Chocolate Chip Sticky Buns

Cinnamon rolls are quite possibly the ultimate indulgence.  They are too sweet, too fatty, too sticky, and too large to be considered anything close to a sensible food item, and yet parade themselves as a breakfast food and are subtle enough to be consumed en masse.  They are known for their migratory pattern which starts on a plate and ends up on an already-inflated pair of hips.  My general rule of thumb when dealing with cinnamon rolls is to keep eating them until lack of cinnamon rolls or other extraordinary circumstances occur.

Sticky Buns adapted from The Bouchon Bakery Cookbook (makes 8)

263 grams AP flour
6 g salt
6 g active dry yeast (recipe asks for instant, but I didn’t have any)
44 g warm milk
2/3 stick butter
132 g eggs
35 g sugar

Filling

1 cup brown sugar
1 cup chocolate chips
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/3 stick butter

Icing a la Food.com

2 cups powdered sugar
2 tablespoons softened butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon milk

1. Proof the yeast in the milk with a pinch of sugar for 5-10 minutes, or until foamy.  In the meantime, combine the flour and salt in a bowl and set aside.

2. Beat together eggs, sugar, and yeasty milk and mix into the dry ingredients.

3. Stir with a spoon until just combined, then dump the whole thing into your stand mixer.

4. Mix on a low speed for 20 minutes.  Slowly add in the butter one small cube at a time.  The dough will be very resistant to the introduction of fat and you will probably need to take it out of the mixer and smush it around a bit.  I found it to be pretty messy, and it sounded rather like I was rummaging through the entrails of a dead animal, so it may be advisable to clear the room of onlookers before proceeding.

5. Once the butter is fully incorporated, knead in the mixer for another 7 minutes or so.  The dough should be soft, oily, and a little sticky.  Cover and let rise in a warm place for an hour.

6. While your dough is rising, prepare the filling by mixing the brown sugar, butter, cinnamon, and chocolate chips in a bowl.

6.  Now the dough is ready to be shaped.  Roll out your dough into 12×15 inch rectangle (that number is kind of arbitrary, as I don’t remember exactly what size I rolled my dough out to, but it should be about a 1/4 inch in thickness).  Spread the filling over the flattened dough evenly, leaving a 1/4 inch margin around the edges.  Position the rectangle so that the longer side is facing you and roll tightly away from you (so the end roll is the length of the longer side).  Cut into 8 pieces.  I use a string or piece of floss by tucking the string under the dough, tying a loose knot on top, and pulling tight.  The string will slice right through the dough.

7.  Cover loosely with plastic wrap and stick into the refrigerator overnight.

8.  Let rise for another hour on the counter and bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes, or until golden brown.  While it’s baking, prepare the icing by whipping together the sugar and milk.

9.  After the buns have cooled, convince yourself that it’s okay that they’re ugly, drizzle them with the icing, and serve!  (And by that I mean serve all of them to yourself.)

An accidental celebration of National Donut Day

Thursday night I was sitting on the couch with a paintbrush in hand, watercolors splayed out in front of me, and a box of Kleenex propped up on the coffee table ready to be painted like one of my French girls, when I suddenly decided–as though compelled by some greater power–that I would much rather bake some donuts.  Unbeknownst to me, it was in fact the eve of National Donut Day, a holiday that I had neither participated in nor heard of before my roommate informed me of its existence later.  Coincidence?  Perhaps, but if you have any belief in fate or divine beings or what have you, you would know that only the cosmic reaches of the Donut Gods could bring about such a fortuitous occurrence.

I stole the recipe from the Bouchon Bakery Cookbook, which my ever generous roommate gave me for my birthday this year.  It’s the first recipe that I’ve actually attempted from that book–although most of the recipes are quite doable and not too hard to follow, the thought of disgracing Thomas Keller and his baking masters with a sad mutilation of one of their carefully thought out formulas was too much to stomach.

