Benito's blog

I thought I was done baking before my trip, but decided to bake a pizza to have tonight and tomorrow night.  These Roman style pizzas are what I’ve been enjoying making lately, The size and thickness of the crust is just right for the two of us to have over two meals.  I’ve been adding a tangzhong to the dough made up of 10% of the total flour, in this case whole spelt at 200% hydration.

We will be traveling for a month and a half, we leave next week, so I haven’t been baking as much since we won’t be around to eat it all.  I did however, have some aquafaba from a bean and fish recipe I made so decided to see how well it would work for these crackers which I’m kind of addicted to lately.  You may recall that aquafaba is the water left over from a can of beans and it is very very useful as a vegan substitute for egg whites in many baked goods such as meringue.  

After my major panettone fail, I decided to makes these sesame crackers for the first time.  I found a recipe on the net while looking for things to use the egg whites leftover from the panettone dough.  I’ve long loved these crackers and have bought them at a local Chinese grocery store.  I’m glad to have found a recipe that uses the egg whites and in fact is super easy.

I had some leftover wild rice (which also had red rice and brown rice in the blend) so not wanting it to go to waste I decided to add it to a dough.  I don’t think I’ve added rice in this way in a long long time.  I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.  I also had a bit of whole kamut left so decided to use it up in this bread as well.

My first two bakes of pretzels were yummy, however, the dough was hard to deal with.  In doing some research it seems that the hydration of that original recipe was too high.  So I’ve adjusted the hydration down to 65% which I believe is the upper end of the scale for soft pretzels. The dough was much easier to deal with especially transferring them into the simmering baking soda bath and out again.  I’m quite happy with these and they are now already all gone.

For my final bake of 2025 I decided to try something I’ve wanted to for some time.  I love chestnuts, when we were kids, my parents would buy them and we’d roast them.  We had to shell them which wasn’t fun but really isn’t that difficult, but it was so worth it since chestnuts are just yummy.  So for this Hokkaido Milk Bread I’ve added chestnuts two ways.  Some are added as inclusions, chopped.  The majority of them were cooked in milk and then blended.  I used this “chestnut milk” as the hydration for the tangzhong.

I baked these today have on Christmas morning and to bring to friends on Boxing Day who have kindly invited for a Boxing Day dinner.  I made a couple of mistakes, I forgot to include the orange zest the dough and then forgot to include the pecans in the filling.  So I added the missing zest from the dough in the filling and used a lot of the pecans on top.  I made cardamom rolls in the past and didn’t think there was a good balance between the cardamom and cinnamon.  I used equal parts cardamom and cinnamon and I think it is better this time.

Baked two of these, one as a gift and the other for turkey sandwiches post Christmas Dinner we are having tonight.  I have used most of my stash of frozen mashed purple sweet potatoes now.  I’ll have to pick up more in the spring.  We’ll be traveling for 45 days this winter so no need to get them yet.

This is the season to bake for friends and people who make your life better.  This recipe was for a Bundt.  Bundts are rather awkward to walk with especially during the winter.  So instead I baked this in two pullman pans.  I didn’t get a chance to try any, but I plan on baking this again in the coming week for a dinner party.  Reports from people who did eat it said they loved it.  Then again, since they didn’t have to bake it, what else would they say?  LOL.

Finally back from a lovely vacation.  I did a Locum for the past week and finally had a chance to bake.  I haven’t baked a chocolate bread in ages, I love chocolate and tart cherries, so this chocolate sourdough focaccia with tart cherries and sugared rosemary was born.  This is a variant of my recent focaccia, however, it has unsweetened cocoa powder, semi sweetened dark chocolate chunks, dried tart cherries and a small amount of sugar in the dough.  Surprisingly the sugared rosemary is actually quite yummy and goes well with this focaccia.