Stuart's Soliloquy to the void

New bread knife

Sunday, June 5th, 2011 | Cooking | 1 Comment

I have recently acquired a new bread knife from Yaxell, a Ran knife, made from 69 layers of Damascus steel. It is a thing of beauty and it carves bread like a wooden knife cuts through soft butter, mmmm.

I normally score my breads using the bread knife and our old bread knife just wasn’t sufficiently sharp to create interesting patterns, but here and now this changes. Now with even more fancy patterns:

It carves beautifully and the crumb isn’t mashed together like our old knife had a tendency to do. Most of my previous crumb photos took several slices before I got to a slice where the crumb was sufficiently nice to look at.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Yaxell in any way. I just love my new knives.

Tags: baking, bread

Sausage rolls

Sunday, November 14th, 2010 | Cooking | No Comments

The typical sausage roll is made from puff pastry, wrapped around sausage meat, brushed with egg and baked. I simply cannot stand these!

When I think sausage roll, I think some nice bread rolled around a real, actual sausage, not just ‘sausage meat’ (whatever that is). So, I take some nice basic french dough bread recipe and let it preferment for about 3–4 hours, then when we get to shaping, I roll out the dough (very much like making croissants, really, just with a single layer of dough and no fats), place a sausage at the fat end of a slice of dough and roll it up into the typical croissant shape (translated literally, we call these ‘sausage horns’ in Danish).

This is left to proof as normal, i.e. 1½–2 hours, and then baked at around 240°C for 10 minutes, then the oven is vented to let out steam, and finally they finish baking in another 10 or so minutes at 220°C.

And unlike my typical bread, these may be eaten hot. The taste of the sausage is typically a lot stronger than the flavour of the bread, so the added taste of actually letting the bread cool off completely isn’t really worth outlasting the temptation of eating them. And once you start eating them, you are hooked. I have yet to meet anyone who prefers the puff pastry versions to these. Bon appétit.

Tags: baking, bread

Just plain bread

Sunday, October 24th, 2010 | Cooking | No Comments

Once in a while I find myself in the rather annoying situation of waking up and realising that we are out of bread, there’s no real good alternative for lunch, there is no poolish ready for use, and the stand mixer is in the dishwasher and not at all ready for use. At that point, I could, of course, do a bunch of kneading myself, but that gets rather gooey and unwieldy with the highly hydrated doughs I prefer to make, so, enter the no-knead process…

The basic process is this: mix everything and incorporate the ingredients, then walk away from it for a while. You could just leave it like this for a good 16–18 hours and the dough will magically have kneaded itself, but from waking up until lunch, 16 hours seems a bit unrealistic. Instead, you can gradually strengthen the gluten strands by folding the bread, say, every 30–40 minutes or so for 2–3 hours. After that, we can shape the bread, let the loaf proof for about five quarters of an hour, then stuff it into the oven at a good 240°C for 30–35 minutes, and finally let it cool completely before slicing the bread. That last part is usually the most difficult part of them all, but like a good roast, you will not get a full, rich flavour unless you let it rest (unfortunately bread usually takes more than 20 minutes to rest, it’s more like 40–60 minutes).

That is what 500 g flour, 10 g salt, 14 g fresh yeast, and 360 g of water will give you when folded every 30 minutes for 2½ hours, and otherwise following the procedure above.

A lovely creamy crumb, and a wafer-thin, flaky crust. In a professional bakery, the ovens are able to take in water and turn into steam in certain intervals inside the oven, which keeps the bread moist and prevents the crust from forming prematurely—home bakers are, typically, not as fortunate, so we have to make do with alternative methods of getting those thin crusts. A lot has been written on the topic: people throw in ice cubes when they load the loaves, they put in wet towels that give off steam, they put a pan of cold water below the plate with the breads on, etc., etc.; In my opinion, this is all much too much work (plus the ice cube thing might damage the oven, crack the glass in the oven front and whatnot, plus it interferes with the bottom heat for my baking stone). Instead, I take some cold water from the tap, and place it in the cup of my hand and slowly drizzle it across the unbaked loaves between my fingers, then bake it just like that. This, of course, keeps me from doing fancy flour-patterns on top of the bread, but I didn’t really plan on doing those in the first place.

