[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. Thanks BA. I'm am out of space for new pans and I still need a couple of full size sheet pans. I may invest in a couple of couches. I can fold those and they take less space.

Mike, I did try to shape these like baguettes. Instead of a proofing board I used the back of a half sheet and I know I did not flour it enough so it was hard to take them of the pan and onto the stone. Thinking about this as I type, I could have just put the whole pan into the oven... As Homer Simpson's baker brother said "dough!"

[aaronatthedoublef]

I made my sandwich loaf and then tried to make sub rolls and they looked more like Olive Garden bread sticks. So I need some work there. Have any of you made sub rolls?

Also, as I've tamed the sour the bread seems flat, like it needs salt. I may add some herbs and see if that helps. Salt is about 1.5%

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[aaronatthedoublef]

On the Kids' Baking Championship on they had "Over the Top Cookies". First they wrecked cupcakes, then doughnuts, then cookies.

There is something to be said for a simple, well made, chocolate chip cookie. Or oatmeal cookie. Or, what seems to have become our family cookie, molasses (even though Mom called them ginger snaps).

As Choco says, if they're made with good ingredients they will taste good. Who needs all this junk on top of them.

[aaronatthedoublef]

BA, next time I will try to wet may lame, especially if it isn't working. And it was a brand, new blade.

So, challah originated as a separation of dough to be sacrificed. The batch of dough, according to modern rules, needs to be five pounds to be kosher.

A rabbi gave me an unstructured dump of info I am still working through and this is just the tip of the iceberg. I think I could easily write a PhD thesis on challah.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. I definitely neglected the challah after braiding and they flattened out during baking. You can see it inside. I also put two half sheets with two loaves a piece in the oven. I usually only do one pan at a time so I may need to raise the oven temp some to account for this.

Two loaves of challah is a lot but not in my house, even with Sam at school. 😉 And Violet will not even try it.

I did track down why there 12 loaves of challah comes from. It's in Leviticus. I know the two challah tradition. I'll find where that comes from. For a long time most challah recipes were big because batches were supposed to be at least five pounds. My first recipe I followed called for seven cups of flour and easily overflowed my mixer. Same thing happened to my mom.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks everyone.

Mike, I'm not sure how to tell if they're over proofed or what to do about it if they are.

I made some regular sandwich bread and may have over-proofed it as well. I increased the hydration from 70 to 75%. The dough was too soft to score which I've never seen before.

I did get a good oven spring and the crumb is a little more open than usual which is what I wanted. It's lighter and softer.

[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? 😉

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