Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: English Muffins
November 24, 2021 at 8:53 pm | Posted in breakfast things, BWD, groups, savory things, tuesdays with dorie, yeast breads | 7 CommentsTags: baking, bread
It’s Thanksgiving week and I can’t get enough carbs..homemade English Muffins will do quite nicely for breakfast. This is actually the second batch of English muffins I’ve made in the past week. The first was a different recipe (and slightly different technique) that I had to make for work. This recipe of Dorie’s is pretty straight forward. A quick-to-make, sticky dough gets a long chill (I went overnight) and is then shaped into rounds and griddled up free-form. After chilling, the dough wasn’t hard to work with and I think my muffins retained a fairly nice shape without using rings. Dorie stops short of cooking the muffins all the way through on the stovetop (the other recipe I made finished them off in the oven for about 10 minutes after griddling them to the desired color). She reasons that toasting the muffins becomes the final step in their cooking process. While this is true, my muffins were still a bit doughy inside when I forked them in half to toast them, and I do think a little dense as a result. Still delicious, though, and I will enjoy every last one, but next time I may think about cooking them a little longer, either in the oven at the end, or keeping them on the griddle a few minutes more if they aren’t getting too browned.
With two English muffin successes under my belt this week, I’m feeling pretty good about applying for that management position at Thomas’. If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan yet, you can test drive this English Muffin recipe here. But get the book and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and all the other participation deets over on Tuesdays with Dorie!
Tuesdays with Dorie BCM: Bread and Chocolate Coffee Can Brioche Ice Cream Sandwiches
June 25, 2019 at 9:43 am | Posted in BCM, groups, ice creams & frozen, sweet things, sweet yeast breads, tuesdays with dorie | 8 CommentsTags: bread, chocolate, ice cream
It’s gotten hot and muggy here these last couple of weeks, and the only kind of sandwich I really care about right now is the kind with ice cream in the middle. These Bread and Chocolate Coffee Can Brioche Ice Cream Sandwiches tick all the boxes for what I want for lunch. Haha.
Maybe it was out of a sense of shame for having missed last week’s TWD posting, but I decided to go all out and make all the components for this treat myself. I did bake the brioche in a can, which came out great. I made chocolate ice cream (I actually used the Philly-style recipe Dorie has in Dorie’s Cookies because I didn’t feel like adding to my egg white collection), which is super rich and dense. I then froze what I needed for these inside tart ring molds to get perfectly circular ice cream pucks that matched up with the round bread slices. And I already had some homemade salted caramel sauce in the fridge. You can totally use all store-bought stuff for this, though, and whatever flavor of ice cream or type or sauce you’d like (I’m thinking coffee ice cream and butterscotch sauce would also be pretty darn good…).
Dorie has you assemble the ice cream sandwiches first and then drizzle warm caramel sauce over the tops. That then becomes more of a knife and fork dessert situation, which to me is less fun than a hand-held ICS situation. So I slathered my brioche slices with the caramel before sandwiching it with the ice cream pucks. There’s a bit of drippage, but getting messy is what it’s all about. Did I mention these are crazy good??
For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll.
TWD BCM Rewind: Tarte Tropézienne
May 30, 2017 at 4:52 pm | Posted in BCM, cakes & tortes, groups, layer cakes, pudding/mousse, sweet things, sweet yeast breads, tuesdays with dorie | 4 CommentsTags: baking, bread, cake
A year ago, the group made Dorie’s Tarte Tropézienne, a pastry cream-filled, sugar-sprinkled brioche cake. I did not. That’s why rewind week comes in handy. I’d never had a Trop before…now I know what I’ve been missing. I really like pastry cream. And brioche.
Trops come in various sizes. I chose to make individual ones rather than slice up a large one. Mine came out looking a little more like burger buns than like the flatter cakes they should be…I clearly didn’t press the dough out enough. No matter, they were still delicious. I served them with chopped strawberries alongside, but next time I may put the berries inside instead.
