Wholemeal Crank

A really simple question....maybe....? If I overproof my sourdough bread a little bit, at what point am I better off just doing one more fold/knead and reshaping and reproofing vs just putting it in the oven ASAP & crossing my fingers? I'm using a *very* lively emmer/barley starter and the loaf itself is freshly milled Rouge de Bordeaux hard red wheat. Usually I've been giving this one rise as dough, then shaping, proofing, and baking with good success. Today's loaf was reshaped and put in the proof box in hopes of one more nice rise.....but this is a sadly common question for me.

thanks for the thoughts. i'm not worried about the sugar, because I will use brown sugar that for this particular brand is bone char free--although my particular vegan has not brought that issue up herself. It's a small enough quantity that I don't think the bit of molasses will be a problem. But the substitutes for the dairy milk would all be liquid and I've been using and developing recipes with powdered milk to get the flavor with less impact on the texture. I have a team match on the way of soy milk powder available although there's gotta be some that someone has made somewhere.

I have a niece who is vegan and want to bake some cookies for her. I've got a fair bit of experience adapting and adjusting recipes for my whole grain baking, and recently have done a lot with gluten-free grains for the sake of friends who are celiac, and I've been adjusting recipes for my own borderline diabetes, but working exclusively with vegan ingredients is new to me. I see a handful of topics here that are mostly a decade or more old, and the choices of ingredients are different today, and there are lots more experienced vegan bakers out there now. So I thought a new topic was appropriate, but I'm happy to take this to another topic if I've overlooked one already in progress. Here is one of my own recipes I thought I might start with: https://debunix.net/recipes/FiveByFiveChocolateCookies.html Lightly greased or lined baking sheets Oven 350°F / 175° C Baking time 12 minutes 3/4 cup / 170 grams unsalted butter (if what you have is salted, see adjustment below) 3/4 cup / 150 grams sugar 3 1/2 ounces / 100 grams unsweetened chocolate 3 large eggs 3 tablespoons / 45 grams water OR 1/4 cup buttermilk OR 1/4 cup water [1 teaspoon vanilla if not using vanilla bean] Milled together 225 grams teff 2 inches vanilla bean [OR use 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, added with the eggs and buttermilk or water] Alternatives for the flour 1 1/2 cups / 225 grams teff flour [OR 1 1/2 cup / 225 grams whole wheat pastry flour OR soft wheat flour OR unbleached all purpose flour] 2 tablespoons / 12 grams buttermilk powder [omit if using buttermilk] 1/2 cup / 75 grams cocoa 10 grams ground chia seeds [omit if using wheat flour] 1 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt [omit if using salted butter] 4 ounces / 113 grams dried cacao fruit, minced 1/2 cup / 2 ounces or 60 grams cacao nibs 2 ounces / 56 grams finely chopped bittersweet chocolate (I love 70% Sambirano from Dick Taylor, or Scharffenberger 70%) Melt the butter and unsweetened chocolate together (I do it in the microwave on lower power to avoid scorching the chocolate, stirring often). Transfer to mixer bowl, and beat together with the sugar. Beat in the eggs, water or buttermilk and vanilla if you are using that. Take half of the flour and whirl in food processor with the dried cacao fruit until the fruit is very finely minced. This stuff is STICKY and the food processor struggles a bit to manage it; I have to stop and pick the gummy coating off the blade a few times to get it done. You can also chop it with a knife but it is hard work and the knife will need a lot of clearing too. Sift or whisk the flours, chia [if using gluten-free flours], salt, baking powder, buttermilk powder [if using] together, and add to the mixing bowl together with the the flour/cacao fruit, cacao nibs, and chopped chocolate. Stir together until well mixed. Icebox/Refrigerator cookies version: work less, eat later This is how I made them the second time, and I think it worked better: let sit for several hours at room temperature or in the refrigerator, to hydrate the flour and let the dough firm up enough to be shaped into rolls. Take about 1/3 of the dough and form into a roll, about 2 inches in diameter, and wrap in waxed paper or parchment or plastic wrap, and chill until quite firm for neat slicing (about 2 hours in freezer, overnight in refrigerator). When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 325°F / 163° C. Slice the rolls 1/4 inch thick and place on prepared baking sheets (lightly greased, or lined with parchment or silpat). Bake 325°F for about 12 minutes, until they are a little dry and firm on the outside, should still be a little soft but not gooey inside. Hand-rolled balls version: work harder, eat sooner This is how I originally made them: let sit for several hours at room temperature or in the refrigerator, to hydrate the flours. Preheat the oven to 325°F / 163° C. Roll teaspoonsful of dough into small balls, flatten them a little, place them fairly close together on lightly greased or parchment or silpat lined baking sheets (they won't spread much). Bake 325°F for about 12 minutes, until they are a little dry and firm on the outside, should still be a little soft but not gooey inside. *********** For these cookies, I've obtained some food-grade cocoa butter, and I was thinking of cutting that with some canola or Algae oil to keep it from being too hard--since cocoa butter is harder than butter at relevant room temperature, and might make things harder for cutting the chilled logs of dough. But I'm a bit at sea trying to guess how much of the oils to mix with the cocoa butter; and I know I need to get the cocoa butter or mixed butter/oil soft enough for creaming with the sugar, and if I were to mix these together I'd need to melt the cocoa butter, let it solidify, and then use it when room temperature-ish and not too hard. And I've already used chia to help with the lack of gluten in teff, but I figure I need more of that +/- flax to help with the egg. I figure flake yeast can add some umami that would help with the lack of buttermilk powder and maybe also the missing milk solids in the butter....but not sure what else to add that dairy richness. Open to suggestions!

