Chris Hennes

Chocolate cake with a very large amount of coffee in it (frankly, I distrust the recipe, the cake was pretty near one of those flourless cakes in texture, and I don't think that was intentional...)

Modernist Bavarian Pumpernickel After my various previous problems making Pumpernickel the "old-fashioned" way, I've now tried the Modernist variant. It basically cheats the color in by adding black cocoa powder, molasses, and caramel color. So, surprise! The color is better in this loaf. It also skips the overnight proof by simply adding commercial yeast. So it's faster to make, assuming you already have a (large quantity of) liquid rye levain. It's a delicious bread, but it doesn't really taste that much like the baseline recipe. The molasses takes over a bit, I thought, and without the overnight proof the levain is just at a standard maturity, instead of getting that extra age. So the rye sourdough flavor is a bit more muted. So: I like it, but it's sort of marginal as direct substitute for the real thing.

I think this is the first time I've made the pita recipe from Modernist Bread. It has a very large amount of oil in it (just over 13% baker's percentage), and uses a 24 hour refrigerated proof stage. I think technically the recipe has you preshape the dough before that proof, but I didn't do that, I just left it in bulk and divided and shaped the next day. We ate these for dinner fresh from the oven: can't get them any fresher than that! They are delicious: great flavor and texture. I generally prefer the flavor of whole wheat pitas (my go to recipe is from Beth Hensperger's The Bread Bible (eG-friendly Amazon.com link)), but these definitely gave my usual recipe a run for its money.

I posted about the Pumpernickel a couple of months ago. Last weekend I made it again, attempting to fix the two major issues I had last time. To address the lack of color I made two changes. First, I tried baking it for the 30 minutes specified for the basic home oven, rather than the 15 given for the convection oven. Second, I cut the power to the oven immediately after baking to prevent the fan from venting. Alas, neither seems to have made any difference at all, this loaf came out exactly the same color as the previous one. It also comes out of the pan wet. I meant literally, with water on its surface when I unmold it. So I had to bake it for a few minutes after the 16 hour bake time to dry out the crust. I don't understand where this condensation is coming from. Any suggestions? To prevent the bread from pushing its way out of the Pullman pan during the final proof, I simply made the full batch, then removed 250g of the dough and used it as an inclusion in another dough. This was completely successful: the dough did not attempt to exit the Pullman pan, and the second loaf (basic white pan de mie with the 250g of pumpernickel dough added to it) was delicious:

Here's the finished video (and note that these turn out to be called "chokeberries" and not "chokecherries" which are apparently a completely different thing... So let's go with "Aronia Berries"...)

My latest cooking video is live, and of course it's a bread product... this time, Cheese Buns, inspired by The Hunger Games...

Your assumption was correct (though she does take her pickles seriously...).

...and, eight years later, I'm still at it. I still don't know what we're supposed to call a sandwich that is basically a Reuben but made with Pastrami, but that's what I had for lunch today. For amusement, I broke out my old, beat-to-hell copy of Joy of Cooking and made Thousand Island dressing from scratch (I made the chili sauce variant rather than the ketchup one). The pastrami is the Modernist Cuisine recipe made with local Wagyu short ribs and shredded, rather than sliced (no real reason, I just felt like it). The bread is the Modernist bread Marble Rye (a blend of Jewish Deli Rye and American-style Pumpernickel), and the sauerkraut is the Juniper Sauerkraut from The Everyday Fermentation Handbook by Brandon Byers. My wife gave me some crap for using non-homemade pickles in the Thousand Island, so I guess I have to get a couple jars of those going...

Yeah, the marbled rye looks a little weird baked in a 9in pan (no, I did not mess up the aspect ratio of the photo, that's what the bread looks like): On the plus side, it's delicious.

Has anyone made the marbled rye? I see that the recipe indicates a 9x4x4 loaf pan for a kilogram of dough - I normally use a 13x4x4 for that quantity. I guess I'll give it a go, but it seems a little odd.

Yes - it was clearly baked at a lower temperature than I normally use (same problem as the rest of the loaf -- 450°F is just a little low, I normally bake at 470°F), but otherwise it wasn't that different from my full size oven, with the exception of having the steam available.

Yep - I'm working on a video about that jam, so yesterday I suckered all my colleagues into trying it by bribing them with fresh-baked bread .

I chickened out and just went with jam after all. I was actually really pleased with it, to me it has a much more interesting flavor than most berry jams. I kept it simple: just the berries, sugar, and pectin. On homemade bread, of course.

I finally got a chance to bake real bread in the FBO yesterday -- I didn't exactly trust it and didn't want to set off the smoke alarms, so I actually wheeled it out to the balcony. Everything went fine, however. I put in a Fibrament baking stone (I just bought the smallest one and cut it to size) and preheated it at 450°F convection mode for an hour before baking. Then I switched to combi mode, baked for ten minutes, then switched back to convection. It probably took 35 minutes or so to full bake this 500g French Lean batard. The crust ended up nicely crisp, though a bit lighter than I prefer, and the baking of the first loaf was a tad uneven, so for the second I rotated it at about the 20 minute mark.

Independent.ie has a little more detail, with some actual numbers:

Their bread is pretty awful, but I eat the Veggie sub several times a year when traveling: their stores have pretty wide operating hours, take credit, and package the sandwiches up in a backpack-friendly way.

You can actually get more detail than that: Subway's US nutrition site lists the nutrition info for each of their bread types, so for example their "Italian" (Subway's basic white) is a 65g serving size with 3g of sugar. For comparison, Wonder Bread has a 33g slice with 2g sugar. Of course, I'm not sure if Wonder "Bread" is a bread in Ireland, either, it may fail the exact same test. Subway Ireland doesn't break it down by bread, but just picking something that matches between their sandwich menus, the Veggie sub, in the US gives 162g serving size with 6g sugars, but in Ireland it lists at 159g serving size and only 3.5g sugars. So if anything the Irish version has less sugar than the US.

My wife will approve, she hates their "bread" -- I'm not sure it's the sugar quantity that bothers her (that's what the courts found made it non-bread in this case), more the texture, but nevertheless...

Well, I mean... better than "The Brussels Sprouter." Apparently they are only interested in carnivorous uses of their gadget, but I bet you could "hack" it to cook vegetables too!! Their marketing department needs to get on that!

The flame temperature of a well-tuned gas burner is something like 3500°F, what's the big deal ? (As a real side note - I wonder how/where they are measuring that temperature.)

Well, in that case I better buy two! I mean, who doesn't need a "luxury burger roaster"?

Is it just a salamander?

I finally got the Breville Juice Fountain I've been eying for years. I haven't really done anything with it yet (a couple of apples to make sure it worked), but I'm looking forward to playing.

We've upgraded to the 4.5 branch of Invision Community Suite. This upgrade comes with a bevy of under-the-hood improvements to the security and speed of the site. It will take us a few days to get the last few upgrade items sorted out (strange font colors, unexpected display quirks, etc.), but if you experience any technical difficulties you can post about them here.

Or just to cut a slot in the one you have.