Monthly Archives: March 2016

March 27th, 2016

Spelt Easter Pinze

Dinkel-OsterpinzePetras comment here made me thinking about baking this years Easter pinze with sweet starter. I already had a spelt variant in my mind and so I decided to combine both ideas. To keep the pinze moist, I replace the milk with some cream and reduced the amount of butter. Cream has not only a positive effect on the crumb, it is although good if you plan to let the pinze rise over night in the fridge, as the cream will not harden in the cold as butter would do. So the Easter Pinze can rise unaffected and it is easy to serve a oven fresh bread for easter breakfast.

As the dough contains a bit more fat (from the cream) I added some more egg yolk, too. This adds a nice yellow hue to crust and crumb, which is very nice especially on rainy Easter Sundays like it was this year. The pale green eggs in the background of the pictures are from my uncles hens, which belong to the so called “Easter eggers”, a variety of chicken which carries a special gen for a blue to green stained egg shell. So I get a  perfect green Easter egg without staining 🙂

 

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March 20th, 2016

Spelt Brioche

Dinkelbrioche (3)Here is –as I promised – the first spelt recipe (of hopefully many more). It is a variation of my brioche recipe, but with more egg yolk and a little water roux to increase the amount of liquid in the dough. A sweet starter adds flavour and helps a good rise.

When kneading to full gluten development, you have to keep a close eye on the dough, as spelt tends to be easily over kneaded. Especially when you use a new batch of flour it is a good idea to do a window pane test in between to test how far the gluten is already developed. It depends on the spelt variety, but perfect gluten development can be less then 30 seconds away from overkneaded .

But if you keep this in mind, then you will have a perfect light and fluffy dinkel brioche for breakfast on sunday morning!

 

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March 16th, 2016

Lemon Raspberry Macarons

Zitronen-Himbeer-Macarons (1)A day off should to be spent considered. And this a dear friend and me did last week. As my friend is as much passionated about baking as I am we decided to to a macaron marathon to compare two different recipes. One was the recipe of Pierre Hermè that I baked two weeks ago and the other one my friend get of the French grandmother of a friend.

Both recipes differs a lot from each other: the Hermé recipe contains more sugar and is made with an italian meringue. This makes the recipe more complicated, but it yields great macarons as well. The grandmothers recipe is very easy to prepare, but we struggeled with runny dough, cracks in the macaron shell and problems with the right baking time. Non of this happend with the Hermé recipe, we baked about 120 macaron shells with that recipe and each of them was perfect! And while the last time I pipe the macarons “free style” this time we used a template we place below the baking paper, so the macarons look now as similar as peas in a pod.

The macarons have a core of lemon curd which is surrounded by a dark pink ganache. The combination of lemon and raspberries is always a dream and the slight tartness of the fruits is the perfect contrast to the sweet shells! A beautiful and delicious treat! Continue reading

March 13th, 2016

Tumeric Loaf

Kurkuma-Laib (4)Bright yellow like the sun shines the tumeric loaf on my kitchen counter. And its good that it shines so bright as spring seems to be far away.

It was the first time in my live that I used fresh tumeric. I got very exited when I saw the rhizomes in our small wholefood shop and bought some directly. And while I packed them in my bag I already saw the bread I was going to bake with some  of them. Continue reading

March 12th, 2016

Ludwig & Jean

Ludwig und Jean BurgerDid you wonder why there was no bread recipe last week? There is a reason as I spent one week in munich, baking and optimising recipes with the team of Ludwig & Jean which I developed for them.

The mail with the question, if I could create recipes for their organic burger and pizza bisto, reached me already back in November. After some long phone calls I knew what they wanted and I knew that I wanted to this! The recipes were challenging as they has to be made with pure spelt flour and only with wild yeast. Plus they had to be vegan so that the same buns can be used for burgers with meat and for vegetarian and vegan variants.

 

All January and February I was test baking and recipe tweaking intensely. With a spelt variant of my sweet starter the burger and pizza get a very complex, deep flavour. Not only the Pizza but the Burger buns as well benefit from a long, cold proof in the fridge. They are made following my principle that a good bun (or pizza) needs time – which is the same principle the guys from Ludwig and Jean follow!

And as I spent the last month thinking a lot about spelt there are some recipes for you coming soon as well – but there will be no pizza or burger buns as my love asked for a break to recover after all the test eating he had to do  in the past weeks 🙂 So you have to visit Ludwig and Jean if you want to try the buns or the pizza. You can find them here:

Ludwig und Jean
Guardinistraße 6
81375 München

Ludwig und Jean

March 4th, 2016

Macaron Orange

Macaron (1)For this I have to blame Eva. She was so enthusastic about the new Book of Pierre Hermè that even I – who never was tempted by macarons before – started to think about baking them. I made a suggestion in the city library of cologne to buy the book and they did it immediately. Maybe they were tempted by Hermés Macarons as well?

After baking Berliner for carnival, I had a lot of leftover egg white. And as Eva promised, the recipe is not hard to follow if you have already a bit pastry experience. And it works perfectly for me, even as Macaron Newbie I got macorns with “feets”.

For the filling, I decided to go astray from Hermès Recipe as I had some pomeranz juice sitting in the fridge and knew from experience that a curd made from this is incredible delicious. And the fruity tartness with the subtle bitter flavour harmonize very well with sweetness of the macaron.

 

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