Donuts a la Bouchon Bakery (makes 8 and a ball)

518 grams AP flour
9 g salt
10 g active dry yeast (recipe asks for instant, but I didn’t have any)
212 g warm milk
74 g sugar
111 g eggs
9 g vanilla extract (recipe asks for paste, but again I didn’t have any)
50 g unsalted butter, room temperature and cut into small pieces

Chocolate Glaze a la My Ass

I did not measure any of the ingredients I threw in there and have no idea how much of each I used.  You can take the risk and use your own judgment, or Google a legitimate chocolate glaze recipe.

some amount of chocolate chips
as much sugar as you feel like
a dash to a blob of water
enough nonfat dried milk to make you happy

1. Let the yeast proof in the warm milk for 5-10 minutes, or until frothy.  In the meantime, combine the flour and salt.

2. Mix the yeasty milk with the flour, salt, and the rest of the wet ingredients except for the butter by hand until combined.  The recipe warned that the dough would be very sticky, but it wasn’t really that sticky for me.

3. Throw the dough into the stand mixer and knead on low with the dough hook for about 10 minutes, or until it starts to get smooth.

4. Add the butter a little bit at a time, and knead until it’s well incorporated.  It may take a while–it took me about 10 minutes with me constantly stopping the mixer and scraping down the sides.

5. Place in a bowl with plastic wrap over the top and let rise in a warm place for about an hour.

 

6.  Time to shape the donuts.  Divide the dough into 8 sections.  Roll each section into a ball and flatten slightly with a rolling pin.  Using whatever cylindrical object you happen to find lying around, cut a 1-1.5 inch circle in the middle of each donut.  Set the holes aside or ball them up together for an extra spherical donut.

7.  I stuck them in the refrigerator overnight at this time, but you can also just let them rise for an hour and keep going.

8.  To make the glaze, melt the chocolate with the rest of the ingredients on the stovetop at a very low heat.  Stir constantly and keep simmering until the glaze is thick enough to coat your spoon.  I didn’t really keep track of how long this took.  Set aside when done.

9.  If you refrigerated your donut dough, take it out the next morning and let it warm up/rise on the countertop for about an hour to an hour and a half.  The donuts should be almost double their previous size.

10.  Heat up the frying oil.  There should be enough in your pot for the donuts to float comfortably.  The book recommends a temperature of 350 degrees F, but I found this to be too hot.  My first couple of donuts were burnt on the outside and uncooked on the inside.  My ideal temperature turned out to be about 200-220 degrees F according to my kitchen thermometer.

11.  Fry the donut until the side facing the oil is golden brown, then flip over and fry the other side until it is golden brown.  This should be very fast, 30-45 seconds at the most per side.

12.  Remember to take pictures of the above steps if you plan to document your attempt, or you’ll just end up looking like an ass in front of the whole internet.

Conclusions:

I’ll let you in on a secret–I actually baked half of my donuts.  And they were just not the same.  I highly recommend against attempting to healthify this recipe, because donuts serve a very specific purpose and it does not entail being anything other than awful for you.  The fried donuts were fairly pleasant and donut-like, which is as good as I could have expected.  Nothing mindblowing (and trust me, I have had some mindblowing donuts in my life) but it was a fun project and edible so I’m not complaining.

Late Night Pandan Bread

I decided on a whim at about 9:30 pm last night that I really wanted some green bread.  I’d seen it at Asian grocery stores and bakeries all the time, but never knew anything about it except that it was green and probably sweet.  My interest was always piqued, but I was dubious of the prospect of occupying valuable stomach real estate with an unfamiliar item when there were so many custard buns, mooncakes, and red bean mochi to be eaten.  The factor that sparked the sudden urge to bake was my acquisition of some pandan leaves from my mother, who had used them in a few Thai dishes and had a bunch left over.  Too lazy to research a quality recipe, I decided to just modify whatever baseline sweet bread recipe I already had.  Keep in mind when viewing this recipe that I have never actually eaten pandan bread and just pulled this out of my ass yesterday.  So results may vary.