They do have a subtle nuttiness that reminds me of chestnuts, distinct from commodity limas.

I have been trying to get more protein into my breakfasts (HgbA1c made me do it), and I dusted off my copy of The Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley Cookbook by Edith Cottrell. It's a quirky volume of recipes designed by a vegan nutritionist, and few of the recipe are really inspiring at first glance. But I remembered her bean-grain waffles fondly, and decided to give them a go again. I gave away my waffle iron ages ago--it took a lot of space and was never reliable, and most of the time pancakes are perfectly satisfying. I bought the almost toy-sized Dash mini waffle iron, which had enough positive reviews for me to be reassured that it would be more functional than an easy-bake oven; since I mostly am cooking for one, a little one seemed like a reasonable way to go. This morning I made a batch of corn-pecan waffles, with fresh coarsely ground cornmeal, a bit more pecans than she called for, and butter instead of oil, followed her timings and instructions to the letter (if it doesn't release right away, bake it longer).....and wow, they were delicious, with just a bit of butter, or with yogurt and berries. Corn-pecan waffles 3/4 cup coarsely ground cornmeal 3/8 cup boiling water Zap a few seconds in food processor and let stand to thicken 1/2 cup warm water Not quite 1/3 cup raw pecans 1 tablespoon butter Pinch salt 1 teaspoon sugar (turbinado/raw/coarse) Zapped for a minute or two again, to be sure the pecans are finely chopped. The batter thickened wonderfully on standing as she suggested. 1/4 cup filled the tiny waffle iron well. Heated the dash until the light turned off; after 9 minutes, it was not quite read; at 10 minutes, it was a LOVELY waffle. It was another lesson in coarser flour/meal sometimes being the shortcut to lighter texture in the finished product, bringing to mind some corn muffins I made ages ago by whirling popcorn in a blender to get a coarse meal, when I was away from home and the Kitchenetics mill. I've now got a second mill (Mockmill) that really does have variable grind capability, unlike the Kitchenetics impact mills that just make fine or ultra fine flours. Today's waffles were grain/bean combo, and I played with the base recipe quite a bit. They're barley/buckwheat & chestnut limas, and a pinch of cinnamon because cinnamon and buckwheat are so good together. The coarse flour is definitely helping. The texture is decent, but the flavor is good but not quite as good. I think next trial should be with some nuts added to the mix for flavor and texture. 125 grams barley 50 grams buckwheat Coarsely milled in the mock mill 2 1/4 cups water 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup dry Christmas lima beans, soaked overnight 1/2 teaspoon salt Pinch cinnamon These took 11 minutes for a quarter cup waffle, because beans, barley and buckwheat all need longer cooking than corn & pecans. But this is a fun exploration, and they are quite a bit better than those I remember from the past, when I was using an unreliable second hand waffle iron and not really understanding what I was doing with the recipes. I can see adding these to the weekend routine, with one batch taking quite a while to get all the way through, but while doing other things in the kitchen, prepping a whole batch to have a several meals later in the week will be easy enough. Very glad I resisted discarding this odd little book--I considered it so many times over the years but memory of the waffles kept it on the shelf through purge after purge when I needed to make room for new books on the cookbook shelves.

