Category: Bread & Pastry
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Making Bread
I’m no expert at bread making. I’ve tried my hands at sourdoughs, baguettes, bagels, flat breads, soda breads, and they mostly came up short of my expectation. But over the years, I’ve gathered a decent dose of learning for an appreciable bread dough. It makes for a good table bread, to be doused in swirls…
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Flakes, V: Kouign-Amann
I think of the kouign-amann as a decadent croissant – caramelized, sweet, flaky, and buttery. It is extraordinary that so much sugar and butter could be stuffed inside a yeasted wheat dough to rise into a layered and puffy pastry. In the realm of yeasted sweet bread with large amounts of butter and sugar, such…
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Flakes, IV: The Biscuit
The biscuit is fluffy, soft, and flaky. That it should be flaky puts it in the flakes catalog. And unless we use lard or shortening for a flaky dough, they are flakes of butter strewn among flour that should only melt when they hit the oven. If you run a search for how to get…
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Flakes, III
It’s said that making pies is not easy, but if you’ve gotten proficient at puff pastry, you’ll see that it’s just another piece of pie. Call it pie in America, tart in France, or crostata in Italy, it’s all about a sweet or savory filling studded by a flaky pastry dough. There is more than…
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Flakes, II
The croissant is butter and flour fermented into crispy, airy, and buttery flakes. It feels magical that a yeasted wheat dough filled with so much butter could rise into such an open crumb and flaky pastry. But it is possible because of lamination. Yeast works between layers of butter, digesting flour to transform layers of…
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Flakes
I’m talking about flakes of butter marbling a slab of pastry dough for delectable puff pastries. Only simples ingredients, mostly flour and butter, but with proper techniques and time, will create light and airy pastries like palmiers and croissants or a flaky and scrumptious crust base for pies and tarts. Techniques – because making puff…
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Yeasted Sweet Bread: The Panettone
On the other end of the yeasted sweet bread spectrum, we have the panettone, packed with eggs and butter, tower tall and impossibly fluffy like a bed of soft cloud. In the south of France, it is called the brioche aux fruits, also known as the gâteau des rois, or the Twelfth-Night cake – reserved…
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Yeasted Sweet Bread
It all started with the holiday baking project – fermenting flour, sugar, and butter into decadent, fluffy, and buttery panettoni. Yeasted sweet bread suddenly seemed so fascinating, arousing in me a desire to learn more about this mouth-watering arena of bread baking. I’ve learned to appreciate textures that only a yeasted sweet bread can give…
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Holiday Baking Expedition: A Modified Panettone
Panettone is an Italian sweet bread eaten during the Christmas holiday. A search for a traditional panettone recipe will prescribe that it is made with a sourdough starter, 3 different refreshes before reaching the final dough mix, taking around 3 days to finish. A search for the perfect picture panettone will show a dome shaped…
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