It is already the last day of 2009! So its time to look back and to remember. When I look through my blog I found a lot of bread I tried during the last year. To share my personal favourites with you I decided to do a Top10 List, but it was impossible to pick just 10. At the end I have 12 favourite recipes.
Happy new year to everyone! Continue reading
I tasted Pandoro three years ago when a colleague brought some after visiting her parents in Italy. I fell in love with this rich bread with the feather light crumb immediately. After some Internet search I found a Pandoro recipe from the Simili sisters on Chili und Ciabatta . Its a great recipe I made many times since this day. It is a time consuming recipe but the result is worth every second you spend in kitchen.
And the I saw a sourdough pandoro on Wild Yeast and I knew that this is the bread I have to bake for Christmas.
This pandoro is made with a sweet starter, a sourdough that is feed more frequently for two days to enhance yeast growth. My lovely boyfriend had to do babysitting my sourdough and feed it every four hours while I was working. He did a great job and the starter was vigorous rising after every feeding. On the 23. December I did the dough and the bread rose overnight. My pandoro need about 18 hours to reach the top of the pan and I let it rise the last 4 hours on 30°C! Continue reading
Michael Suas recommend in “advanced bread and pastry” to create a sweet starter to bake sweet bread like Panettone or Pandoro. Due to rising this starter on high temperature and many feedings, the growth of wild yeast is encourage as wells as the growth of homfermenting lactobacilli while bacteria producing acetic acid are inhibited by the high temperature. This produce a very vigorous but jet very mild tasting sourdough.
We need this very vigorous starter because the high amount of sugar and butter in the dough of Pandoro or Panettone inhibits the growth of yeast.
To keep the starter on a constant temperature I placed it in my microwave and turn the light on (just the light, not the microwave!). The light bulb produce enough warmth to heat the microwave to 30°C what is perfect for the starter. Continue reading
Es gibt einen Grund, warum ich Biologin geworden bin und nicht Architektin oder Bauingenieurin. Welchen? Dafür muss man sich nur mal mein Lebkuchenhaus ansehen. Ziemlich krumm und schief ist es geworden
Von vorne sieht es ja noch ganz passabel aus, aber an den Seiten und an der Rückwand erzählen viele zuckrige Fingertapsen von meinen verschiedenen Versuchen, das Haus mit Zuckerguss zusammenzukleben.
Als es dann endlich stand, kam ich beim Fotografieren auf die Idee, dass eine Teelicht das Häuschen sicherlich schön erleuchten würde.
Nach einigen Fotos roch es jedoch recht verbrannt und kleine Rauchschwaden stiegen vom Dachstuhl auf. Die Teelichtflamme hatte die Unmengen Zuckerguss, die den Dachstuhl zusammen halten, angekokelt.
Mit einem Mal befand sich meine heile Winterwelt in heller Aufregung. Zum Glück beherbergen wir ganz viele Feuerwehr-Autos im Wohnzinmer, die sofort alamiert werden konnten 🙂
Sometimes we like to have some “Fast Food”. But because we did fries, burger and rolls by our own, our “fast food” is not fast at all.
Especially because I bake the hamburger rolls with sourdough and poolish. That gives some flavour to the bread and creates a very thin crust.
That is good for people like me who do not like soft rolls with their (vegetarian) burger. Continue reading
After a week with experiments which seemed to fail one after another and long evenings spend in lab to figure out what went wrong, I was not in Christmas mood last weekend. Friday night I leave the lab happy because of one experiment worked at least, but I was so exhausted that even baking seemed to much work on this weekend.
But then I realized that if I want to have a stollen for Christmas that rested at least two weeks (four weeks would be better) I had to bake it now. I had all ingredients on hand, only a recipe was missing. Looking through my bookmarks I found that I bookmarked two different recipe for this year: Dan Lepards recipe for a extra moist Stollen and the recipe for Thüringer Stollen from Bäcker Süpke.
When Zorra asked for a theme for my post in her culinary advent calender I had to think for a long time. Christmas seems so far away in October!
At the end I decieded to post a about Podvodnik. Its a cookie recipe that use yeast to rise the cookie. A perfect recipe for my blog, because “Hefe und mehr” means “Yeast and more”!
Podvodnik is czech and means sweet liar. I found the recipe on the homepage of Radio Praha and I was fascinated from the way the dough is prepared. The dough contains no sugar and it ferments one hour in a bowl with cold water. The sweet taste comes from rolling the hot cookies in vanilla flavoured powdered sugar. That sounds strange but it tastes great: a sandy cookie with a nice taste of vanilla. A little bit like vanilla crescents, but somehow different. Delicious! Continue reading
We call them Liebesgrübchen (I don`t know how to translate this. Maybe love pit?) for other people they are Engelsaugen (angle eyes) or Gulatschen.
And after some resarch I find the english name Thumbprint cookies for them. But how ever you call them, they are delicious!
Liebesgrübchen are a traditional cookie for christmas in my familiy and there is no christmas without them. Normaly I bake a recipe from “Handbuch für die Weihnachtsbäckerei” from Pfeifer & Langen, but this year I brake the tradition somehow when testing Bäcker Süpkes Recipe for Gulatschen.
His recipe contains less sugar and egg but much more butter. He recommends to rest the dough one night in fridge to get a nice sandy cookie. My dough stayed in fridge even for 36 hours because on friday, when I planned to bake I had to stay in lab untill night because my experiments worked not the way they should. So I postpone baking to Saturdaymorning. Continue reading
Recipes for cooking are rare in this blog. Its not because I do not cook, but while baking means time for relax cooking is an everyday work for me. But this stamppot is one of my favourites and deserves its own post.
I get the recipe with my weekly bag with organic produced vegetable and now I am cooking it when ever I have endives in this bag. Its a perfect recipe for me: mashed potatos with some green vegetable – I love this kind of dishes.
I bake them rather seldom but this fluffy muffins are a nice snack for a long travel or a delicious treat to share with co-workers. And what I like most about this recipe is the fact that I have to only one dough to get two different kinds of muffins. I would just change one thing next time: I would add some chopped chocolate to the dark muffin variation to make them even more delicious.
I found in the recipe in “Advanced Bread and Pastry”. Continue reading