According to their ingredients list, their 70% cacao bar includes 'cacao fruit sugar' but does not specifically say 'cacao fruit': now wondering how they process that fruit. The Dick Taylor cacao fruit bar is fabulous, so it clearly can be included without degrading the chocolate as a whole. This was my tasting note about it: 'Dick Taylor microbatch 'Tropical Cacao Fruit', made with the same beans as their Belize (Maya Mountain/Toledo) 72% bar, and their tasting notes for that one are 'dried plum, tart cherry, and jasmine'; I find it deep, earthy, fudgy, with a delicate and the fruitiness is very subtle. The Tropical Cacao Fruit version is 70% cacao, and it is overtly fruity from the first moment as it starts to melt in the mouth, tart cherries and raspberries to the fore over that deep fudgy chocolate, and a floral element, a bit like a fine Santa Rosa plum, above it. Not quite as silky a mouthfeel as the the 72% cacao from the same beans....but not in the least coarse or unpleasant. I love, love, love this fruit-forward version.'

I find this very intriguing. I have enjoyed a frozen cacao fruit bar and had cacao-fruit infused chocolate (thank you, DIck Taylor Chocolate!) and eaten and cooked with dried cacao fruit (thanks to Blue Stripes) and the cacao fruit is deliciously fruity and floral. That said, I also remember another intriguing paper that suggested that the role of the cacao fruit might be less about infusing flavor molecules from fruit to beans as they ferment, and more about achieving appropriate temperature and humidity: https://www.acs.org/pressroom/presspacs/2022/acs-presspac-april-27-2022/new-cocoa-processing-method-produces-fruitier-more-flowery-dark-chocolate.html It makes perfect sense to me that the authors might be inclined to overstate the benefits of a process that might most benefit those able to build large-scale fermentation facilities to control temperature and humidity, and I've had plenty of terrible versions of chocolate produced by companies more concerned social benefits or guilt-free marketing than taste. And I agree that sugar is sugar, from fruit or from beets or from sugar cane, as far as the nutrition goes. But if these processes can be tweaked to make chocolate that is silky smooth *and* tastes terrific *and* is less wasteful....and is accessible to more than giant food conglomerates....lots of ifss!....it is intriguing.

I did just order as much as the budget could afford and then some from Harry and David. What I remember from that very first Scharffenberger factory tour is that they use the same bean blend with the same fruity flavor profile for the 70% and the 99% cacao bars. They use a different blend that has less fruitiness and a little less bitterness because it is made with milder manor beans for both the 62% and the 82%. And it's that 70% flavor profile that I crave when I use the 99% for Baking. and the baking bars are the same ingredients as the bars to eat out of hand, again if I recall correctly, without alterations in proportion of cocoa butter etc. that you find a lot of other brands of bulk chocolate sold as coverture. I just never trusted the gigantic blocks they used to break up and sell at Whole Foods after they quit caring the Scharffenberger in bulk. I know at least once or twice I purchased one of those mystery chunks of chocolate and was disappointed, but I don't know if it was Valhrona or Callebaut or something else.

no offers at all for the 99%

thanks, that helps. It's strongly suggest that the baking bars are going to be the most marginal aspect of the business going forward unless they really change course, and that I should be stocking up on every last one I can afford and have space for because they are not likely to continue much longer if they're not already permanently discontinued.

I have been using Scharffenberger chocolate for my daily hot chocolate and for baking/cooking for 20 years, through the Hershey's buyout and back to private hands, but recently my local grocery ran out of the 99% baking bars, and because I'm homebound after surgery, I can't do what I did when they switched over from larger baking bars (cheaper by the pound) to the smaller (more expensive) versions, and drive from shop to shop in the LA area and grab all the bars I can. So I checked online, and <scharffenberger.com> redirects to Harry and David's, where indeed they offer the bars I use for cooking. I'm wondering: does this mean Scharffenberger was purchased by Harry and David's? Or has the company gone out of business entirely, and there will be no more after wholesalers and retailers have exhausted their current stock? I'm seeing zero news articles by googling that suggest a bankruptcy, and they were spun off from Hershey's 4 years ago, but no mention of change of ownership since then. And their facebook page has no updates since June. Has anyone here heard something about SB going out of business? Where else should I look for updates on what's happened to them?

