Bread - What are you baking today…..
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Boom. I don't have a warm-spot - wish I did….
I’m sure you have… airing cupboard for example? There must be a closet in one of the bathrooms with underfloor heating.
In my case we have a cupboard as a part of the same unit that houses our integrated fridge. All the warmth generated ends up there so the temp is a steady 29C.
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I promise you, we don't. We have lots of great cupboards and areas that remain super cool all year (possibly more useful), but nothing that remains super warm. Even the boiler room is so large and open, it does not remain very hot, and modern boilers are so bleeding efficient, ours only seems to warm up what it's meant to….
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I promise you, we don't. We have lots of great cupboards and areas that remain super cool all year (possibly more useful)…
I have realised there is a massive difference in the design, construction and purpose of British and Norwegian houses, so while a warm cupboard here or there in a British house wasn’t unusual, a cold pantry/larder was (is) more useful. I’m campaigning to retain a small corner of our cellar as a cold pantry at the moment. Hot Ingrid doesn’t understand and is having none of it, but as I keep saying, it isn’t her that makes the damn food.
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It is Valentine’s Day, Norwegian Mother’s Day and Fastelavn (Scandinavian Shrove Tuesdays, on a Sunday).
In an effort to combine all traditions I took Hot Ingrid out for dinner last night and I am made traditional Semlor today, but we had them for breakfast instead of tea.
Started by making a standard sweet bun dough:
Then hollowed them out, a mixed what was removed with boiling milk and marzipan to
make this mix:
I then filled the hollowed out bun with the mixture:
Then added whipped cream, the “lid”, and some icing sugar:
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Only 4 rashers of bacon? Poached eggs look great.
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Did my first bake with the baking steel last night. My normal baking routine had been disturbed by preparing for the sale of my house so I fermented a poolish in the day time and used the evening to get to grips with the steel. First, the results:
This is what they looked like in the oven straight after launching from the peel:
Using the steel cut the baking time by 10mins. I didn’t leave the loaves to go dark, but the colouring is much more even. If I left them to go dark brown, then the baking time would have been 5 mins shorter.
The oven spring was decent, quite uniform and controlled. The final shape of the loaf was quite pleasing, more symmetrical and rounded. One really fun thing was being able to watch the loaves rise in the oven. It will be interesting to see how the pure levain loaves I have planned for the weekend fare.
Launching was easy and fun too, but the process made a lot of mess, leaving loads of flour everywhere. Definitely one of the things I’ll be focusing on improving.
The bread was good. Decent crust, moist and tasty but the crumb was unspectacular. It was airy, and fluffy in texture but the bubbles were quite evenly spaced. How much of this was due to the fermenting and flour mix (I used bran and wheatgerm), and how much was the baking steel I do not know, but again, more bakes, with different doughs should clarify this. I’ll do a Biga this weekend too, so I can knock off a couple of pizzas.