For the recipe, see Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWJ: Brioche
September 20, 2016 at 12:01 am | Posted in breakfast things, BWJ, groups, sweet things, sweet yeast breads, tuesdays with dorie | 8 CommentsTags: baking, bread, breakfast
We’ve used Nancy Silverton’s brioche recipe left and right by now, but we’ve never just made plain brioche with it. Brioche is one of my favorite breads to make…all eggy and buttery and stuff. It’s easy to mix and to work with, when the temperature is right. I’ve made a different Dorie brioche loaf recipe before, so this time, I tried to make brioche à tête. For some reason I own three of the small fluted molds used for this…why, I don’t remember. My tête shaping skills need a little work. These looked more like brioche à goose egg. No matter, it tasted the same– delicious! Salty butter and plum jam were my toppings of choice here.
For the recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWJ: Swedish Limpa
August 16, 2016 at 3:35 pm | Posted in BWJ, groups, savory things, tuesdays with dorie, yeast breads | 4 CommentsTags: baking, bread
Baking bread isn’t my typical 90° day activity. I didn’t really have any other choice, though, if I wanted to get Beatrice Ojakangas’s Swedish Limpa made within the first two weeks of this month. Limpa, if you haven’t had it (I hadn’t myself until today), is a rye bread favored with orange zest, fennel, anise and caraway seeds and molasses and brown sugar. It’s often eaten at Christmas time in Sweden…in my house it will be eaten in mid-August.
I don’t have any anise in my spice collection and didn’t really feel like getting any either, since I’m not much of a licorice fan…I just used a bit more caraway and fennel to compensate. The recipe makes two loaves, which is a bit much for us, so I made half. The bread is traditionally baked in round cake pans, but I’ll be putting most of it into the freezer for later. With easy future toasting in mind, I baked my half-recipe in a 9″x5″ loaf pan instead.
This bread is delicious! I’m the one who added the molasses and sugar to the dough, yet somehow I forgot until the first bite that it would be slightly sweet. And the orange zest, seeds and rye–yum! Seriously, heat wave be damned…I’m glad I turned the oven on for this one. The recipe notes say the bread goes well with meat and cheese, and I believe it, but it’s also not bad with just a smear of salty butter.
For the recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWJ: Danish Slices
May 17, 2016 at 10:44 am | Posted in breakfast things, BWJ, groups, sweet things, sweet yeast breads, tuesdays with dorie | 4 CommentsTags: baking, bread, breakfast
I don’t have much more to say about Beatrice Ojakangas’s Danish recipe, since I’ve covered most of it once or twice before. It’s damn good, no matter what form it takes, even the simplest Danish Slice.
I had half a batch of dough left in the freezer from the spandauer pockets I made a couple of weeks ago, and rolled it into a long rectangular that I folded up and around a duo of almond frangipane and pureed prune paste. I brushed the top of my formed Danish with egg wash and sprinkled on some granulated almond bits before baking it. After it had cooled a bit, I made a quick coffee glaze and spooned it over. This is just.so.good. And a piece left over for dessert the next day is nice heated slightly with a little scoop of vanilla ice cream. I think the Danish would be proud.
For the recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan. There’s even a video of Beatrice and Julia making Danish together. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWJ: Danish Pastry Pockets
May 3, 2016 at 5:16 pm | Posted in breakfast things, BWJ, groups, sweet things, sweet yeast breads, tuesdays with dorie | 3 CommentsTags: baking, bread, breakfast
I’ve made Beatrice Ojakangas’s Danish recipe here once before, when we formed it into an impressive braid. Her dough uses a “quick” method, employing the food processor to break down the butter into chunks in the flour, rather than folding a butter block into a dough. The rough dough does need to rest in the fridge overnight, but after that, all of the lamination work is done quickly and at once, without any waiting in between the turns and folds. Pretty easy, all things considered, and crisp and flaky, too.