Waking up this dormant topic because I've got a question about homemade natto vs prepared frozen natto: The diabetes educator was very pleased when I mentioned that I'd enjoyed natto as part of a more savory breakfast on travel to Japan (she notes that starting meals with a protein by itself is better for blood sugar levels), so I decided to get some prepared versions to get a sense of what I should be aiming for when my spores arrive next week. I went to Nijiya market in Japantown, but was disappointed to only find frozen versions already portioned out in quite remarkably wasteful packaging. I checked the miso and tofu shelves 3 times, and I'm pretty sure I didn't miss anything there. The labels were naturally rather opaque being largely in Japanese; the ingredients were all similar (natto, little packets of soy sauce and mustard); so I rather randomly picked two versions. I let them thaw overnight in the refrigerator, and tried one of each today. And....I didn't like either of them. The point of making my own would be to start some meals with a spoonful or two of it by itself, then waiting 10 minutes to start on the carbs etc, so diluting it by putting it over cereal for reasons of flavor sort of defeats the purpose. Remembering now how much I disliked matcha based on the sad matcha I was preparing from supermarket offerings before I went to Japan and learned how much I could like it when prepared properly from fine matcha....is this going to be like that? Is it that the prepared versions are stronger flavored than the version offered at the hotel's buffet.....or was it because that was seasoned already.....or was it just that I was eating it with rice and so the strong flavor was diluted....or are they just not very good versions?

I was absolutely enchanted with the first batch of Kernza I tried, where there was a remarkable floral note like wheat crossed with vanilla orchid, but the bulk batch I bought after the smaller quantities were gone has been merely very tasty and not extraordinary. Because of that floral note, I first used it mostly in sweet or sweetish cookies, cakes, or breakfast breads. I've used my bulk purchase more in breads and crackers but not usually as the sole flour, because the high proportion of bran and distinctive gluten properties don't lend themselves to light sandwich loaves. I think it was most successful as very wet, soft dough baked in muffin tins for support or as flatbreads when not cut with modern high-protein wheat berries for yeasted breads.

My apologies if this is not the right place to ask this question and surprisingly, I don't see that we have a topic to help figure out where to ask things or discuss things. So this might be a bit off topic.... I have seen a lot of recipes for from scratch spice blends that include toasted and ground peeled/split dals of various kinds. What got me thinking are some recipes and ask for lentil dal and chana dal or urad dal. How important do you think it is to use that precise type of dal when making a spice mix that's going to be blended into a stew or pot of beans or rubbed on the vegetables? Are there substitutions you feel comfortable making when you don't have the specified dal on hand? I have many legumes in my pantry and am often reluctant to buy a pint of another variety when I only need a tablespoon here and a quarter cup there.

Probably time to buckle down and experiment with both salt-preserved and sugar preserved lemons, since I've got plenty to play with this year.

Waking this up after a long time, because of a marvelously mellow tea that ended a terrific meal at MoMed in Los Angeles. It was lemon-fennel tea, with a larger than I'd have dared use quantity of fennel, and a bit of lemon that I could just see as a rounded slightly orange-yellow bit of rather irregular (like it had been dried/shrunken) floating mostly underneath the fennel. Our server said something I didn't quite catch about it being made with a preserved or fermented lemon, wish I'd paid more attention at that moment. And it was deliciously fennel with strong sweet licorice/anise notes but also just enough that was distinctly fennel to confirm that it was not made with anise. And the lemon was remarkably subtle. It was not sour, hardly even tart, and certainly did not seem salty enough to have been made with a typically salt-preserved lemon, or sweet like the lemon had been candied or preserved in syrup. It was simply tamed enough to not need any more sweetness than provided by the fennel in order to be wonderful. And there was zero of the bitterness that creeps into my own lemon-infused teas where I slice some of my home-grown eurekas into the teapot, when I let it steep long enough for that to be extracted from the pith of the peel. How might that lemon--probably a meyer lemon--have been preserved/dried/prepared?

forgot to mention, I've been to Friends and Family--it's not far from me, and a pleasant place to wait for my car to be serviced nearby. The baked items are delicious, and feel a lot more....substantial....than those at conventional bakeries. But I have to be careful when I say substantial, because it's more about flavor and mouthfeel of the whole grain contribution, and not about *density*. They are not heavy at all. But they do feel like I'm eating something more than a bit of floury sugary fluff.

That's a good tip, and a useful book. I found the book useful for tips, but a little frustrating for lots of recipes using the heritage grains as additions to white flours instead of 100% whole grains. But after my first attempt using 50:50 barley:einkorn flour, a ratio that I plucked from thin air, which came out very heavy and gummy despite baking to an internal temperature of 210°C in the romertopf, what I was doing was clearly not the best approach. The crust was delicious, and if it is cut thin and heavily toasted, it's definitely edible. I'll keep playing with this sourdough--the starter seems nice and zippy--but with different flour blends. And my next attempt will be flatbreads because they are so much more forgiving than loaves meant to be loftier!

I posted a query in the sourdough starter topic about the experiments in baking bread using cultures recovered from ancient Egyptian pottery and looking for actual recipes that use ancient and heritage grains that would have been available as staples in Egypt at that time--einkorn, emmer, barley. Has anyone here got such a recipe or seen one?

