baking: does it come easily to you?

Beauties. someone's got some proofing baskets!

those are gorj

unf

slice em open

i wanna see the insides

This turned into a bread-themed NIN lyrics thread pretty quickly.

haha1

those are amazing looking!

Those look fantastic!

I don't think my link worked, here are my (adopted) bread children:
https://instagram.com/sparkspasm_sp/

am hefty envious of the sourdough

dawg Jordan

the inside of mine doesn't look luxuriously open like that, i wish it did.

damn

i made cinnamon raisin bread a couple months ago that was good? i don't have the attention span to do what you guys do

If the choice had been offered, I would have ticked the box for: I am a fairly good cook and I'm OK at baking, although it is only of marginal interest to me.

that's about where i stand as well

i am a weirdly good natural baker but don’t often and it’s all weird because i can’t cook a thing and don’t care and can barely wash the dishes

I should've mentioned that I'm still a beginning baker, so special equipment, techniques, and ingredients are probably going to be out of reach for now.

Instead, I'm going to try this: https://minimalistbaker.com/the-worlds-easiest-cinnamon-rolls/

This will be the first time I've worked with dough that needs to rise, so still a new skill to learn!

Tracer, are you doing the Tartine thing?

I should reiterate that I don't know much about baking, I just watch her. There's been a lot of experimentation, and mostly what I've learned is that it always comes out bread!

I was just staying with a friend who was doing the Tartine thing. I liked the breads a lot (he's been trying to open a bakery somewhere). While he was away I was feeding all his sourdough starters.

I am very good with dough but suck at baking most things because I hate following recipes. I am a much prep chef/kitchen overseer.

One reason to have kids is that after you teach them the basics, then they spontaneously bake all kinds of delicious things on their own. My 12 year old can whip out an apple cake from memory. My oldest made éclairs last week. My boy makes pizza (including the dough) from scratch all the time.

That is awesome.
Funny timing to see those lovely loaves. Just a half hour ago was thinking to myself that a bagel making project is going to be in the near future. Have put off the idea for a year or more

OHhhh pics after it happens. I made bagels once/twice? in high school when my electric pasta machine had a bagel extruder.

i have not. "Tartine" means toast in French, usually with butter and jam, which i am a big fan of. but i gather this is a sourdough guru of some description?

I've been using this book - https://thedobook.co/products/do-sourdough-slow-bread-for-busy-lives

Yep, this Chad Robertson dude who has a bakery in SF and has published these tomes about sourdough baking. I've gotten the impression that it's kind of a movement and everyone has their variations on it. I'm not sure what the essential elements are that make it different from other sourdough styles, but I think a longer fermentation time is part of it? Idk, I shouldn't even be talking about this. :)

I'm sure you can find the recipe out there, and the baker I co-habitate with also had success with the variation here, which I gather is a lot less fussy about the fermentation time and dough folding: https://foodbodsourdough.com/

leee those cinnamon rolls sound good

I have definitely come across a LOT of extremely pedantic shit on the Internet in the last few weeks about "slap 'n' fold" vs "stretch 'n' fold" etc and some of it can feel douchebro mansplainy, like somebody's telling me the right way to fold a pocket square. Not saying the Tartine thing is that - I haven't read anything about that (though I expect I will at some point). But then there are other really, kinda, I want to say Santa Cruz types out there that are just super chill about encouraging people to try things and they're usually on crappy forums (lol?) just mixin it up breadstyle, I love it.

getting closer!

https://dzwonsemrish7.cloudfront.net/items/2n0X112h2n3A2x200n3M/IMG_9217.jpg

that looks wonderful! do you spray mist in oven while baking to get that crust?

i didn't for that one. but i have with others and it does seem to create a browner, bubblier crust which is really nice. making in creuset/dutch oven, the lid of which you remove after 20 mins, is apparently a shortcut to a good crust and "oven spring" so i am going to try a big 1kg loaf like that today

https://imgur.com/gallery/nX6Eypp

Those are the cinnamon rolls from the link above, they’re not very sweet and are actually kind of bitter, I think because of the stevia I used in place of sugar.

i got a bread baking book for xmas from which i made the aforementioned cinnamon bread. i started a sourdough starter today. i'm excited about the ferments to come.

I did my first real vegan baking experiment yesterday with some brownies! I replaced the eggs with mashed bananas, but I think the extra moisture changed the baking time a lot, and I really had to add quite a lot longer and at a lower temperature because they were on the verge of burning. In the end they didn't rise at all but are super gooey.

the best chocolate chip cookies i ever had used aguafaba (i.e. the juice from a can of chickpeas) as an egg replacer

would like a harbl fermentation update

xxpost justin3 once gave me a great vegan brownie recipe that used black beans, it worked great. i’ll post it here if i can find it

ah ha! found it

https://chocolatecoveredkatie.com/2012/09/06/no-flour-black-bean-brownies/

my husband & are both non-vegans & we wolfed these, they are so good

oh man i'll have to try that

lol @ food bloggers. jeeeez katie skip the chit chat and gimme the damn recipe!!

oh damn, we don't have quick oats. I wanted to try those tonight.

I'm like, maybe I could use muesli?

yeah the chatty food blog style is so rmde
no-one cares!!!

lol that is a thing on the food blogs that I've seen too.

Weirdly enough, the recipe I was using as my base was also brownies with black beans!

oh gah, the overly dear diary food blogger is so annoying. I always scroll scroll scroll until I see ingredients. I have no clue what they are thinking or what mass feedback all of them got to that bs.

there must be a reason for it. more room to show advertising? they all do it. i have rage-quit so many recipes.

xp - flourless and/or vegan brownies are better than regular brownies, since it is almost impossible for them to be cakey

i stopped looking for recipes on blogs years ago because of the indulgent personal storytelling, probably contributed to the atrophying of my food prep repertoire but at least i didn't have to read any unfunny jokes

I've half-convinced myself that all those recipe blogs are generated by a single content-farm in Belarus or something.

i don't mind those chatty food blogs because i just scroll down over the text until i see the method and ingredients

A good friend of mine writes a baking blog - it has diary elements but she's a good writer, and keeps it brief. Her taste in cakes is impeccable:
http://alicebakesacake.blogspot.com

i'm starting to nail it. two weekends in a row of absolutely killer loaves of bread. this time i even totally freestyled it, didn't have the right flour, maybe 2/5 white bread flour and the rest a weird combo of whole wheat, rye plain (soft) white flour that you'd use to make pancakes and malted bread flour. KILLER. i get that goddamn spring all the headz talk about! the two things i changed that i think made the most difference: 1) refreshing my starter a day before making the levain. it's more active, stronger, able to keep going. 2) switching to just the bottom element in my oven after putting the dough in. just those few seconds of air escaping can be enough to make the elements kick on, and when the top one's on it crusts over the top of the loaves before they've had time to properly spring. or at least that's my working theory.

there should be a comma after the word 'rye' fyi