Pandan Bread (makes 2 loaves)

500 grams AP flour
8 g salt
8 g active dry yeast
a bit more than 260 g milk (we will be simmering the milk, so some will evaporate)
100 g sugar
100 g pandan leaves OR 2 tsp pandan paste
2 eggs
100 g oil

1.  If you’re using whole pandan leaves, simmer the leaves in the milk on low heat for about 20-30 minutes, or until you can taste the pandan flavor in the milk.  [Note: Try mashing up the leaves in a blender first to get the color and flavor out of them more efficiently.]  Take out the pandan leaves and set aside 260 grams of the milk until it has cooled enough to be warm to the touch but not too hot.  If you’re using pandan paste, you can skip this step and just heat up the milk a little.

2.  Let the yeast proof in the milk with a pinch of sugar for about 5 to 10 minutes, or until foamy.  Beat together with one of the eggs, sugar, oil, and the pandan paste if you’re using it.

3.  Combine the flour and salt, then add to the wet ingredients and stir with a spoon until they’ve just mixed.

4.  Ok yeah, fine, I cheated.  I wanted my bread to be green, damn it!  If you’re using pandan paste then food coloring should not be necessary, as it already contains some.

5.  Dump into the bowl of your stand mixer and knead on a low speed for about 8 minutes.  Add spoonfuls of flour as needed, but be conservative.  You might want to stop every now and then to scrape down the sides of the bowl.

6.  Let rise in a warm place for about an hour.

7.  Punch down the dough and knead a few times.  Shape into whatever type of loaves you’d like.

8.  Let rise again for 20 minutes, then place in the refrigerator to retard for a few hours.  I left mine in overnight (overnight meaning 4 hours) and continued the process in the morning.  After you take it out of the fridge, let it come back to room temperature on the counter for no more than an hour.  (Refrigeration is optional.  You can also just let it rise for an hour and skip to the next step).

9.  I went back to sleep after taking the dough out, so mine rose for too long.  It should not be poofed up this much; rather, it should have gained about 85% of its original size, so not quite doubled.

10.  Beat the second egg for the egg wash and brush over the loaves.  Bake at 350 degrees F for about 20-25 minutes (22 minutes was my magic number).

 

Conclusions:

Considering I had no frame of reference, I rather liked this bread.  It was suitably soft and fluffy, and had the right amount of sweetness.  It pretty much tasted like what I would want from a generic sweet bread–which was sort of the problem.  The pandan flavor was so incredibly subtle that I couldn’t taste it at all.  Next time I think I will try using pandan paste, which is more concentrated and potent.  Overall, however, I’m quite happy.

Portuguese Sweet Rolls

My first experience with binge eating (disclaimer: no eating disorder, just poor self control) came at the tender young age of 10.  My mom would pick my brother and I up from Tae Kwon Do practice and take us to a small Portuguese bakery to replenish any calories we may have inadvertently lost in the course of pretending to kick things for an hour.  We sampled many of their offerings, but the one item we always made sure to get was a loaf of Portuguese sweet bread.  It sweet, lemony, bright yellow, and delicious.  As much as I would try to limit myself to two (very large) slices, I always ended up sneaking out to the kitchen in the middle of the night and scarfing down about half the loaf.  This weekend, I found myself in a bingey sort of mood, so I decided to track down the delicious bread of my youth.

Portuguese Sweet Bread adapted from Jo Cooks (makes 24 rolls)

3.5 cups AP flour
0.5 tsp salt
1 package or 2.25 tsp active dry yeast
75 ml warm milk
2 tbsp brown sugar
.75 cup sweetened condensed milk
3 eggs
4 tbsp butter
zest of half a lemon or lime

1. Combine the flour with the zest (I had a decaying lime on hand and used that) and the salt.

2. Throw the yeast in with the warm milk and brown sugar.  Yeasties loove sugar.  In 5-10 minutes the mixture should get frothy.

