Just testing the picture-taking capability of my new BlackBerry Playbook… not bad; better resolution AND colour than my actual camera.  Even with no flash! Making my Auntie Sally’s Challah recipe… as you can see here, each week I print out a new recipe sheet.  Terrifically wasteful, but one doesn’t want to bring any kind of electronic device within splashing range.  I suppose a whiteboard would do the trick… but for now, I print it off from the spreadsheet, which automatically calculates what I need based on how many finished challahs I want. Another trick that will throw off my quantities a bit but greatly increase the yumminess of the finished product:  any bread dough left over from the week – in this case, a bit of a batch of no-knead dough from Tuesday’s boule – becomes an instant pre-ferment for the weekly challah.  I did use regular yeast as well, though since I’m leaving it overnight, I probably didn’t have to.     One of the most...

  Besides a bunch of Auntie Sally’s challah which I whipped up before Rosh Hashanah and still had in the freezer, this is the main “overnight sponge challah” I’ve been playing around with this yom tov season. Because the base recipe doesn’t make very much, I thought I’d quadruple it for the first days of Sukkos, when we were expecting lots of guests.  With the help of my trusty sourdough spreadsheet (which works even with NO sourdough, just by filling in “0g” of starter), here’s what I came up with for the sponge: 1620 g flour (mix of ap and bread) 1960 g water 200 g sugar 220 g oil 4 tbsp salt 4 tsp yeast Here’s the wet stuff going into the bucket first.  With its happy new batteries, my scale held it all,  even though officially it only holds up to 2kg.  I was so happy I’d finally gotten around to marking the bucket weight on the side, just ...

A wonderful, wonderful year to everybody reading this and even those who are not! May all of our braids go ‘round and ‘round     Coiled tightly   in the snails of our lives!   More New Years’ Dough! Two kinds of challah this year:  4-600g loaves of Super Wonder Challah (double recipe) and 3-675g loaves of Auntie Sally’s Challah . Here, I’m mixing flour into the gloppy sponge for the Super Wonder challah last night before it had a chance to rise.   What did the sponge look like?  Happy you asked! Most spongy indeed.  And then this morning: Oy, vey!    It actually popped the bucket open in the fridge, and a bit of it was dried out, but I tucked it back in and it moistened up again just fine.  By the way, you can’t quite see in this picture, but the bucket was so swollen it wouldn’t sit flat on the table – it was wobbling like a weeble. Dark = Auntie Sally’s Light = Super Wonder May it be a...

These are the same as Friday’s, made once again with the Balthazar’s Chocolate Bread dough. They turned out great!  Much easier than I thought they would be, although the table is still a powdery, jammy mess. The sourdough wasn’t quite ready from its overnight rest when I had to mix up the final dough (it was fridge-cold when I started it last night – I didn’t give it any time to warm up first), but because the recipe calls for added yeast, I didn’t worry about it too much, and the dough still rose fabulously well.  It’s a moist dough, but far more workable (in my opinion) than the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day pain au chocolat.  If I was making it up as a loaf, I would definitely go with this recipe. I used a plain round cookie cutter, let them rise a bit before frying, and filled the heavy pareve enamel pot with oil so as to ensure a perfect yummy sphere shape for each sufganya. Et voila!  Here they are, fried up and naked, waiting for their powder...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!  Delicious challah… better the next day! Now that is an accomplishment, because I usually don’t like challah very much by Saturday afternoon.  I made last week’s amazing Super Wonder Challah.  I ran out of bread flour, so it was perhaps a little softer than last week.  That made it very hard to braid.  Didn’t help that I doubled the recipe and ended up with enough to make three HUGE loaves (>2lb) that spread like crazy in the pan.  So in the end, it was not as picture-perfect as last week, but absolutely just as yummy – if not more so.  And today, even yummier!  Hooray for pre-fermentation; definitely works for me, though it’s a mystery why prefermenting HALF the flour can make the bread tastier than prefermenting all of it (I usually make the entire batch on Thursday night, let it rise, and fridge it overnight). Elisheva said that this was the closest to storebought challah that I’d ever ...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out! Unveiling My New Super Wonder Challah! My mother invited us for Shabbos dinner because she was also having my aunt (who just returned from shiva in Vancouver earlier this week) and she asked if I was bringing challah, so I said sure. Having messed up a couple of breads in a row, I promised myself I’d stick to the standard recipe, but couldn’t help myself… I wanted to do a preferment. I found this recipe online, which is very similar to my Reliable Challah except that it preferments  half the flour overnight.  Perfect!  I don’t have cubes of fresh yeast, so I used half of the regular yeast from the Reliable Challah recipe, about 1/2 tbsp, subbed 1/4 cup of sugar instead of honey, and left out the egg entirely.  I used 3 cups of bread flour, measured by volume, because I figured it didn’t have to be exact.  After a short room-temperature rise, I let it sit in the fridge overnight. In the morning, after ...

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...

I’ve been sprouting these wheat berries for a few days now… they’re ready.  Now what should I do with them??  I have some rye flour I’ve been wanting to play around with… any thoughts? (the sprouts are in the fridge now, awaiting their fate – they should keep for a bit while I decide!) Postscript:  I’ve found the solution (I hope!):  Sprouty Spelty Wheat Bread. Original recipe, speltless, is here , apparently adapted from Peter Reinhardt’s Whole Grain Breads , which I haven’t read.    (from Kath Eats , a blog where I borrowed another recipe a while back, for making Ciabatta and Focaccia from the same batch of dough. (I also just discovered that the lovely Kath and her husband Matt – who bread-blogs at her food blog – are opening their own Great Harvest Bread franchise this fall!) I have no whole wheat flour in the house, but some leftover whole-grain spelt, a gift from my sister a long, LONG time ago.  I decided to use it up with thi...

I’m making Auntie Sally’s challah dough for Yom Tov (third and final batch of dough!) because I think it will make a couple of nice challahs along with some excellent cinnamon buns.  I have yet to make really EXCELLENT pareve cinnamon buns, so here’s hoping. I’m modifying my formula from last time , splitting it up to include a bit of a preferment.  Why the heck not???  Why a preferment and not an autolyse, like this winning recipe from Challah Crumbs (which I very nearly selected)?  I dunno.  I have some time… why not let the stuff sit in a bowl as long as possible? So here’s the same recipe, divided, with 25% of the flour in the preferment.  I estimated 140g for a cup last time, so I’m keeping that the same. Preferment: 2 cups bread flour = 280g 1 cup of sugar = 200g 4 tsp yeast = 24g Going to try to reduce this to 14g 2.5 cups of warm water = 600g (whoah, this is going to be SLOPPY…) Postscript:  indeed, it was very slopp...

Thursday night:  pâte fermentée, mixed. Friday morning:  risen nicely!    Add roasted potato, flour, whole-wheat flour, water, more yeast, salt.  Also a bit of fresh rosemary (next time, I’d use more… the flavour was VERY faint): Knead well, until gluten is moderately developed (short of the shinier chewing-gum texture I’m learning is characteristic of highly-developed dough).  The finished dough (some crumbly finger-leftover-bits dropped on top):   Fully-formed loaves, set to rise on parchment and cornmeal: Fully-risen loaves, floured, then slashed (much neater than trying it without the flour!):   Crispy crust, hot and fresh… delicious!   Would I make this bread again?  It WAS yummy, with a faint tang from the preferment and a bit of a rye taste, mysteriously, from the rosemary. It was moist, but not extraordinarily so.  At Shabbos lunch, it may have tasted marginally fresher than a bread without all ...