So I was listening to As it happens, and the other day they replayed this story: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.5240203/what-does-bread-from-4-500-year-old-egyptian-yeast-taste-like-rich-with-overtones-of-brown-sugar-1.5240514 Basically, the story describes adventures in sourdough recovery from ancient Egyptian pottery (done under reasonably controlled conditions) and notes that they used barley and einkorn to bake bread with it because they did not have modern wheat in ancient Egypt. My most recent batch of sourdough starter had again gone awry after my first baking, and I needed to make another batch anyway, so I decided to see what happens if I follow the basic process from Peter's book in terms of quantity and proportions of flour and water and timing, but substitute barley and einkorn wheat for the flours (50:50 fresh home milled barley:einkorn, just because I could not find a more detailed reference yet). Basically, I'm curious to see if the starter generated is more like a regular wheat sourdough or different, because of the different grains, even if they were grown likely somewhere in the US or Canada, thousands of years and miles from ancient Egypt. The starter has been quick to develop and I've now got it ready to bake, and mixed up 1 part starter to 2 parts 50:50 water:flour, and will save some for my future starter and fill out the rest with more of the mixed flour, water and salt to make the first loaves. I've played with barley a little in unleavened flat breads (makes a nice breakfast 'toast' with peanut butter or jam), and a fraction of barley in a more conventional yeasted bread, but this is different, and I'd love to see an actual recipe suggesting proportions of the different grain flours and . But the signal to noise ratio in trying to google this is poor, because the original story from 2019 was very widely published and republished in every sort of new outlet, and the proliferation of sourdough baking and blogs during pandemic lockdown further overwhelms search results. Have any of you here seen an actual recipe shared/published by Blackley, Love, or their collaborators?

And duh!, why didn't I think of this before: Caputo's lists several nibs from top chocolate makers including Marou from Vietnam. Not cheap, but I have liked so many of their chocolates that I might try some next time I'm ordering from them.

I just discovered that they're available from Dandelion Chocolate as well, but as expected, not cheap. I decided to go with them because I have really enjoyed the specific Kokoa Kamili bar made from those beans, so I'm going to hope I like the nibs as well as the chocolate. I haven't had similar high percentage Valrhona's chocolate for a long time, but IIRC their roasts tend to be darker than my preference. But I'm really glad this is something major makers are still putting out, because it does add such a fine touch in the right recipes.

thanks for the tip.

Need to wake this topic up because Scharffenberger no longer is selling their cacao nibs. I have built them into a number of recipes (e.g., Five by Five Chocolate Cookies) as an interesting alternative to tree nuts and to add more cacao flavor to a recipe. Now that they're no longer available from Scharffenberger, I'm mostly seeing versions from companies whose emphasis is on natural/organic/whole ingredients, and having been burned by too many awful muddy chocolates from similar producers, I'm wary of ordering random brands. I want nibs that will actually taste good in my recipes, good enough for making into decent chocolate,and not stale, bland, badly roasted versions. Where do you get nibs you can trust?

I have been playing with ammonium carbonate for a year or so, since I first bought some to use for my Lebkuchen experiments. I read about the cautions to use it in things that get baked thoroughly, to avoid the bitterness of incompletely evaporated ammonia in the finished products, so I’ve been careful to use it in things that are meant to be thin and crisp all the way through. This weekend I prepared a batch of crackers, based on little Salted Biscuits from the breads of France. I modified the recipe a little bit, with some malt and flake yeast for flavor, and of course I milled the flour fresh as I usually do. For 600 g flour , I used 2 teaspoons of ammonium carbonate. I rolled them out, less than an eighth of an inch thick, but probably a little more than a 16th of an inch, baked them at about 375° for eight minutes on silicone lined baking sheets over quarter inch baking steels in my convection oven, which was preheated with a couple of batches of cookies before I started the crackers. After the crackers were done, I put them back in the oven at about 200° for 90 minutes to fully dry and crisp up. And the result? Instead of adding a bit of lightness to what is usually a dense but delicious cracker, I got light and crisp crackers that feel fully dried, but have that have a horrible chemical taste that I assume represents that which was described as piss salt above. So the question is why? I did my best to get these things thoroughly dry and thoroughly baked. And the cookies that I baked at the same time, which were also made using ammonium carbonate, and were a little over an eighth of an inch thick, also double baked with that second long, low heating with the crackers, are delicious without a hint of that chemical taste. So now I’m puzzled why the thinner product, which, arguably, should be less likely to have in completely evaporated ammonia, clearly has ammonia left?