The 11-strand braid came out fairly well, probably the best of the 4 I've done. My wife thinks I overdid the sesame seeds a bit, though. (But I love sesame seeds on bread.)
The chocolate pecan meringue cookies came out pretty good, too, I lowered the temp from 350 in the recipe to 325 and baked them for about 22 1/2 minutes, they're just a little chewy in the center and that's how we like them.
We've got a number of tiny tomatoes, mostly on the '4th of July' plants, which are a very early variety.
It has been too hot here for much fruit to set, but we're supposed to have a day or two when it doesn't get above the mid 70's, which should help. (As I recall, most tomatoes will only set fruit when the 6AM temperature is under some temperature, but I'm not sure what, somewhere in the 70's I suspect.)
We had a lavash pizza last night with the usual ingredients plus some of the pulled pork from Thursday's BBQ takeout. My son was drizzling apple-habanero sauce on it, that was quite good.
I had made bagels earlier in the day; by suppertime we hit 100 for the first time in three years, so we had sandwiches on the bagels and salad. Supposed to hit 102 on Thursday!
I'll be making bagels today.
I will definitely be making these again. It'd be great to have a package of Vienna buns to compare them against, but unless I make a trip to Chicago that isn't likely.
I made semolina bread today, let the final proof go on a little too long because I was listening to an online presentation on sourdough, but it didn't collapse in the oven.
It's so easy to do, too. It uses just a little egg wash, so unless you're doing a lot of them even one egg will give you lots of egg afterwards to use for something else. I did these and then my wife had her breakfast omelet with the rest, plus a second egg.
Happy Birthday, Cass, think cheesecake even if you can't bake one!
Here's what the poppy seed coating looks like:
I've tried making an angel food cake a number of times, most of them were edible, none of them were what I would call great.
I used this recipe yesterday: Rosette di pane recipe.
The list of ingredients is missing the water for the biga step (it is mentioned in the text), I added more water because it seemed too dry at first, the final dough was way too soft, so I should probably have left the water out of the second step.
An 18 hour biga gives it a lot of time for enzyme activity, which produced a flavorful bread, though I think it could be improved upon. (A little rye or triticale, maybe?)
I used my steam tube, I suspect it isn't quite as effective as a commercial steam injection oven but it is a lot easier for me to use than just dumping water in a hot pan and trying to avoid getting burned. I think what I need is a somewhat larger cast iron pan, maybe one of the square ones. Lately I've been pre-steaming the oven before putting the dough in, then adding more water to replace the steam that comes out the open door. The crust was a little pale, I may need to double-pan it so that I don't burn the bottoms.
My wife ate two of the rosetta rolls from today's test bake, she likes the crisp crust, and I think with a few more test bakes I may be able to get them to be hollow. I used a different recipe than the one that was originally in Italian in that old BC thread, as I recall those were very good, they had some fat in the dough.
I put them in a micro-perfed bag, that should keep them from getting soggy overnight.
I had one for lunch, a Fairbury all-beef dog, some mustard, sweet relish, some jalapenos (instead of sport peppers) and a pickle spear. And celery salt, of course. It was very good, the closest thing I've had to a Chicago dog in several years. I think I can get sport peppers, but I haven't looked lately, I know I can't get Vienna all-beef dogs or the day-glo green relish here. :sigh: But at least I can make something pretty close to Chicago-style hot dog buns now.
I made four of them to see if they have about the same shelf life as the buns I made them from do.