3.  Beat the eggs and combine with the condensed milk and yeast mixture.

4.  Pour the wet ingredients into your stand mixer and add in the dry ingredients a little bit at a time, then mix for about 10 minutes.  It will be very sticky and won’t come together very well.  This is apparently okay, but I ended up taking the blob out of the mixture to knead by hand for a while.  This is also when you want to add the butter but I may or may not have forgotten to put it in mine (I definitely forgot).

5.  When the dough is done, it will not look or feel done.  I stopped kneading when I was able to clean the bits that stuck to the counter by rolling the dough on top of them.

6.  Let rise in a warm place for about an hour.

7.  To shape it, I rolled the dough out flat and then cut it into 24 pieces.  I then rolled up each of the pieces into a ball.

8.  Place in a greased pan with plastic wrap loosely over the top to rise for another hour.

9.  Bake in a 350 degree oven for 25 minutes, or until the tops are pretty brown.

Conclusions

The buns were definitely drier than they should have been, possibly because of the exclusion of butter.  As far as taste goes, they were quite sweet (always a win) and definitely had the hint of lemon that I remember from my childhood.  The texture may not have been spot on, but the flavor was pretty close to what I was looking for.

And, I single-handedly demolished about a third of the pan right away.  Bingey mood satisfied.

Dem’s some ugly (chocolate chip) bagels

This weekend I baked me some bagels and they were ugly.

I’m talking real rough, crumb-only-a-mother-could-love, fell-outta-the-ugly-tree-and-hit-all-the-branches-on-the-way-down, maybe-baking-will-make-it-prettier-no-it-didn’t-oh-god-no, ever loving holy ass ugly.

Almost every single day for my last two years of college, I would get the same thing for lunch: a chocolate chip bagel toasted with strawberry cream cheese from Einstein Bros. Bagels.  I have, to date, never encountered a more perfect combination of flavors.  There is something about the chewiness of the bagel combined with the crispiness of the uneven toasting, mixed with the melted chocolate chips oozing out of every crevice and blending with the sloppily applied cream cheese that, when experienced all at once, can take a person places that a bagel was never meant to take a person.  I would eat my lunch in class, but I’m not sure why I even bothered going.  From the moment I pulled apart the crinkly paper packaging to the last heavenly bite, I would be too busy basking in the clutches of delirious pleasure to pay any attention to the lecture.  Then, fingers sticky with chocolate and face smeared with strawberry-pink food coloring, I would drift happily off to sleep, visions of the bagel still dancing in my head.

(Notice how I am punctuating my paragraphs with pictures that are related to the recipe but unrelated to the text?  That’s something I learned from serious baking blogs because I’m a serious baking blogger now and this is how we do.)

Back to the ugly bagels.  So I was lamenting the fact that acquiring my nectar of the gods required me to either A) wake up early enough to drive over to Noah’s in Albany before work or B) settle for the sadly inadequate grocery store packaged equivalent, when I realized I had a third option–make it myself!  From prior research I knew that the bagel making process was somewhat more involved than what I was used to.  It involved boiling and making a sponge and all sorts of other baking voodoo I had never heard of, and I was slightly intimidated.  Fortunately, I managed to stumble across The Sophisticated Gourmet’s wonderful recipe (linked to at the bottom), which seemed relatively doable.

The dough was much stiffer than most breads (bagels typically have a hydration of around 50%, as opposed to white bread at 60-65%) and was actually pretty fun to work with.  I didn’t have to worry about it sticking to everything, and it was pleasant and rubbery to roll out.  It was, however, quite difficult to shape neatly, especially with the hole.  I used the method of sticking a finger in the middle of the ball and rolling it around, but a cleaner approach might be to roll out a long tube and then connect the ends to get a ring.

