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Joan, maybe you just haven't found the right type of bread yet.
The challenge with the Clonmel recipe is that it's huge, 5-6 cups of flour. It just barely fits in my 4 1/2 quart KA. But that's actually somewhat of an advantage when teaching kneading by hand, you can really get into it.
It's nearly a no-fail recipe and you can adapt it a lot of different ways, substitute butter for oil, bake the bread in a loaf pan or free form, add some whole wheat or rye flour, substitute honey for the sugar, etc, and they all should come out just fine.
I've cut the salt in that recipe by half or more lately, can't say I've noticed much difference in taste, it is a bit more airy.
We had a simple stir fry and some rice. Still have one plate of hot cross buns to give away, two of our neighbors don't appear to be home. Maybe I'll take it 2 doors down in the morning, I don't really know that family, it's a fairly new house built 2-3 years ago, it was the last open lot on the block.
The gluten-free ones went over well, there are two people at my wife's office who can't eat wheat, they don't get to share in the office treats very often.
Here's the GF recipe I used: GF Hot Cross Buns
If I make these next year, which seems quite likely, I may cut back on or leave out the cardamom and substitute nutmeg for the allspice.
Today I'm making Vienna Bread and a batch-and-a-half of Hot Cross Buns (a total of 48 1.5 ounce rolls, one 16 and four 8's.) I"m putting a cream cheese frosting cross on them.
My newest neighbor will get the 16 rolls one, and I think one of the Vienna Breads, she's got family in town for Easter.
Today I made one batch of gluten-free Hot Cross Buns and a batch of whole wheat Hot Cross Buns for my wife's office. I'll make more batches tomorrow for neighbors.
Recently I've been using celery seed in a lot of my cooking, I think it would go very well with salmon and couscous. Savory and marjoram also go good together. (And parsley is good on almost everything!)
I'm gearing up for my pre-Easter Hot Cross Buns baking marathon starting Thursday. This year I think I'll be making at least 2 batches of the Hot Cross Buns from the KAF Whole Grains book, because we have 3 new neighbors, all with several kids, and I think I may try one batch using a gluten-free recipe for some GF people at my wife's office, plus I'll send in some of the whole wheat ones.
Was at a banquet this evening and one of the other guests at our table was talking about a Finnish brown bread she had recently, one that was made with rye flour and molasses. I see several recipes for this on the Internet, she's going to try to get the one she had for me. She said it was sweet, but not like Boston brown bread, which she's also had. She thought it had some seeds in it, I see recipes that have both caraway and fennel in them.
I've been collecting dark rye recipes for a while, I'm going to be trying to make a black bread that doesn't use something like coffee, cocoa or caramel to color the dough dark.
(Note: I had posted this in the wrong thread, so I moved it and two other posts to the current week's thread.)
Happy Birthday, CW!
March 26, 2018 at 10:22 am in reply to: Old Family Recipies that are not Really Old Family Recipies! #11779Apropos of this thread, over the weekend I ran across a recent Epicurious article talking about a recipe that is remarkably close to my mother's oatmeal crisps cookie recipe:
What I found interesting about this article is that the author was trying to improve her grandmother's 'Cowboy Cookie' recipe. Her conclusions: Changing from Crisco to butter adds a nice buttery flavor, but causes the cookies to go flat, something I've known since the 1950's. (My sister always made these cookies with butter. When my younger son tried experimenting with the recipe about 10 years ago, his first thought was to change from Crisco to butter, too. As Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr first said in 1849: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!)
Otherwise, add more salt and use less leavening.
Do that (and reduce the vanilla) and you wind up with the recipe MY mother always used. (I've experimented with using alternate chocolates, but I usually go back to Nestles Morsels.)
Her other suggestion, let the dough rest for 24-36 hours, is one that would NEVER have worked in our house, we kids (and my mother) ate almost as much raw dough as we baked.
March 26, 2018 at 10:07 am in reply to: Old Family Recipies that are not Really Old Family Recipies! #11777Look at recent winning recipes from the Pillsbury Bake-Off, they all feature shortcuts to actually making dough. (And Pillsbury has IMHO been stacking the contest to favor those types of recipes.)
These days half of my net searches seem to bring up Twitter posts.
Is it any wonder that, according to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon is replacing Google as the primary search tool for products?
The thing about barley malt, though, is that it colors the dough, so your bagels won't have a classic white interior. I like the flavor it brings, though. Non-diastatic barley malt powder is nearly colorless, and brings a similar sweetness but without the color.
Tonight I made boneless center cut pork chops, baked in the oven in a little butter and lemon, with a classic Sauce Robert. (Demi-glace, onions, white wine, dijon mustard)
This is the first time I've tried making Sauce Robert (possibly one of the oldest sauces in the repertoire), I was pleased that my wife liked it.
Bagels aren't hard to make, though most home bakers will boil them in an alkali solution made with baking soda rather than with cooking lye. (You really do need to wear gloves and use eye protection when using lye. I suspect you have to be careful what kind of pot you use for the lye solution, too, though I've not researched that.)
Several years ago an article in the New York Times suggested taking baking soda and baking it in a hot oven, turning it from sodium bicarbonate to sodium carbonate. That will make a more strongly alkaline solution, though still quite a bit weaker than one made with lye (sodium hydroxide.) I still haven't tried this.
Though I've done it a few times, I don't usually take the time to retard the bagels for 24 hours to develop the classic sour tang of a NY bagel, I can't say anybody's noticed.
I've tried several bagel dough recipes, the one I like best is Peter Reinhart's recipe in his Artisan book. He puts some barley syrup in the dough (and in the boiling water)
They may not carry it during certain times of the year, because without the cornstarch it is very prone to clump.
I wonder if baker's superfine sugar would work here? It's not as finely ground as powdered sugar, but it is much finer than granulated sugar.
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