It’ll make the bread dough rise faster, right? Right? Uh, no. Not necessarily. Uhn uhn. This all started with my wild yeast (aka sourdough or natural leaven) cinnamon buns. They took forever to rise. Forever being, oh, say, 8-10 hours at 30-35C for a first rise and another 12-14 hours for a second rise. …
Continue reading “More sourdough starter is a good thing, right?”
This is the next bread in line for the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge. I was looking forward to making brioche since so many people were huge fans, but since I hadn’t had brioche before, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I cut the recipe in half, converted to grams, then replaced the yeast with …
Continue reading “Peter Reinhart’s Poor Man’s Brioche, Sourdough Version”
I’ve never been a bagel person, but given that the only bagels I’ve ever had were from supermarkets or the like in Western Canada, I doubt that I’ve had the best. Perhaps really good bagels will change my mind? No idea, but since bagels were next in the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge, I was willing …
This gets to the science behind baking bread. If you can make an excellent loaf of bread that turns out exactly as you want it to without knowing anything about bread hydration and baker’s percentages, great! Me? Not so much. I started reading up on it preciesely because my bread wasn’t turning out the way …
While the grocery store had both squid and cuttlefish, we ended up buying cuttlefish over the squid for two reasons – the cuttlefish are significantly cheaper and require much less work to clean up. Yeah, squid rings are prettier, more elegant, than cuttlefish strips, but honestly, with just the hubby, do I care that much? …
Continue reading “Filipino Deep Fried Squid Rings or Cuttlefish Strips”
I’ve made this dish before for Fahim and I, and we really like it. Then, one day, his parents were here and I made it again, and they agreed that it was good and said I could make it again. For them, that’s high praise! The original recipe is from Ceylon Cooking by Chandra Dissanayake, …
Anadama Bread is the first recipe in Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and therefore the first recipe being tackled by those participating in the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge. Quite a few of those participating are already onto their second recipe, some on to their third, so I’m behind already, and I just got started. …
During my travels through Teh Interwebs, I ran across this article on shaping boules. It’s got useful information and big pictures showing the process, so if you have any questions, it’s well worth looking at. Meanwhile, it led me to a few questions and possible Aha! moments. Let me run this past you. It’s only …
My mother-in-law makes a lovely seeni sambol – spicy, sweet onion sambol – that I love. But I didn’t have her recipe, so had to see what I could find. Because, of course, I had to have seeni sambol to go with my coconut roti. This picture doesn’t do the dish justice. Unfortunately, I forgot …
I’m forever on the hunt for more good bread recipes. It’s a sickness, I tell you. 🙂 So I gave this recipe a try. The author of the original recipe calls it a 63% hydration bread, but really, if I’m going to get nitpicky, and when doesn’t that happen, I’d point out that, with standard …