I’ll PM you with my notes for the dough.
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When I was toasting the flour for the matcha polvorones (which I ended up really liking), I couldn’t help but think of combining toasted milk powder with it. So I made these toasted milk powder polvorones. They’re delicious! I think malted milk would be even tastier, though.
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I made a batch of English muffins for the first time today. It took a while but it was very hands off so I don’t mind and it cooked much better and easier than I thought it would. They have a lovely texture and flavour and are even somewhat healthy because I put in some whole wheat flour. It’s a great recipe to have under my belt what with my fiancé enjoying English muffins for lunch very frequently and it’s much cheaper than store bought ones.
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Those look delicious!!
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Picture perfect! Yum!
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Thank you! I’ll take that as high praise considering how pretty all your bakes look 
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Those look perfect! Congrats on the new skill and recipe.
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Rustic Tart Dough pg. 162 from SBC “Pastries”, a butter/cream cheese dough similar to RLB’s dough, a little more cream cheese possibly. Rolled out really easily and produces a very flaky dough. The pear/blackberry tart has amaretti crumbs sprinkled across the top. The plum has a handful of raspberries sprinkled throughout the tart. Plums were from Fresno and apparently were bred for crispness! These held their shape a little more than I expected.
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Thank you so much! It will definitely be useful 
Recently I saw someone make scones with a jammy egg in the middle.
What interested me was the technique of freezing the egg raw.
I immediately thought of scotch eggs and how people struggle to get a perfectly jammy egg.
Well, someone tried to deep fry frozen eggs:
So I decided to try making savory muffins with both a frozen egg and with eggs boiled for 3 minutes to set, then frozen for easier peeling.
It seems in order for this to work well maybe the dough has to be frozen once the egg is encased, as is the case with the scones. I decided not to freeze my muffin batter and the frozen egg was a disaster. The soft-boiled eggs work, but I think as long as they’re frozen, a 6-minute egg would still remain gooey once baked. At the very least I think 4 minutes would be ideal. As is they could be cooked more for my liking.
A scotch egg could work given that you would freeze them once assembled, but I worry about the problems that guy experienced with exploding eggs. And given that frozen soft-boiled eggs definitely remained oozy, there’s no real reason to keep them raw.
The muffins by the way are delicious. They’re made with olive oil, cheese, roasted red pepper, chili flakes, garlic powder, and some herbs.
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Failure… something something… learning… something…
I wanted to make challah today. I know, it’s Passover. I shouldn’t be EATING bread, nevermind making it. I was never that religious. But the two loaves of Japanese milk bread I made over the last couple of weeks were SO good that they each disappeared before the week was out.
I pulled King Arthur’s challah recipe, which I had made before, ages ago. This time, though, I decided I was gonna be all clever, and modify the recipe to use a tangzhong, a mixture of flour and water heated up 'til the starch gels. It gives bread a super soft, fluffy texture and allows it to stay fresh longer. King Arthur’s website even gives you general instructions on how to do so. In a nutshell, increase the liquid in your bread 'til you have approx. 75% hydration (which is pretty high for tight-crumbed sandwich breads), then peel off about 5% of your total flour and 5x (by weight) as much liquid for the tangzhong. Pull this out of the total flour and liquid for your recipe.
Well, I must have messed up, either in my calculations or my measurment, because after adding about 90g of water to the overall recipe, and pulling out 25g of flour and about 110g of water for the tangzhong, after mixing all the dough ingredients I was left with something so loose that I could only really call it ‘batter’. There was no possible way to shape it at all. I was quite frustrated, but figured, rather than just dump it, I’d let it rise for an hour, pour it into a loaf pan, and see what happens.
After the hour rise, I was left with a very thin but VERY bubbly mixture, which I tried to stir vigourously enough to deflate a bit. But it was impossible. So I shrugged, poured the whole thing into a parchment lined loaf pan and threw it in the oven for about 45 min.
This rather unattractive fellow is the result:
The crumb more open and uneven than I’d like, though given the messed up rise and apparently far-to-high hydration, that isn’t surprising. What is surprising is a slightly off flavor. With 3 tablespoons of honey, you’d think it’d be plenty sweet, but I find I’m missing some of that flavor, and what remains tastes a bit… musty?
Something clearly has gone wrong here. Might keep the loaf and see how it lasts, but I dunno. This might end up binned. Which pains me greatly. I know it’s just a few cups of flour and 3 eggs, but I just HATE having wasted the ingredients, and the cleanup time, etc.
