Happy New year!

Happy New Year to you all.

Pain au Levain - Hamelman

This is the Pain au Levain from the Hamelman book. I started yesterday at 11AM and finished the next morning at 4.45AM.
I haven't tasted it yet and tomorrow I will cut it and post a pic of the crumb.

Multi flour

This bread is made out of different flours : Plain flour, Rye, Whole Wheat and Buckwheat. Also some honey is in this loaf as well as some oil. I think this bread is tasty, I kinda like it.

Ah, Paris!

Home of some of the best bread bakers in the world!

VMSD Increased Grain two folds - crumb

Here's a pic of the crumb. It seems that the dough benefits from doing a second fold. The crumb seems to have larger holes than the previous one with only one fold. This is a perfect loaf in my humble opinion.

Stollen - Peter Reinhart

This is my stollen version from the Peter Reinhart 'bread baker's apprentice' book. It has been more than 18 years since I last made them in school, so to be honest I don't remember how we shaped them. I hope it looks okay. Taste is great though. Cinnamon and the orange and lemon zests give a delicious taste.

Vermont Sourdough Increased grain - two folds

I made the Vermont Sourdough again, I did this because of two reasons. One being that I love this bread and a second one to test if I was able to get a great result more than once.

An interesting fact is that this loaf is folded twice, the previous one was only folded once. I hope to see if there is a difference in the crumb structure as soon as I can cut the loaf. More about this in a next posting.

Vermont Sourdough with Increased Whole Grain- Hamelman

This recipe is similar to the previous Vermont Sourdough posting only it has increased Whole Wheat. Once again, a great crust and crumb. I managed to reproduce the succes of the previous posting.

The fact that these levain breads only contain flour, water and salt + the levain (which has the same ingredients) and give a great result is just amazing! Bread making is alchemy!

Pastry

I had to go to a party and had to bring some pastry with me. Made these ones : with 'crème au beurre.' I am sorry but I don't know how this is translated in English. If someone wants to let me know that would be great.

The ingredients are eggs, sugar, boiled sugar and butter. Basically what you do is add the boiled sugar sirup to the eggs and beat in the stand mixer. After that incorporate the butter.

Brioche - Hamelman

This is the first time I made Brioche. The dough contains 50% butter, which is a lot. Some other recipes use up to 70% or more butter. I think 50% gives a rich dough. The taste of butter is really delicious, it had been a while since I ate this. Not the healhtiest bread in the world, but quite tasty!

Cookies

I had some pâte sablee left and decided to make some cookies. I also had some speculaas dough sitting in my freezer and I also decided that this would make great cookies too for the Christmas party at my computer class. So here is the result.

Vermont Sourdough - Hamelman

This bread took two days to make, but it was worth it! I think the loaf simply is just perfect. I love the crumb.

Whole Wheat with pecans and Golden Raisins

I am into whole wheat it seems at the moment. So I decided to make this loaf. Once again from the Hamelman Bread book (page 246).

A tip I can give if you want to make this one too : the oven temperature (450°F) was too high for me. The author mentions in the book that you wil need to lower the temperature by about 15°F after 20 minutes (because of the pecans and raisins).

This did not work for me, I did not check in time and after 20 minutes of baking I saw that the crust was already too caramelized, so I lowered the temperature but it was already too late. So this one had a slightly dark crust, but I liked it even though I had to scrape some crust off.

Whole-Rye and Whole-Wheat bread

From the Hamelman Bread Book.

This is one of the first loaves I made from this book and I find this a tasty bread with a firm crumb. Delicious bread!

Rye Sourdough (again)

I made this one a dozen times before, but since this blog is like my diary of stuff I am baking I will post this pic. I really love this bread. The result after overnight retarding was super!

No Knead Bread (rye & whole wheat)

I like no knead bread, it is very easy and quick made. You let it rise overnight and the next day you bake it. Very convenient and easy. The result is most of the times great, so is the taste. I must admit I made a few loaves that did not were that good, the trick is (even though it is a wet dough) not make it too wet.

This bread came out very nice I think. The crumb looks great, holes could have been larger, but since I did use rye and whole wheat it looks just fine. No knead bread : you should bake one, you won't regret.

Mickey

I am digging through my archives of the previous blog I did and stumbled upon this pic. This birthday cake I made this summer and I could simply not resist posting this again. I like this one a lot!

Rustic Bread

From the Hamelman Bread book, my first try. Satisfied with the taste, but not with shape of the loaf. I made the pre-ferment too wet, so actually the whole dough was too tacky and the loaf did loose shape when I removed it from the basket. Oh well, I believe I read in Daniel Leader's book :

"After a bad loaf comes a good one!"

Buttermilk cluster - sandwich bun

Well, this dough is made from the same recipe as the buttermilk cluster pic I posted before, but this time I decided not to use a spring form pan to bake them in, but bake them separately. Once again the kitchen looks like a small bakery.

Wheat Walnut