The chocolate chips started to melt almost as soon as they entered the dough, so the whole process left a trail of melted chocolate around my kitchen.  I certainly didn’t mind, and the streaks of chocolate inside the dough itself were a deliciously happy accident.

So, did it work?  Well, they certainly felt and tasted like bagels!  The recipe was great; my implementation of it, not so much.  I might try making them more dense next time by adding a tad less water and boiling for a little longer (I went with about 30 seconds on each side).  I might also try making them look more like bagels and less like bagel’s horribly deformed inbred cousin.

Actually, I’ll probably just end up going with the easier and possibly cheaper option of just going to Noah’s.

Recipe: http://www.sophisticatedgourmet.com/2009/10/new-york-style-bagel-recipe/

Honey Milk Rolls

Some days you just need to bake.  It doesn’t really matter what you make in the end; you just need to feel the dough under your hands as you roll it out, or hear the clink of the fork against the bowl as you beat the eggs, or watch your clothes get progressively more caked with flour and wonder if it will ever wash out.  Baking is incredibly therapeutic.  Got into a fight with a friend?  Bake it out.  Lost that tennis match?  Bake it out.  Gained ten pounds and got nothing done at work and A&E’s Intervention is not on Netflix?  BAKE THAT SHIT OUT.

Honey Milk Rolls (makes 12 rolls)

250 g + handful bread flour —100%
4 g salt —1.6%
5 g active dry yeast —2%
125 g warm water —50%
25 g nonfat dry milk–10%
25 g honey–10%
25 g oil–10%
25 g + pinch sugar–10%
1 lightly beaten egg

1.  Combine 250 grams of the flour with the salt and milk powder and set aside.  Proof the yeast in the warm water with a pinch of sugar, about 5 to 10 minutes.

2.  Beat together eggs, honey, sugar, and yeast mixture.  Add to the dry ingredients and stir until combined.

3.  Transfer the dough to the stand mixer and mix on low for 10 minutes.  Add the oil and mix for another 8 minutes.  Transfer dough blob to countertop and knead by hand, throwing in handfuls of flour, until the dough is workable and not too sticky.

4.  Let rise in a covered, oiled bowl until moderately bulky, about an hour.  If you have a kitchen thermometer, you can go ahead and stick it in the dough to see what its internal temperature is.  Dough rises optimally at 75-85 degrees.  Being the impatient soul that I am, I went with the high end of that range.

5.  Scrape the dough out of the bowl and onto a lightly floured surface.  Roll out into a rectangle, fold over, and repeat a couple of times.  Cut the dough into 12 equal pieces.  Roll each piece out into a long rectangle, fold in the sides, roll out gently again, and roll it up into a ball.  See the picture sequence below (photographed by the talented Cindy).

9.  Line the buns in a sprayed or oiled pan and let rise for another hour or so, loosely covered in plastic wrap.

10.  Brush with an egg wash and bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.  Take the buns out of the pan immediately after they are done and transfer them to a cooling rack.

Conclusion

Loooook guys.  Look at the fluffy.  But once again, despite adding buttloads of sugar, these buns were not sweet enough for my taste.  I’ve been nervous about really going overboard with the sweetness, but I think I might have to next time.  I don’t want buns that are decent and go well with soup.  I want buns that blow your mind and can give Frosted Flakes a run for its money in the this-will-make-me-bounce-off-the-walls-and-later-get-diabetes sweepstakes.

Cindy’s Gooey Butter Cake: A Photoessay

A La Paula Deen

Sacrilegious Hot Cross Buns

Now, I have no idea how strong of a religious connection hot cross buns actually have, but I rather like the thought that the act of baking these without godly love in my heart will condemn me straight to Hell (as if my life up until this point hasn’t done the job already).  I have never eaten nor actually seen a hot cross bun, so I can offer no guarantee that these actually taste like they are supposed to.  I just thought that they look pretty in pictures, and it’s kind of close to Easter or whatever, so I figured I’d give it a shot.  I used chocolate chips instead of the traditional currants, but you can replace it with anything.

