Mmmm, bagels

Happy New Year all! What better way to start off the new year then with a fresh bagel. I know. That's why I made them this morning. I hadn't made bagels in a few months and realized that I hadn't shown them on the blog yet, so I decided to illustrate the process. King Arthur flour has a few different recipes for bagels, but the one I like best is their recipe for Water Bagels. The recipe makes 16 bagels, about the size of Lender's bagels, not too big, but satisfying. I made 8 cinnamon raisin, and 8 everything bagels, using my homemade everything bagel topping.

Today, on the French Chef! Episode 79: Brioche

The title pretty much sums it up. Today I made Julia Child's brioche. And it was good. I bought a reprint of her French Chef cookbook, originally published in 1963. I don't usually buy new books, but it was only $7 and it's Julia, you can't say no to Julia.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Just thought I'd show you what I made for my Thanksgiving. I told my mother to leave me in charge of bread. I made crescent rolls, Italian bread and honey wheat rolls. And since I just made sugar cookies for the baby shower, I decided to make Thanksgiving cookies too! Enjoy the day!

Homemade crescent rolls!

It's the time of year when you start thinking about certain foods. For me, I love crescent rolls. And I really only have them at thanksgiving. Once in a great while, I will buy a package and make a baked brie. Mmmm, baked brie. Anyways, I was flipping through another of my vintage cookbooks last weekend, this time Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book from 1950. There was a recipe for homemade crescent rolls. Wow. Obviously homemade will be better than store bought, right? Well, before we get to the rolls, take a look inside this book.

Whole wheat bread competition

I bake a lot of bread. A lot. But They're usually sweet breads or in roll form. I haven't been able to perfect a wheat bread that I can use for sandwiches. I'd like to make and not buy sandwich bread every week. So today I chose two recipes to test to try and find a good "go to" recipe for whole wheat sandwich bread.

Garlic knots, mmmm...

After months of wanting, I finally tried the KAF recipe for garlic knots. I first saw these knots about six months ago in an email from KAF. I immediately read their blog post about the knots and then went to the recipe page. I was discouraged, however, when the recipe called for many things I didn't have on hand; dry milk, pastry flour, potato flour, pizza dough flavoring and the rolled dough improver. Well, over the past few months I managed to buy dry milk, and the pastry and potato flours (only the potato flour came from KAF, the others I could find at the grocery store.) Finally, this past weekend, on my trip to the KAF store I bought the pizza dough flavoring and the dough improver. I know, I could have made these without the pizza dough flavoring and the improver, but I wanted to make them correctly, and frankly I forgot about them for a while.

Noon Rogani Bread

Even though my husband and I are going away for the long weekend, I decided I still wanted to bake today. Since I've been on a cinammon kick lately, I decided to make noon rogani bread. I made it once this spring when KAF first emailed me about the new recipe. It came out okay, but not great. I thought I'd give it another go.

I made the dough, as stated in the recipe, letting the flour, yeast and water rest after mixing. This does not look like the "slurry" they describe in the recipe, but I kept going.

Baguettes and Italian Bread 101

So here it goes. I'm delving into what may be a very time consuming and expensive (not to mention fattening) project. But baking makes me happy so I'm willing to try. I actually started this process last night for the breads I made today. I decided to make french baguettes to go with the French onion soup I'm making, and since the baguette recipe on the KAF website requires a starter, I began last night, with my first of what I'm sure will be many mistakes. I accidentally made the starter (twice) with all purpose flour instead of the bread flour it required. I thought I could walk away from the laptop and remember that. Oh well. I decided to use the mistake starter to make the Italian 101 bread, actually I made two loaves with the two false starters.

The starters were nice and bubbly this morning (sorry no pics) and I made the doughs in my new Kitchenaid mixer. (I got a great deal on one, otherwise I like making my breads by hand.)

The baguette dough made three loaves. Unfortunately, I didn't have a really sharp knife to slash the loaves, so they looked a little hacked before they went in the oven.

The Italian breads looked much better. It made two braided loaves.

Into the oven for a second rise.