At any rate, for a fairly quick bread (yes, my quick breads take in the vicinity of 6 hours), it has a nice taste, but not as pronounced a taste of wheat as the 12+ hour breads do. But, at least, there was bread for lunch.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Forest berry slices

Saturday, October 9th, 2010 | Cooking | No Comments

There is this small cake that is a staple at almost any Danish bakery, the raspberry slice. While it is small and not terribly fancy compared to a lot of other cakes, it has a rather religious following of people who simply cannot do without it. At the basic level it’s two thin layers of baked shortcrust pastry on top of each other, separated with a layer of raspberry jam and decorated with layer of glacé icing and hundreds and thousands. But for some reason, a bite of this unseemly cake can compete with a lot of fancier cakes.

So, it is on shaking ground that I break with dogma and not only replace the raspberry jam with forest berry jam (we were out of raspberries, sorry!), and use margarine instead of butter (so us poor lactose intolerant people won’t suffer the worse, apart from gaining weight). Of course, we didn’t really have any jam at all, so we had to make that first from a blend of forest berries that we had in our freezer, along with some fresh Danish apples to provide thickening.

Allow to cook in with a smidgen of sugar.

Once that’s reduced a lot more, we can apply it to the baked shortcrust pastry slices.

And now, with jam, glacé icing and hundreds and thousands ready, just smear, smear, smear (carefully, though, so the slices don’t break apart).

Once the jam is applied on two of the slices, the remaining two are carefully placed on top. If you are wondering, this is what too much jam between the layers looks like.

So, just add the glacé icing and the hundreds and thousands, carefully cut into mouth-sized bites (provided you have extremely large mouths).

You can see how the jam is spilling out a tad too much. But even if we broke dogma, they had that raspberry slice feel and taste to it that is always great to bite into. Our daughter applied the hundreds and thousands; according to dogma, they should only be placed in a small but generous strip in the centre of the slice, but that was a bit too much to explain to a two year old who got to sprinkle them across the slices (I know, it’s almost sacrilegious).

Tags: baking, cake, pastry

Honey top cupcakes

Saturday, October 2nd, 2010 | Cooking | 2 Comments

Time passes quickly and life with a two year old doesn’t leave much time for anything much, least of all blogging, so these pages have seen little love for a good long while now. In fact, baking has been this hurried event where I’ve started using the same one or two recipes over and over again for bread, which makes for rather boring blog posts, to be honest.

Today when my daughter woke up from her midday sleep, she resolutely pointed to one of my baking books, flipped around for a short while then resolutely pointed to a recipe for honey top cupcakes and making them could only go too slow (she was trying to get her apron fastened almost before we managed to get into the kitchen).

With such a scrumptious base, how can you go wrong? In case you wonder, we like to bake—probably also more than is good for us, but that is another story—so we have a decent stock of cupcake forms, here nicely added to our metal form to lessen the clean-up mess.

Our daughter diligently helped mix flour, spices, egg, wheat-based cream and the sugar-honey-margarine base above into a coherent dough that we (more or less successfully) managed to move into the forms.

This just leaves a bit of baking to be done for a while.

And, of course, no cupcake is complete without some form of icing. A nice lemon icing with red fruit colour. Nothing too pompous so our darling daughter won’t die of sugar shock.

It’s awesome to be baking the whole family together, in case anyone should be wondering.

With cinnamon, ginger and ground clove these cupcakes taste very Christmasy (basically the same things we stuff into our Christmas cookies over here). So, with a chance of beating even the store advertisements… have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Tags: baking, cake, cupcake

Highly hydrated doughs

Saturday, April 17th, 2010 | Cooking | 2 Comments

Since the time I started baking I have read copious amounts of information on baking, primarily perusing titles from master bakers here and there, and some successful owners of bakeries in Denmark, Sweden and the United States. Some give good advice, others not so good, but the main thing I’ve taken away from having read all this is… it’s food, experiment and find something you like (though do be accurate about what you do so you can recreate it).