Hot Cross Buns (makes about 18 buns I think, but I ate a bunch before I counted so I don’t really know)

500 g AP flour —100%
9 g salt —1.8%
5 g active dry yeast (I ran out of yeast; you might want to increase to 10 grams for a quicker rise) —1%
220 g warm milk —44%
75 g sugar–15%
40 g oil–8%
75 g lightly beaten eggs–15%
big pinch of cinnamon
however many chocolate chips as you can comfortably cram in the dough

Flour paste for crosses:

dash of flour
splash of water

1.  Combine flour, salt, and cinnamon in one bowl and whisk together eggs and sugar in another.  You will probably use 2 eggs; you can set aside whatever you have left over for the eggwash.  (You might want to hold off on the cinnamon until you get to the kneading process, because apparently it tends to kill off yeast, but my yeast seemed fine.)

2.  Dump the yeast in the bowl of warm milk to proof for 5 or 10 minutes, until foamy.  Mine did not present any indication of being alive, but I think the lack of foaminess was from the very small proportion of yeast to liquid.

3.  Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the egg mixture and yeasty milk.  Mix with a spoon until lazy and/or tired.

4.  Transfer the dough to the stand mixer and add the oil.  Mix on low for about 8 minutes.  The dough will form a puddle in the bottom of the bowl and be very sticky.  This is to be expected.

5.  Scrape the dough out of the bowl and onto a lightly floured surface.  Knead for a few turns, adding flour to your hands as you go, until you feel like you can work with the dough relatively easily.

6.  Roll out the dough into a rough rectangle with a pin or with your hands.  Pour the chocolate chips in the middle.  Fold the dough over and knead for several minutes, gently, until the chocolate chips are well incorporated.

7.  Ball the dough back up and place in an oiled bowl to rise in a warm place for 1 to 2 hours.  Because the amount of yeast I used was so low, it took a long time to rise and never got very high.

8.  Now it’s time to shape the dough.  I believe that the pleasant, pull-aparty grain of my buns was a direct result of my shaping method.  I pressed the dough out into a rectangle, then folded it over a few times, then flattened it back out, then rolled it up like a jelly roll.  Then, for each bun, I pulled off however much dough I needed and rolled it with my fingers until it formed a long tube.  I then rolled up that tube (there’s a lot of rolling involved) and formed it into a bun shape by gently stretching apart the top and folding it under itself.  The buns were not pretty or uniform, but they did have great textural variety on the inside.

9.  Line the buns in a sprayed or oiled pan and let rise until roughly twice its volume.  It took 2-3 hours for me (I’m not exactly sure because I fell asleep during this time).  Brush with the egg wash.  Make a paste out of the flour and water; it should have the consistency of pancake batter.  Put it in a plastic bag and cut out a small piece of the corner.  Use this to pipe crosses onto all of the buns.

10.  Bake at 325 degrees for 7 minutes and 350 degrees for about 13 minutes.  Keep your eye on the buns; once they are golden brown on the top they should be done.

Conclusion

Yeah, I can live with that.  Sure, they could be prettier, but it’s what’s on the inside that counts.  And what is on the inside?  Something soft, stretchy, mildly sweet, and enhanced with chocolate chips and blasphemy.  It lost a lot of its fluffy charm the next day, but I’ve come to accept this degradation as a fact of baking.  The bread also didn’t seem sweet enough to me, especially after losing its newly-baked freshness, but considering I have never encountered a recipe with a higher sugar percentage than 15% I’ll chalk that up to my overly demanding taste buds.  Overall, I’ll call this neither a win nor a loss–there were no boundaries broken, but it marks yet another stable entry in my growing arsenal of baking attempts.

Chill out and eat some cranberry walnut bread, man

I labored a bit over the title of this post and how clunky and awkward it is, but then I realized that by doing so, I was defeating the whole purpose of tonight’s theme:  Relax.  Stop overthinking.  Let whatever happens, happen.

