[Mike Nolan]

Apparently one way is to pipe something like cookie dough on top.
hot cross buns with stripe in the dough

[Mike Nolan]

I've seen hot cross buns where the cross is from dough baked into the roll, but I'm not sure how they do that. A different dough, maybe?

[Mike Nolan]

We had salads followed by hot cross buns (with extra icing, of course.) Slightly better than yesterday's meal. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

The first batch of Hot Cross buns just came out of the oven, the second batch will be going in later this evening. That batch was made with 10% of the flour in a tangzhong roux.

[Mike Nolan]

Shipping costs have been going up because of increased demand. UPS has been advertising they're looking for more drivers. And cardboard boxes are in short supply, too, so they've also been going up in price. And I read in the Wall Street Journal the other day that more companies, including General Mills, Kimberly-Clark and Hormel, are planning to raise wholesale prices to reflect their increased costs, including COVID-19 mitigation. But the government still says inflation is under control. (Another Wall Street Journal article was talking about how the middle class is going to bear the brunt of the tax increases that are coming.)

I did actually find my wife's preferred toilet paper in the grocery store the other day, the first time I've seen it since last spring.

I've ordered from walmart.com, but they don't always have what I'm after, especially specialty flours. But Amazon doesn't have a lot of those, either.

[Mike Nolan]

I made some fan tan rolls today, the stacking process didn't go as well as I would have liked, I think my dough was too soft. As a result, some of the rolls didn't look much like fan tan rolls, though others did.

I made 7 with butter and 11 with sugar, cinnamon and maple syrup in between layers. The latter were even messier but were yummy! I also made and froze a dozen of the maple/sugar/cinnamon ones and will try making some of them in a few days.

Those wound up being supper tonight, not the most nutritious supper we've had lately.

[Mike Nolan]

Chocolate, bananas and strawberry go well together, think banana split. But this cake is something that you'd need a big crowd to serve it to.

But sometimes that's the point of a dessert. My wife has made a Spanish Wind Torte a couple of times, it is a lot of work but when done right is a pièce de résistance at the table.

[Mike Nolan]

This is a REALLY good pumpernickel. It uses both a rye starter and some commercial yeast, I'm not sure how it would come out if you just used commercial yeast. It isn't assertively 'sour', though I can taste some sourness. Some of the rye breads I've made from the Ginsberg book have been in-your-face sour, this one isn't.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't think I've ever seen Hot Cross Buns available around Easter in the stores in Nebraska, which was why I started baking my own.

[Mike Nolan]

The Reubens we had last night were so good, we made them again today. One of the two loaves of pumpernickel is gone already. I'm hoping the other will last long enough to be available for ham on Easter.

[Mike Nolan]

Over the years I've given away hundreds of those rolls. I make them smaller than the recipe calls for, 1.5 ounces each. A 6 inch round pan holds 8 of them comfortably, 7 around the outside and one in the middle. I've done them in an 8 inch pan, which holds more like 15 of them, and I did them in a 12 inch pan once, I think it held around 36 of them.

I used to send in a big batch of them to my wife's office (bringing in home baked items was dying off even before the pandemic shut the campus down, the university had banned pot lucks completely), and she seldom had any left at the end of the day. I know several of our neighbors look forward to them every Good Friday. (For some strange reason, I never seem to make these any other time than then.)

Their biggest drawback is that they dry out fairly quickly, like in 2 days. They do freeze well, though.

[Mike Nolan]

Nice crumb.

I've been using the Hot Cross Buns recipe in the King Arthur Whole Grains book for quite a few years, I'll probably make at least two batches of it on Thursday, I may try one using tangzhong to see if I can tell the difference. (The rule of thumb is that you use up to 10% of the total flour and a 5-1 ratio between water and flour in the roux.)

[Mike Nolan]

Part of the reason it is so dark is it had some powdered caramel coloring in it. However, that was the last of my caramel coloring and King Arthur doesn't seem to carry it any more, so I'll have to order it from somewhere else. :sigh:

[Mike Nolan]

I bought a 50 pound bag of clear flour from Stover Company in the Pittsburgh area in 2019 when we were there visiting my son and his family. I think it cost me about $25. It seems to be holding up well in storage. (I put at least a third of it in the freezer.) It was Bay State brand, but Ardent Mills also makes one.

My former neighbor, the head of the local Sysco office, checked with Pillsbury and ConAgra, they only sold clear flour in the east (maybe as far west as Ohio) and in a few places on the west coast, though he could order it by the pallet (40 bags.) It's probably a marketing issue, most of the large mills are in the central US, and the way roller mills work they generate LOTS of clear flour, but if there's no interest in it, it isn't worth packaging and storing it. I believe it is sold in bulk as animal feed.

I've ordered 50 pound bags of flour from Baker's Authority, most recently medium rye, but I also ordered 50 pounds of semolina from them, shipping for a bag that big is sometimes higher than the cost of the flour itself, but even $65 for 50 pounds is still a lot cheaper than King Arthur. If I buy semolina locally it costs me about $2.50 a pound, rye flour is next to impossible to find locally other than Bob's Red Mill, and only one type a dark rye that is a fairly fine texture, if I want medium rye or coarse rye meal, I will either have to buy it online or buy rye berries (also not easy to find at a good price) and grind my own.

If I was a little younger, I might think about trying to open up a store that specialized in bakery products including varietal flours, but I don't know if it would be successful enough and I'm not sure I've got the energy for it any more.

The rye flour came UPS and the box was pretty beat up by the time it got here, but the bag inside was still intact enough the flour hadn't been compromised. I kind of feel sorry for the UPS driver having to lug that thing around, though.

I think the semolina I ordered was prepared at a mill in Wyoming, then shipped to Ohio or Texas before it was shipped to me in Nebraska. Kind of a long trip.

Last spring I bought a small chest freezer when our main freezer needed some repairs, the plan was to use it mainly for storing flours afterwards and that's working out pretty good.

I've been using plastic jars that I buy M&M's in at Sams (62.5 ounce size), they work pretty well for storing 2-3 pounds of flour, but when I bought my rye flour recently I also went out to Sams and bought some 6 quart round Cambro-style containers.

[Mike Nolan]

Report on Jewish Bakery Pumpernickel (Ginsberg pps 93-96):

This is a really good pumpernickel bread, but I did fiddle with the recipe a little. It produced two loaves about 650 grams each from (730 grams pre-baking weight), the loaves are about 10 inches x 5 inches by 2 1/2 inches.

Both of the sponge stages call for coarse rye meal, and the coarse rye meal I have is almost like cracked grain, which I thought might be too coarse to be the only rye in the recipe, so I used coarse rye meal for the first sponge and medium rye meal for the second.

I used first clear flour in the final dough, and I added about a tablespoon of caraway seed.

It uses some caramel color to produce a darker loaf.

I also used an egg wash rather than a cornstarch glaze, because cornstarch glaze always seems to produce a white pasty exterior, and this produced a nice shiny one.

It produces a fairly stiff dough, but it mixes well and it rose decently. I did let the final rise go for about 90 minutes as opposed to the 45 minutes in the recipe. Actual baking time was in the middle of the range in the recipe, by which point the internal temperature was about 206.

It slices easily and has a good internal crumb.

We used this bread for a batch of Reubens, and they were great. It was also pretty good with just little butter on it.

It also passes the toast test with flying colors.

This recipe is a real keeper, I'm sure I'll be making it again--soon!

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