Ah well. Not everything can be a winner. Maybe I’ll try again tomorrow w/o the tangzhong modifications. I probably should have started there anyway.
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As long as “musty” isn’t “spoiled”, perhaps repurpose in bread pudding or French toast? Try for grilled cheese? Make croutons?
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With tangzhong, it’s more that it allows you to increase the hydration, but with challah, it’s fairly stiff because typically it’s braided, and a fairly stiff dough is good for that. For 25 grams of flour, 125 grams of water in the tangzhong.
You also have to consider that the eggs are part of the hydration in challah. So it gets really high if you went up to 75% plus three eggs, which will add another 112 or so grams of water (74-75% of 150 grams).
For challah if I were going to incorporate gelatinized flour, I think I’d go with yudane, since I find it easier to convert to stiffer doughs. Here is one:
Cook’s Illustrated has a tangzhong recipe for challah:
It still looks good given everything you wrote leading up to the photo. I was expecting a true disaster!
I always find that challah with that much honey isn’t very sweet. I’ve made a note that if I want it sweet I need to to use more.
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Thank you SO much for the tips. My baking skills are only JUST starting to get to the point where I’m comfortable ‘tweaking’ recipes here an there. I did take the eggs into account in my liquid measurement. The original recipe has 480-510g flour (depending on humidity, I used 480), 170g water, 2 eggs + 1 egg yolk, plus the honey and veg. oil, which don’t contribute water. I figured that meant about 270g water total, which is about a 56-57% hyrdration. As you say, stiff. Working that up to close to 75%, I added about 100g of additional water, bringing to total to 370g. Then I pulled from that total to do the tangzhong.
But yeah, 75% with a tangzhong for this dough was CLEARLY too much water. I will look over the recipes and give one a try. I don’t know if I want to try sourdough challah, since I’m not sure I want that tang in a bread I’d normally want on the sweeter side. I know different ways of setting up one’s levain can give you a more or less tangy/sour sourdough, but I’ve never played around with it so I have no intuition as to how to modify things.
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Raspberry cream scones using dehydrated berries. I botched the first batch today - the raspberries I used couldn’t take 425 degrees. They scorched, and while we nibbled around them a bit, ultimately I decided to chuck the lot and start over. I hate it when that happens.
There was a do-over at 375, and I was happy with the results.
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I keep a stiff starter which is used for panettone and other rich breads, and it’s nice and mild, but even 100% hydration starter I find is usually mild in enriched breads. They don’t taste like lean sourdough loaves. But mostly I linked that for the yudane aspect. If you wanted to try that particular recipe you could replace the stiff starter with a biga and use yeast in the dough. Then you’d definitely have a mild flavor.
I have some birthdays coming up, so cookies are needed. First up: brownie cookies with caramelized white chocolate… very tasty. In the freezer, but taste testing confirmed they are gift worthy… https://buttermilkbysam.com/rye-brownie-cookies-with-caramelized-white-chocolate-chunks/
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Challah attempt #2: The last one was deemed “not good” by my partner as well, so it got binned. It’s rare that I have a failure so bad I’ll toss it rather than finish it off. This was one of those times, I guess.
Figured I’d try just using the King Arthur recipe straight up (well, almost. I increased the honey from 3 to 5 tablespoons since I wanted a sweeter loaf).
This one came out… better. But the dough was still VERY soft and VERY sticky. Shaping was… difficult. I mean, from here, it looks nice enough:
But from another angle, things get… unfortunate.
Still, this one was far more acceptable than the last one, in that it’s recognizably challah, in both taste and (substandard) appearance.
Better crumb. Decent texture. Interestingly, this recipe calls for AP Flour. I wonder if subbing in bread flour might give things a bit more structure, so everything isn’t quite so slack. Reducing the water is another added option, as well as looking more closely over the two additional recipes @Shellybean suggested.
ever onward…
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Seems just like yesterday but here its Easter again. I baked my traditional Ukrainian🇺🇦 paska. Recipe passed on from my mum. It is so light and has a touch of lemon because zest of lemon is rubbed into the sugar. Its a big loaf but i weighed it and it comes just at 12oz just to give you an idea how light the crumb is. Oh and it really isnt overbaked just a dark picture.
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Wish I could have that lovely looking slice (or three) for breakfast 
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