If you didn’t know any better – like I didn’t when we first came here – you’d probably assume, with good reason, that both of these tins contained condensed milk: But that’s where you’d be wrong.  Sure, at least at first glance, the Hebrew text is exactly the same: חלב מרוכז וממותק / chalav merukaz umemutak / concentrated sweetened milk.  But the English is different, and therein lies the key difference between the two – the one on the right is FAKE. Here are the ingredients of the real thing (on the left): Milk (55%), sugar (45%).  That’s it.  Pure and simple. Now, here are the ingredients

When you love baking as much as I do, you become an evangelist. After we moved to Israel, and our whole lives were topsy-turvy, the only time I felt like things were at all “normal” were when I was making bread.  Those breads were rudimentary at first – hey, we didn’t even have an oven.  But they kept me grounded.  I was so ecstatic when all our possessions arrived, including my gorgeous cast iron loaf pans, plastic dough bucket , and other beloved bakeware, accumulated over the years.  It was time to get my hands floury and really start baking again. I love how centered and grounded baking makes me feel, but can’t help wondering why other people seem to think it’s hard, or complicated, or just not something they have space for in their lives.  We all have time and space to make bread.  Sure, it takes a while, but very little of that is active prep time.  A bread that takes 36 hours from start to finish may have less than ten minutes of actual st...

I wrote on here back in June about my deep-seated, irrational NEED for a piecaken.  If you don’t remember, or have no clue what that is, you can read about it here . So today I did – kind of.  Except it was an utter disaster, the most cr*ptacular confection I think I have ever confected. And in case anyone thinks I am some kind of Superwoman who never blogs her failures, here ya go, in delicious step-by-step horribility… Starting out on a promising foot with a delicious pie.  I used a sheet of malawach pastry for the top crust, rolled thin.  I’ve done it before and it actually makes a pretty decent, flaky / tasty crust.  Oh, inside this there is cherry pie filling.  And I cut proper vents, four of them, right in the middle. The top crust wasn’t attached perfectly at the edges, as you can see… …but that still doesn’t exactly explain what happened when I went to “decant” the pie on top of some of the cake mix.  Oh, yeah, did I mention I wh...

What with the kids making challahs yesterday, I realized I had too many if I made all my “snakes” into 4-braid challahs.  So I decided, with the snakes I’d already rolled out, to make 2 6-braid loaves instead of 3 4-braid loaves. Rolled out the snakes nicely: long and thin, because if they’re too fat, a 6-braid can easily turn into a round challah.  Braided them up… and then noticed an extra snake sitting on the table: I’d forgotten to include it, and one of my beautiful “6-braids” was actually only 5.  Can you guess which one???   Quick fix – and seriously, this was the easiest solution to any bread problem I have ever encountered:  tuck the extra snake underneath the braided challah in the pan.  Can you see it hiding under there??? Left it to rise, baked as usual… and nobody ever noticed the difference.  The volume of the finished challahs is identical, because they both contain 6 strands – just one has the extra strand hidden inside… ...

3 pm on a winter Friday afternoon is NOT the best time to realize the challah that has been lovingly rising since late the previous night actually contains NO YEAST. I was lying down with GZ when I realized… I started visualizing me getting out all the ingredients the night before: salt, sugar, flour, water, oil, eggs… nope, definitely no yeast.  Eeeeeek!!! I basically threw GZ down on the bed, raced to the computer to Google “forgot yeast bread help” or something like that.  Yay – a solution! I took the FULL AMOUNT of yeast called for in the recipe, added a bit of sugar and enough water to make a thin paste.  (note to self: use a bowl next time, not a teeny tiny container, because it WILL bubble up) 5 minutes later, it was bubbly – ready to go!  I smeared the paste everywhere and kneaded it in as well as I could (the site I found suggested not overkneading the dough, but how the heck do you do that without the finished bread being full of yeasty-pasty blobs?...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!  Moment of infamy, shouted at the Shabbos table: “The challah has a bite missing!” Which would be fine or, if not fine, the end of it if said child had not chosen to clarify for the guests:  “ a mouse must have eaten it.” Yup, our rodent guests are still with us, and probably multiplying by the week.  It is no longer safe to leave ANY food out, especially in plastic bags.  And the trap-kill-poison campaign has wound down; the baited traps that worked well at first are no longer effective at all.  It must mean they’re getting too much food elsewhere to care about what’s in the traps… but how??  It’s all locked up now, I’m certain of it. Argh.  So unjust.  So frustrating.  And, in this case, so humiliating.

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!  Gorgeous challah, fluffy-soft… no SALT!!! :-( Sad but true.  And we were taking it to neighbours’ for supper.  I just gestured to keep on sprinkling more more more salt… but salt sprinkled is NOT the same as salt incorporated in dough.  Blah.

It’s my disasters that keep me humble… that’s for sure.  (Speaking of disasters, have you entered my Kitchen Disaster contest yet???) Then again, I bet you don’t get so many disasters with all those other marginally competent bread blogs out there!!!  I bet that’s how I earned my fifteen loyal followers in the first place, by being human, just like them! So.  If you recall, I decided to make a delicious sprouty, wheaty bread for our supper tonight!  I started sprouting the wheat berries on Monday, and mixed up a couple of components of this bread last night . Here’s what I started with when I picked it up this afternoon:  “soaker”, preferment, exactly 11g of sprouted wheat berries.       Ground the wheat berries to “kneadable” consistency.   Holds together when smooshed into a ball in your hand:   Tossed in the rest of the flour, touch of honey, touch more yeast and kneaded the whole mess together.  Should hav...