Things have a way of working out.  And when I say that, I don’t mean that they magically become better all the time, but rather that one’s definition of “working out” is surprisingly adaptable.  Outcomes that seemed unacceptable just a short while ago become reasonable, even desirable, once you’re given no option but to accept them.  The human mind is incredible in how eager it is to please itself.

Last weekend I learned that, at least when it comes to baking, it seems the less you think the better off you are.  So today, I applied that logic full force and created this Cranberry Walnut Bread.  It is the most basic of bread doughs: flour, water, yeast and salt.  Artisan breads generally utilize some sort of pre-ferment like a sponge or a poolish, but I did no such thing.  Who has time for that?

Cranberry Walnut Bread (makes 2 loaves)

500 g bread flour —100%
10 g salt —2%
10 g active dry yeast —2%
350 g warm water —70%
pinch of sugar
greedy handful of cranberries
generous sprinkling of walnuts

1.  Combine the flour and salt in a bowl and set aside.  Add the yeast and a pinch of sugar to the warm water to proof, and wait 5 or 10 minutes.  The yeast should be bubbly and foamy.

2.  Make a well in the flour mixture and pour in the yeast solution.  Mix together with a spoon of some sort until it is too difficult to mix by hand.  If you are as deficient in musculature as I am, this will occur almost immediately.

3.  Move everything into the stand mixer.  With the dough hook attached, beat at a low speed for about 8 minutes.  Let it rest for 5 minutes.  (I threw that in there because it sounded cool; I didn’t actually let it rest at all myself.)

4.  Add the cranberries and walnuts to the bowl.  Mix until they are well incorporated.  Remember when I said dough doesn’t like party crashers?  Yeah.  This will take a while.  Maybe 5 minutes.  I considered being less shameless in the amount of cranberries I added, but then realized that in my entire life, I have never eaten anything with cranberries in it and thought to myself, “Gee, I wish there weren’t so many cranberries.”  So in they went, the whole unholy lot of them.

5.  Leave the dough in the bowl with saran wrap over the top and put in a warm place to rise for about an hour, or until you can poke it and create a dent that fills in only halfway, and slowly.  I poked mine many times because that is my favorite part.

6.  Gently plop the risen dough onto your counter and divide in two.  I flattened and folded it a couple of times with the whimsical notion that this would create texture; I have no idea if it had any effect.  Shape into whatever kind of loaf you would like.  I scored it at this point, but you’re not actually supposed to until later, so don’t do that.

7.  Cover loosely with plastic wrap and leave in a warm place to rise for another hour.

8.  After the loaves have sufficiently risen, then it is time to score them.  I made a few weak attempts to poke at my dough with a knife, but I was too afraid of collapsing it to try very hard.   You need a very sharp knife or razor to do this.  Assuming you have one, make a few slits on the top of your loaves, as artistically as you feel compelled to.  This is to direct the expansion of your bread in the oven.

9.  I baked the bread at 375 for 13 minutes and then switched to 400 for another 22 minutes, but all the baking blogs say 450 and it’s generally accepted that you start at a high temperature and end at a low temperature rather than the other way around.  There are all sorts of fancy tips for making artisanal breads that I didn’t bother with, including using a Dutch oven and baking on a pizza stone.  Steam is purportedly necessary to create a good crust, which is why professional bakeries have steam injectors.  There is a technique floating around to replicate the effect at home that involves a bowl of water and some rocks and pipes, and apparently voids the warranty on your oven.  I ended up just spraying the loaves with Pam every 10 minutes.  That’s kind of like steam, right?

