Anna N

You people can become enablers without even trying. I am quite taken with those cast-iron pans which have been on my wish list for a very long time.

Does this look at all like pizza to you? Me neither. Sometimes life does get in the way. Thinly sliced, leftover pork chop on a homemade bun with smear of lingonberry sauce and some dill pickles on the side. Pizza for dinner maybe? Working on it

Oh Chris. I am laughing with you, not at you, because I’m sure you were laughing at yourself as I would be. Pizza is on my calendar for tomorrow but I won’t be canning it just yet. First up will be same day pizza.

Sous vide pork chop, sugar snaps sautéed and then drizzled with a little sesame oil and a homemade bun.

Thank you. You are always in my corner.

If I were the type to cry over spilled milk I’d be drowning in tears about now. But I’m not. Hamburger buns. How difficult can that be? What could possibly go wrong? Well here it is. I know how very long my GE profile oven takes to preheat. So long before I put my burger buns for their final proof I turned the oven to 375°F. I checked periodically and noted that it had reached 375. I keep a thermometer in there at all times. And so my buns are proofed and I open the oven door to slip the sheet pan in there with its eight lovely buns and stop dead in my tracks. If you’ve been baking bread as long as I have and especially if you’ve been baking every single day for the past couple of weeks you know the blast you get when you open a preheated oven. It was absent. The oven was barely warmer than room temperature. I love this oven. Its Achilles’ heel is that it has a control pad which all too easily one can accidentally touch and turn off whatever was turned on. Now I had a tray full of perfectly proofed buns and nowhere to put them. I turned the big oven back on and realized that it would take far too long to reach temperature so I stared for a minute at the Cuisinart steam oven. I turned it to 375°F convection bake and threw a thermometer in there. I was now watching two ovens and praying to the kitchen god that one of them would eventually reach 375°F. The Cuisinart steam oven eventually did. I used scissors to cut around the parchment paper under each bun separating them from the whole shebang and slipped three of them into the CSO on the cast aluminum plate . This was really only a partial solution because I still had five buns to cook and the Cuisinart seemed to accommodate only three at a time. So I turned on the third oven—The Breville Smart oven. Now I was bobbing back-and-forth between three ovens checking the buns in one and the thermometers in the other two. All the while of course my buns are losing their perfect proof. Eventually I was able to get them all cooked in the two small ovens. These five were cooked in two separate batches in the Cuisinart steam oven. And these were baked in the Breville Smart oven. All of them reached ~200-205°F. I think they will all be edible they are not the buns I set out to make when I got up this morning. Apparently Nathan and his team forgot to promise me a rose garden.

Here they are baked: Just out of the oven. Just out of the pan. Apparently they went over well with an 18-year-old heading off to work on a Sunday morning.

Cinnamon rolls for my granddaughter ready to go into the oven at her house.

Well I don’t know what to make of this. Is it possible that Nathan and his team are smarter than I am? These two are the Walnut (and raisin) bread. Both were made as near as possible exactly the same. Both under went a very long cold proof in the refrigerator. The loaf in the the back was baked in my GE profile oven with ice cubes tossed in to produce steam. It baked for about 30 minutes. Initially at 500°F and then immediately dropped 470°F. The loaf to the forefront in the photograph was baked in the Cuisinart steam oven. I could not bring myself to preheat it for a full hour but it did get close to 30 minutes of preheat time at 450°F using the steam bake function. I had a cast aluminum plate also preheating in there. The bread was baked for 15 minutes before being turned front to back and baked for another five minutes. The internal temperature of both loaves reached ~ 200°F. There is some slight exaggeration in the photograph regarding the difference in the two sizes which I could not avoid no matter how many photos I took. But it is clear that there is more loft from the loaf that came out of the Cuisinart steam oven. Hmmmm.......

Quite, quite beautiful.

One feature of the book which is very useful if you’re just starting out and are not sure where to begin is the section titled Choose Your Own Adventure. It begins in volume two on page 44 and offers you options as to how much time you want to take, how much flavor you want, whether you want to bake sourdough or rye breads. I could go on and on. It’s a fascinating section and includes charts for instance for Radical Recipes, another for Surprisingly Awesome Recipes, one that outlines New Techniques and one that lists Discoveries. This section would make a perfect Quickstart brochure.

