (they were still F not B when I bought this book) cookie book and used their method to make things kind of, sort of, work.

KAF has illustrations and Duff does not. I like illustrations to go with words. And I bet there is even a blog post of the KAB website these days but I didn't think of that until too late.

The dough is good. It is a sable cookie recipe.

Kind of wonky but they'll be better next time! And they taste good. They could use browned butte.

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[aaronatthedoublef]

Just saw this... I still kinda sorta like Alton. My wife took me to his stage show many years ago and it was pretty entertaining. But he says some things that don't make sense, are overly complicated, or outright wrong.

He has breathed new life into Good Eats by going back and correcting a bunch of these things.

[aaronatthedoublef]

BA - "leftover" pizza? Is this a new recipe? 😉

[aaronatthedoublef]

Neat BA. After baking straight on the stone for many years now I am coming back to pizza in a pan. Still tinkering but I think the best results for us come from baking first in a pan and then on a stone to finish. I've also started to let them cool on a rack first and then transfer to the cutting board. The bottom crisps up better this way.

Violet and I started checkerboard cookies late Sunday but ran into pizza time so the dough is still chilling in the refrigerator. We'll finish them this afternoon I suspect.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Joan - 18 Eggland's best for under $8 would be a HUGE score here! Congratulations. 🙂 I've been buying Kirkland "free range, organic" which are about $8 for 24 which is a good price these days. I do wonder how eggs can be "free range", "organic", and "vegetarian".

I've started making cheesesteaks. My sons were not impressed with the ones they had in Philadelphia on our last trip through. I forget which of the famous places we went to. I made my son one for lunch today.

[aaronatthedoublef]

4 Strand. I may try a different way next time.

I noticed a lot of people on line making little balls of dough and then flattening them. Roll up the flattened balls and then turn those into strands. I think it makes them more a consistent size and shape and help the dough texture.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Made challah today. Kate took it out of the oven for me but I didn't tell her I had loaves in both ovens two came out a little well done. Still, the inside looks good.

Happier with the braids and I made five loaves this week. The thing I am realizing is that a dozen loaves with be expensive. Honey and apple cider are really expensive and you all already know about eggs. I'm using local honey from a small producer and his price went up a lot but I know his expenses must have as well. I may call him and see if I can buy direct.

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[aaronatthedoublef]

Just catching up. Butter cakes, too, can suffer from over mixing. It will make them dense and dry if you beat too much air into the butter.

Mike - which semolina did you use and which did you switch to?

I used some Whole Foods whole wheat and it definitely changed the taste of my pizza dough. I'm using BRM right now but I think my favorite is still KAB white. But the price is out of site now. Over $10/5lbs.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. I'm trying to figure out how to add starter to my formula. I'm still not sure about how much of a percentage of the whole it should be.

Google and Microsoft (and others too, probably) both host online forms that can link in their spreadsheets. I don't know how easy it would be to pull that into the BBGA website but that would be a neat way to go. Build a form that queries you for ingredients and percentages and then fills in the recipe in the right format.

But the BBGA is tech challenged and not great about taking members up on their offers of assistance, I think.

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