Conclusions

This was by far the easiest and most stress-free bread that I’ve made.  I didn’t bother with a recipe or fancy techniques, I went in with low expectations, and I didn’t hinge my happiness quotient of the day on the outcome.  As a result, it turned out more or less exactly like it was supposed to.  There were some issues–the crust was not that crunchy and I am still having trouble getting a good oven poof going–but in many ways it exceeded expectations.  It was surprisingly flavorful for something with so few flavorings, and somehow stayed perfectly soft all of the next day.  And what seemed like an excessive amount of cranberries and walnuts going in turned out to be just right.

My takeaway, then, is that I really just need to keep things simple and stop obsessing.  That first part I think I can do.

Challah Master Class with Mama Raja

 

Some people just have a natural gift for baking.  My roommate Cindy is one example.  Another, more infuriating example is my mother.  You would think that these things are genetic, but apparently not.  My mom loves baking–cookies, cakes, quickbreads–but she doesn’t really work with yeast.  A couple of months ago, before I had started on my own baking obsession, she decided on a whim to make a challah.  It turned out perfectly–soft, stretchy, beautifully golden brown.  And, as many times as I have tried, with as much time and care as I could possibly pour into it, I have failed to produce the same result in my baking.  This weekend I harassed my mom into replicating her first effort so that I could watch and take notes.  My conclusion is that the following is apparently necessary for perfect bread: laziness, a flagrant disregard for proper baking procedure, and not being me.

Challah a la Smitten Kitchen (makes 2 loaves or however many arbitrary shapes)

2 1/4 teaspoons (1 packet — 1/4 ounce or 7 grams) active dry yeast (we used instant yeast)
1/4 cup (85 grams) plus 1 teaspoon honey
2/3 cup warm water
1/3 cup (80 ml) olive oil, plus more for the bowl
2 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons table salt
4 cups (500 grams) all-purpose flour

1.  Proof the yeast in the warm water with a teaspoon of honey.  After 5 or 10 minutes, the mixture should be foamy and bubbling.  Ours was not.  “Oh well,” said my mom, and proceeded to add in the rest of the wet ingredients (egg, honey, oil) anyway.

2.  After the wet ingredients are well incorporated, use the beater attachment on the stand mixer and stir in the flour a third of a cup at a time.  “Eh,” said my mom, and went directly to the dough hook after dumping the flour in all at once.

3.  Knead the dough for 5 to 8 minutes, until it is smooth and elastic.  After 8 minutes, our dough was not even close to elastic, let alone being able to pass the windowpane test.  “I don’t even know what that is,” said my mom, and stuck the dough in the oven to rise.

4.  Wait for an hour or so.  When fully risen, the dough should be “double in size” (whatever that means) and when poked with a finger, should leave a dent.  Ours was definitely not double in size, but since it was never that bouncy to begin with anyway it passed the poke test.

5.  Lightly punch down the dough and shape to your heart’s desire.  Our dough had nothing to punch out of it, but my mom did have fun with the shaping.  She kneaded in some chocolate chips.

6.  Let rise for another hour or until doubled again.  Generally you want to wait until right before putting the challah in the oven before brushing it with egg wash, but my mom brushed the dough before letting it rise.  She claimed that this would prevent a crust from forming on the dough.  It did not.

7.  Let bake in a 350 degree oven for about 20-25 minutes.  Despite the crust that had formed while rising, the challah puffed up beautifully in the oven.

Conclusions

So, how did this nonchalantly-prepared challah turn out?  Utterly perfect, of course.  It was exactly the texture I’ve been trying to get time and time again, and it was achieved without any of the fancy dough conditioners, overnight rises, excessive kneading times, carefully timed ingredient-adding, and overall massive amounts of effort.  I like to think it was the fact that the recipe used oil instead of butter.  Or maybe instant yeast is better for these things than active dry yeast.  Or maybe it’s the lesser amount of salt.  Or perhaps I’ve even been overkneading my dough this whole time (despite all evidence indicating otherwise).  It certainly can’t be the baker, can it?

All I really know is this:  IT’S.  NOT.  FAIR.

I’m going to go gorge on some more challah now.