[skeptic7]

I got it, but mainly by process of elimination.

[skeptic7]

Oh I was at a grocery store that has white flour but not whole wheat. I went to whole wheat for health reasons, and used white flour for pie crusts and special holiday baking. I don't have medical reasons, I just thought if I stuck to whole wheat it would have a little less calories.
Mike what sort of mill do you have and how much work is it to get the wheat kernels and grind your own flour?

[skeptic7]

I was trying baked yeast donuts again, this time in plain rather than chocolate. I had stretched out the dough to get larger holes and tried without too much success to make the rings uniform in height and width. However when they baked some of the holes closed and other donuts were decidedly lumpy. They were a little dry the next day but still great with yogurt and strawberries.

[skeptic7]

I add mash potatoes very rarely. I don't often make mash potatoes, and then mainly eat them myself. I have some recipes, a Betty Crocker Hot Cross bun recipe that calls for mash potatoes and I will make the effort for them. I found the bread is moister but also a little heavier.
I add potato flour because it is easier, just measuring out the potato flour and adding it to the regular flour. Its a small enough amount I don't think about adding extra liquid. If the dough is slightly too dry I can add a tablespoon of water at time when kneading. I do think that it keeps the resulting bread moist.
I didn't use any potato flour in a recent recipe and found the dough drier than the breads with potato flour.

[skeptic7]

I use potato flour in most of my yeast breads. I do 2 tablespoons of potato flour to 4 cups of flour.

[skeptic7]

My friends would have gladly eaten any donuts available, but they wouldn't have joined in my dissappointment at the lumpy shape and the sometimes completely filled in hole. This batch of donuts had better texture and shape than the last batch but still hadn't achieved perfection. My unsympathetic friends were more interested in taste than appearance.

[skeptic7]

My problem with the recipe is the premise, I never had problems finding things to bake using buttermilk. I sometimes had to make a point of using regular milk because it was getting sour, but buttermilk keeps so well in the refrigerator I don't worry about it. I use buttermilk more in pancakes and quick breads than in yeast breads.

[skeptic7]

Disposable gloves and masks and sanitizer are easily available around here if you check the right stores. Its just its not every store. The hardware store had disposable gloves and sanitizer and bleach. One of the grocery stores had disposable masks. I saw cloth masks for sell at the hardware store. Reusable gloves are in short supply.

[skeptic7]

Nice article. The quarentine has given people the time and incentive to try and retry baking. Baking one batch of biscuits is either easy -- like when you did it in Girl Scouts -- or impossible -- the first several times you did it alone -- but now people have the time to try batch after batch until things work and no way to throw up their hands and go to the store when the first couple don't work.
Its easier baking when there aren't the time constraints but its harder not having friends to eat extra donuts. It'd be nice having friends to sympathize at ugly but tasty donuts, but I didn't have any of those before the coronavirus epidemic.

[skeptic7]

I got to two stores today. Both were essentially out of flour. Trader Joe was out of butter too. I didn't see any yeast in either store, but I wasn't looking in the right place for cake yeast.

[skeptic7]

Mike, Baker Aunt;
Thank you for finding the information for me! I'll try make Pan au chocolat soon, but I will probably have to improvise on the chocolate sticks. I'd like to try making my own molds and seeing how that works. If it doesn't work I'll just eat my mistakes. 🙂

[skeptic7]

Got it.

[skeptic7]

I got it!

[skeptic7]

I finished baking my chocolate donuts. I couldn't find my donut cutter so I tried to form these as if they were bagels, forming a whole with my thumbs and then stretching them out. I tried to let them rise the whole afternoon, but the house was rather cold and they didn't rise much. I finally baked them in the evening for 20 minutes. They were small and misshappened poor things, the oven spring mainly obliverated the center hole. Not very sweet, darkly chocolate and with a fine texture. I was hoping for something more open.

I started with this recipe
http://www.everythingispoetry.com/2013/09/chocolate-baked-donuts.html

I used non fat milk, and 3 tablespoons of butter, 1 cup of whole wheat flour instead of 1 cup of white flour and some other changes. I'll have to try the plain yeast donuts some time before giving up on this.

[skeptic7]

I just did another cheese pizza and will be baking chocolate donuts later today. I started the dough for the donuts yesterday, but it was lumpy. This is a yeasted donut recipe I found on the web and was adapting a bit. I had mixed most of the dough together when I realized I had forgotten the sugar. I hastily mixed it in as best I could but the dough turned out very lumpy and the lumps could not be kneaded out. I refrigerated the dough overnight, and then let it warm up and started kneading away and when I finished kneading it the lumps were gone!!. The overnight wait seemed to have softened the hard spots. Now to roll the dough out and hope I can find my donut cutter.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 12 months ago by skeptic7.

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