I will have to take your word for it. I’m normally perfectly open to people enjoying whatever they enjoy but this one really made me, shall I say, nauseous. So I will have to grant you your right to enjoy what you enjoy.

Not to be picky but it’s not grated Parmesan. I use it as a shortcut and it’s great for what it is but I would never call it grated Parmesan. Crumbed Parmesan maybe.

The reference is page 5–297. It appears to be baking in the baking pan that comes with the oven. Edit to add Cannot imagine why you would need to preheat a tiny oven like that for one hour. I wish the team was available to explain that. On the same page is a photograph of what I believe to be the Breville Smart Oven in which they are using a combi- cooker and they claim there is room to put a lid on it. If it really works decently it would be far better for me because I can handle the weight at counter level but not bending over to use regular oven. They are using a smaller 3 quart cast iron combination cooker.

You just have to be kidding, no?

Found some tricolor orzo while on a mission to find Modernist bread ingredients and cooked it up today to enjoy with a meatball tajia that was lurking in my freezer.

I was very tempted to make hamburger buns this morning although not the modernist version. The whole wheat version called out to me as sandwich rolls rather than hamburger buns. I don’t eat hamburgers. Yours look very good as did @Chris Hennes‘s.

I have a question about the chocolate brioche — perhaps about all brioches. It is not a bread I am very familiar with at all. But I did get a text from my granddaughter which was not a complaint but just a comment that it is very crumbly. She said, “It’s still good but I have to be careful where I eat it,”. I asked if it was equally crumbly yesterday when it was fresh and she said that it was. Is this the nature of the beast or is it a defect? Thanks.

No I had not seen it. Or if I had it was very quickly and it hadn’t registered. Very beautiful indeed. There is so much in these books to admire.

So every day I find something new in the set of books and somebody will be happy to hear this little tidbit. This is about the Cuisinart steam oven and its use in baking. I quote directly: The steam feature can help make a nice crust. Good for sourdough (or similar) boules. Shape an 850 g boule. Preheat the oven to 450°F on the bake steam setting for about one hour. Bake for 20 minutes. Turn the boule around in the oven ( this will help it brown evenly). Bake for another 10 minutes. This is NOT the way I have been using it. I shall mend my ways.

The intention was an Egg McMuffin. The reality was a rather mushed up egg on a toasted English muffin.

@teonzo For the most part the book offers 4 methods of mixing most doughs: By hand By spiral mixer By stand mixer By planetary mixer With a detailed explanation for each with each recipe. The books do stress the need to watch and control temperature so as not to break the emulsion of a brioche. They recommend cold liquids but soft butter. Sometimes I expect it is a matter of opinion how on executes certain steps. For instance, your way of adding butter and salt and sugar together and their way may not be a case of right or wrong but just different. Your suggestion to use the paddle attachment versus the dough hook is one I think makes sense. It is possible that this is covered in the books and I’ve simply missed it. Your input continues to be appreciated.

It’s not always cold here you know! But I do take advantage of a window for my levains. As the temperature drops outside there will be more places inside that are conducive to lower temperatures. At the moment though I live in a very tiny house that is very well insulated and finding a cooler spot is challenging.

This is more like it! This is the farmer’s bread which was cold proofed for more than 20 hours. It was baked in my GE Profile oven with a couple of cups of ice cubes tossed in just before the bread was loaded. No cover. The burns on my hands suggest I’m too clumsy to deal with screaming hot lids and such. This bread released just fine from the linen-lined Banneton. I brushed some of the excess flour from the dough before baking it. I am becoming quite enamored of the cold proofing method except for the issue of refrigerator space. I may try and address that today by moving stuff from my beer fridge to the main fridge. It would be marvelous to open the refrigerator and discover that you had plenty of room for your breads to do their thing. Like @Chris Hennes

Nice, Chris. I started mine with dark rye because it’s very much easier to source than the light rye. When I was able to get some light rye I began converting over. I really need to refocus. I spent a restless night having dreams and nightmares about bread failures and successes and I do believe I invented a new and miraculous additive. I just can’t remember what it was.