In some peoples’ opinion (and mine too for that matter), you should try to master the plain bread before you start adding all sorts of extra things to it. In a basic bread there are four ingredients: flour, water, salt, and yeast (or sourdough). That is it. No seeds, no additives, no lard, no herbs. Just four plain ingredients. I use organic flour and Maldon sea salt, mainly because I do not fancy eating flour with all kinds of remnants of artificial fertilisers, and Maldon sea salt because I like their salt taste the best (but do try a bunch of different salts and find the one you like best).

The amount of flour you put into this thing mainly controls how much bread you will have once the process is done (this is an over-simplification, each ingredient influences the final outcome in a lot of surprising and complex ways, so take the following with a grain of salt), the amount of salt will control the taste (and to some degree how well the gluten strands develop), and the yeast will control how quickly the fermentation process will happen (more yeast, faster bread and less taste, less yeast, slower bread and more taste), and finally there is the water. This is usually the ingredient you turn up and down to control the handling characteristics of the bread. The lower water rate, the more manageable the dough is, the higher it is, the more you will feel like you’re battling some sticky monster from hell as you try to shape everything up into loaves of bread.

So for a while I have been giving the breads very low amounts of yeast (around 1–5 grams), rather long time to ferment (from 5 to 18 hours depending on how busy our daily schedule is), and very high amounts of water (around 90% the weight of the flour) a try. This has given me a very open and creamy crumb with a soft crust the first few hours after baking, which hardens into a denser crust after 6–12 hours and a superb taste. In order for such a wet dough to stick together, it is necessary for the gluten to be able to keep it all together, which is what the long fermentation will help you achieve. For a brief few illustrations I have taken some photos of a 5 hour fermentation followed by 10 hours retardation (placing the dough in the fridge).

The lighting is a tad shoddy. It is surprisingly difficult to pour dough, handle a camera and get the lighting just right around 7 am after having stumbled out of bed. There is some nice gluten strands here, but without the retardation they are typically longer and tougher. You can tell how strong they are by how long they can get before they snap if you pull at the dough.

Next, there are more fun ways to influence the result of your bread: how you bake it. With steam? without steam? at what temperature? for how long? I usually pour a bit of water over the loaves just before I put them in the oven, which will create enough steam to keep the crust from setting too quickly. Since the dough is highly hydrated, the loaves need to bake for a good while (usually around 40 minutes in my oven), and I start out at the high end of the temperature range at 250°C for 15 minutes, then I vent the oven (open the hatch for a few seconds to let out the steam), then I finish baking over the next 25 minutes, slowly reducing the heat once in a while to keep the crust from scorching.

After baking, you will have a nice, creamy, open crumb and a wafer thin crust that flakes like it does with plain bread from a good bakery. Flour, water, salt, and yeast. That is it.

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Chocolate cupcakes

Saturday, November 14th, 2009 | Cooking | 3 Comments

Recently, my youngest sister wanted to bake these ‘advanced’ cupcakes, so she asked whether I would bake them with her. Never avoiding a chance to bake with others, I immediately agreed, and we had a lot of fun preparing, decorating, and not least eating the cakes.

It’s a fairly standard chocolate cake with whipped egg whites carefully folded into the chocolate batter. After a good bake we piped butter frosting over the cupcakes and drizzled candied violet over it.

Looking closely we can see the small pieces of candied violet better:

Normally I don’t fancy cupcakes too much as I think they have a tendency to become a bit too dry, but these were very good. Yummy.

Tags: baking, cake

Slow durum bread

Saturday, November 14th, 2009 | Cooking | No Comments

If one has better time, it is, of course, preferable to give the bread a slow rise, which brings out more flavour nuances in the bread. There isn’t that much difference in consistency to the quick durum bread, but it does have better flavour.

The ingredients are:

• 700 g wheat flour
• 300 g durum flour
• 10 g fresh yeast
• 20 g sea salt
• 700 g water

The ingredients are mixed together for 3 minutes at first speed to incorporate the ingredients, and then continuing on first speed for another 7–8 minutes to develop the gluten.

The dough ferments for 3 and a half hours with folds every 50 minutes and then the dough is shaped into pretty loaves.

After 1½–2 hours of proofing, the loaves are slashed and baked. Looking closely after the slashing we can see the bubbly activity inside the bread.

After baking they have a lovely golden durum crust.

