When baking bread paying attention to the development of gluten is really important. The gluten network makes the dough elastic and extensible and makes it possible that the dough can trap and retain gas that yeast and bacteria when using sourdough produces during fermentation.
I have the feeling that autumn is already knocking timidly on my door. I knew that it is still august, in theory it is still midsummer, but after all the rainy days in the past weeks and with the fact that the days already started to get shorter I feel a little bit like autumn. Don’t understand me wrong, I cherish the change of season. It is like George de Santayana says: “To be interested in the changing seasons is . . . a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.” And I love the change from summer to autumn – maybe because I was born in this special atmosphere between theses seasons in September 29 years ago.
When my mom asked me if I would like to take the second half of a butternut squash I had directly the idea of putting the squash in a bread dough. I like butternut squash very much, it sweet and creamy taste and the stunning colour makes it to one of my favourite winter squash.
The bakery in the small village in which we spend our vacation in East Frisia offered little braids made of a slightly sweet dough. They taste great with jam or honey or as a sandwich with cheese.
The kitchen of our small holiday home contained a oven. So I brought the most important things for baking with me: scale, bowl and my hands 
. And I tried to recreate the recipe for the little braids to take a little bit of our holiday memories back home.
I decided to use Pâte Fermentée as a preferment and a water roux for a fluffy crumb.
To make kneading more easy (I left the kitchen machine at home) I let the dough rest after mixing it together for 30 min – during this Autolysis the proteins in the dough are hydrated and developing a nice gluten network is then more easy.
The little braids are delicious – slightly sweet like the original and with a fluffy crumb.
Paule baked Schuedi some weeks ago and this rise the whish in me to eat delicious “Butterkuchen”. Butterkuchen (called Schuedi in Luxembourg) is a cake with a yeasted dough base which is topped with butter flakes and lots of sugar. When the butter melts during baking it forms little buttery sweet pits in the surface of the cake.
Like Paule I connect Childhood memories with this cake because this was the favourite cake of my granddad. As a child I did not like this cake so much, my favourite was streusel cake. But when I grow older realized how delicious such a simple cake can be. This cake shines with its simple but high quality ingredients. Using a good fresh butter is really important for a great taste, I prefer sweet cream butter.
For the dough I used a preferment to add more aroma to the dough and reduce the amout of yeast.
The cake tastes great. My boyfriend already asked for second one because this one was gone so fast.
Some years ago, when I discovered bread baking again after a longer periode of not-baking, one of the first breads I bake was the Farl a la Paul Hollywood. I found the recipe on Petras Blog, Chili und Ciabatta.
But soon I like Breads with long fermenation and preferments like sourdough, Poolish or Pâte Fermentée more then the quick variants and so I forgot about the farl.
This weekend, when I thought about a bread for our barbeque at work, the Farl sprang back into my mind and I decided that I would tweak the recipe. I added a Pâte Fermentée and reduced the amount of yeast.
The dough was very easy to handle due to the lower hydration then my usual recipes – a good bread for beginners – and the bread was everything I hoped. Thin crust, regular crumb, with the flavours of a slow rising bread and a hint of buttery taste.
Since I baked the Yoghurt Sesame Rolls the first time I think about how to change the recipe so that the overnight method would work for sweet rolls, too. Normally I add some eggs to my sweet rolls dough, but to keep a dough with egg overnight at room temperature was too risky in my eyes. And so I decided to try a modified sweet roll recipe using buttermilk. Buttermilk is rich on lecithin same as egg yolks which is positive for the dough development.
Folding the dough develops the gluten network nicely and makes the crumb fluffy and soft. The crust is soft, too like a good sweet roll should be. The rolls gain flavour due to the long fermentation even without adding a preferment and the rather low hydration makes them easy to shape so that this recipe is ideal for beginners in bread baking.
Pudding pretzels or Pudding pastry are one of the best pastries you can buy in the bakery. They are so delicious that I even ignore that the boyfriend calls them “Eiterbrille” (that means pus-filled goggles). I know this term for them is common in the Rhineland but I don’t like it.
The pudding pretzels you can buy are made with danish pastry dough but when I made them last weekend I decided to use a simple challah dough instead. That saves some time and a lot of calories!
I filled the both of the loops of the pretzels with pastry cream and they bake very well. All of my fears of melting fillings that flood the oven did not hold true. I would have liked it if the filling melt a little bit at last so that the surface of the pudding would be more even. But it stays as rough as it was when I filled it in. Next time I have to take care to smoothen the surface! Continue reading
It seems like I would spent each wake moment in the lab. I try not to spent the nights there, but I start very early in the morning and at the moment I work very often one day of the weekend, too. There is a silver line on the horizon, promising that I will finish the missing experiments very soon and that we can resubmit our paper in near future. For me this means although a well deserved vacation!
Due to the enormous amount of work I have less time for Blogging. I still bake bread, take pictures and write down new recipes, but to put everything together as a post is not so easy at the moment.
When baking at the moment I use recipes that need not so much time each day. My favourites are those recipes that requires proofing over night.
This light sourdough bread is such a recipe. It taste very nutty because of roasted rolled grains and seeds, it is very fluffy and soft and it has a deep complex taste due to the two preferments and the long, cold proof.
I don’t like it when I have left overs in the fridge. They tend to grow old and after some days I will throw them away. And I don’t like to throw away food! Normally I plan our meals so that we eat everything or that the left overs are enough to be packed as lunch at work on the next day. But this saturday there was some potatoes left. Nothing else, only potatoes. And we had a invitation for Lunch the next day, so cooking something with something with them was out of question.
I inspected the fridge and found following things: Some Pâte fermentée, made because I wanted to bake something but without any recipe in mind, a cup of buttermilk and as I told before, potatoes. Looking on these things I had a Idea at last: I would bake some nice rolls for breakfast on Sunday.
Why did I wait so long until I tried this recipe? I don’t know! It is a simple recipe with three components that promise dessert heaven on earth: Meringue, cream and fresh fruits. And like Eton Mess the magic of pavlova consists of this mixture of crunchy and soft, sweet and sour and this made the dessert irresistible.
I saw Pavlovas on many food blogs before: Claudia bake them, and Paule, Nicky and Barbara made them some time ago, too. And every time I read one of their posts I thought: I have to try this! But I didn’t do it until this weekend. When we bought some delicious berries (strawberries, blueberries and raspberries) I decided that they would be great for a pavlova.
I like the miniature version of the dessert that Claudia bake and so I decided to do single portion pavlovas with a diameter of only 10 cm and a little pit in the middle to keep the cream.
The recipe is really simple only waiting for the meringue to bake/dry takes some time. And you will be rewarded with a delicious dessert for your patient waiting! A great recipe for the summer!