There are a variety of little shapes you can form Danish dough into, but I only did the “spandauer,” mostly because it has the coolest name. It’s just a square folded up around a filling like a baby in a papoose. I didn’t feel like trying to hard on those fillings. I thought for all of two seconds about making a pastry cream, before remembering I had some ricotta cheese in the fridge. I drained it for a couple of hours before stirring in a bit of sugar, lemon zest and egg yolk. I topped that off with some rhubarb jam. After the Danishes were out of the oven they got a good squiggling of glaze. These were quite delicious, and would have no doubt been amazing with coffee for breakfast, but we actually had them for dessert. Good anytime of day– that’s what I’m sayin’!
Back when we did that braid, I also tried out my shaping skills on the pinwheel. That one was filled with cream cheese and blueberry jam and sprinkled with pearl sugar. And glazed, too, of course.
For the recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan. There’s even a video of Beatrice and Julia making Danish together. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWJ: Persian Naan
April 5, 2016 at 12:02 am | Posted in BWJ, groups, savory things, tuesdays with dorie, yeast breads | 8 CommentsTags: baking, bread, savory
This Persian Naan flatbread from Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid uses the very same dough as the Oasis Naan we did almost four years (what the –??) ago. So I’ve kinda done this one before, but it’s been a while. The dough is actually as simple as it gets– water, flour, yeast and salt. One proof, then shape and bake. The book instructions call for making it by hand…last time I used the food processor…this time I used the KitchenAid…do what you like and rest assured that it will all be good.
The dough bakes up nice and puffy and chewy. It didn’t brown so well on top, so I brushed a little melted butter on at the halfway point and gave the naan an extra couple of minutes in the oven to get a bit of golden spotting. This was a nice bread to have with our Sunday morning fried eggs and avocado. It kind of reminds me of the grocery store Turkish pide bread that I fell in love with when we lived in Oz, but can’t get here.
For the recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan. There’s also a video of Alford, Duguid and Julia making the bread together, and the authors wrote this article that gives more naan tips. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
TWD BWJ Rewind: Pain de Campagne
March 29, 2016 at 8:21 pm | Posted in BWJ, groups, savory things, tuesdays with dorie, yeast breads | 7 CommentsTags: baking, bread
Joe Ortiz’s Pain de Campagne is my first home sourdough bread experiment. A whole wheat starter (called “the chef”) is refreshed over a period of several days, hopefully collecting wild yeast from the air in the meantime. There’s a warning in the recipe intro that you might get a flat loaf– no guarantees in the world of wild yeast. I could see the change in my starter over the week and I definitely noticed it’s sour smell increasing, so I had some hope for it, at least.
After almost four days, the final dough is ready to be mixed and later shaped. My bread definitely rose and had a nice shape but it’s quite dense inside. I didn’t really get any large air holes in the crumb and I see that I need to work on my slashing skills. Still makes good, flavorful toast though, with a nice crust, and it won’t go to waste.
For the recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll to see if anyone else did a rewind this week!
Tuesdays with Dorie BWJ: Buttermilk Bread
February 2, 2016 at 12:01 am | Posted in BWJ, groups, savory things, tuesdays with dorie, yeast breads | 13 CommentsTags: baking, bread
Lora Brody’s Buttermilk Bread is one I’ve been wanting to make for a while now. Sounds simple and homey and a nice thing to bake on a cold day.
The recipe in the book calls for making the bread dough in a bread machine, which I don’t have, so I made it in my stand mixer instead. I swapped a 50/50 water/liquid buttermilk combo for the water/powdered buttermilk in the recipe. While I used the full 2 1/2 teaspoons of yeast, I think I could have gotten away with just 2 teaspoons. I basically followed the mixing instructions we used when we did the White Loaves years ago, since they seemed pretty standard for this type of bread. I then switched back to Brody’s instructions for rising and baking.
This made a nice sandwich loaf, and maybe next time I’ll try it in the cloverleaf roll variation. The bread has maple syrup in the dough, so there’s a hint of sweetness there, and I think the crust is really good (I’m the weirdo who likes the end pieces). I’m looking forward to pulling slices from the freezer for grilled cheese!
For the recipe, see Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll.
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