And after cooling, the bread is ready for serving, perhaps with a nice variety of seafood.

Bon appetit!

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Quick durum bread

Friday, October 23rd, 2009 | Cooking | 2 Comments

Ever since our daughter has started in a nursery, we have more or less been incapacitated with illness, one overtaking the next, so time and energy for baking has been rather scarce. I did, however, succeed in baking a quick bread this past weekend, before I succumbed to another illness (the joy).

I found myself without bread on saturday, and a lacklustre enthusiasm of having to eat the local bakery’s cardboard bread once again. Lunch was few hours away, and the only straight dough recipes that I really like takes at least six hours from start to finish. So what to do, what to do… let us try something crazy and just go with the flow. Let’s try to mix some of the techniques from the slower breads, and the theory of bread baking I’ve been reading up on, with the traditional way for Danish home bakers to bake: quickly and with lots of yeast.

For interested parties, I’ll present to you the ingredients here:

• 700 g wheat flour
• 300 g durum flour
• 28 g fresh yeast
• 24 g sea salt
• 650 g water

This is a bit high percentage of salt given my usual tastes, but the quick fermentation process will yield a rather non-tasty bread (i.e. without as much wheat flavour), so we compensate by adding salt (this is not necessarily a good way to compensate, but when in a rush and all that…).

The ingredients are all weighed into a mixing bowl and gets an improved mix (3 minutes at slow speed for incorporation, and 3 minutes at a higher speed for gluten development). In order to further improve the gluten structure (this was, perhaps, not really necessary as it wasn’t a terribly wet dough, all things considered), I decided to let it ferment 40 minutes, fold, ferment 40 minutes and then divide and shape into loaves.

After the first fermentation, the dough is slightly sticky, but it has a nice structure, a bit like a good Danish dough.

Folding it gives it a very nice, firm, and smooth texture.

And giving it another 40 minutes to divide the loaves and shaping them works nicely.

After this comes the proofing time, letting the loaves rise after you’ve removed a lot of the air when shaping the loaves. I let them proof for about an hour, enough to turn my oven up to 236°C. I let the loaves bake around 30 minutes, but they probably could’ve taken five minutes more.

We were rather in a rush, so waiting for the breads to cool entirely was not really an option either, so we dug into them a bit early, while the crumb was still a wee bit too moist (but that is, for some reason, what most people insist they prefer).

This bread will not win any taste rewards, but it’s a nice, quick(-ish) bread with a comfy feeling (kind of saturday morning, the rain is pouring down, you’ve got a cold and you just need a nice warm slice of bread with jam and a big cup of tea, your comfy chair and a good book and to whittle away the hours). It definitely beats the usual quick breads from the Danish bread cook books, if I have to say so myself. Also, the durum flour gives it that nice, rich yellow tint (although that may be a bit hard to pick up from the photos).

Tags: baking, bread, white bread

Croissants

Saturday, May 16th, 2009 | Cooking | No Comments

Between having taken up a new job and having a baby daughter there is practically no time left to do anything, and blogging has been prioritised rather low in the little time there has been, and baking only slightly more than that, so it has actually been several months since I have been able to find time to bake anything. So, the day that I actually found time to bake had to be used to its fullest with something non-trivial, and one of the things I have missed dearly has been some of the folded butter doughs like wienerbrød (Danish pastry) and croissants.

The dough has to be rolled out to a rectangle and be fairly thin, then you add a block of butter (or margarine in my case), fold the sides over the margarine, roll it out and make a single fold. Then you refrigerate it for 30 minutes, roll, fold, refrigerate, roll, fold, refrigerate, and then you shape. I would’ve liked to get some photos of the margarine work, but from previous experience everything gets easily ruined when working with margarine if you pause overly long, since it is a lot softer than the butter that is usually used. So we skip forward to shaping the croissants.

Since the margarine is so soft I have had to add more flour to keep it from leaking everywhere, making the dough a good deal firmer than it is supposed to be. At least they are croissant-shaped, but they will most likely be somewhat more dense than what I had hoped for.

Sure enough, not the light flaky croissant you get at a bakery, but a tad heavier, albeit still decent, croissant. They weren’t all bad, though, about 25 of these disappeared within a few hours.

Tags: baking, pastry