Christmas Cookie Post Numero Dos!
I’ve only ever made one kind of biscotti before: white chocolate cranberry almond, which I make every year from Christmas. The Sourdough Surprises project this month was sourdough cookies, so I decided to try the suggested sourdough biscotti recipe and ended up with these dark chocolate, hazelnut, orange, and cinnamon lovelies.
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Coincidence (noun): a striking occurrence of two or more events at one time apparently by mere chance.
Serendipity (noun): good fortune; luck; the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.
Was it a coincidence or serendipity that just days after bookmarking these roasted pear and chocolate chunk scones, I discovered that the Sourdough Surprises project for this month was sourdough scones?
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This has been a busy month for me, so here I am, a day late for Sourdough Surprises, with a bit of a flop. And while I’m sure these sourdough grissini twists could be perfectly lovely, mine were… not. I’m equally sure that there is nothing wrong with the recipe, but that all my issues were totally due to user error. 😉
User error and a stupid too-hot oven!
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English muffins just happen to be one of my favorite breakfast foods (only partly because they form the base for eggs benedict) and they are one of those things that I keep meaning to make but never get around to doing. Enter Sourdough Surprises. This is the third time since I started baking with the group that the monthly project has coincided with something on my “to make” list! Perfect!
As always, I am kind of awe-struck that a bubbly mess of flour and water can so easily be turned into something like this:
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When I saw that this month’s Sourdough Surprises project was pie dough, I got very excited. So excited that I actually made this pie back at the end of July because I just couldn’t contain myself. Fruit pies are one of my very favorite things to bake and I was stoked to see a recipe for a pie crust using sourdough starter. And after making and eating this pie crust, I can officially say that my favorite way to use my sourdough starter is in sweet pastries, such as pie or danishes. The starter gives such a richness and complex flavour to pastries that for some reason I don’t taste as much in other applications, and the smell of it baking in the oven is mouthwatering….
A little while ago I posted a pizza I’d made, and promised to report back with the details on the process once I’d worked out the kinks. I’ve been working with Jim Lahey’s no-knead pizza dough and a few methods for baking it in a home oven that are supposed to mimic the effects of a commercial wood-fired pizza oven. The Sourdough Surprises project this month was pizza, so I took the opportunity to make a sourdough version of the dough.
sourdough Neapolitan-style pizza heading into the oven
To clarify, when I say “pizza”, I’m talking Neapolitan–style pizzas: thin-crispy-chewy-airy crust and a few carefully chosen toppings, baked in a wood-fired oven at a zillion degrees so they come out minutes later, smoking hot and slightly charred and delicious. …
This month’s Sourdough Surprises project was bagels, yet another item that just so happened to be on my “summer to-make” list. The recipe comes from Susan at Wild Yeast, a fantastic blog and resource for all things concerning bread and the home of YeastSpotting, a weekly round-up of user-submitted blog posts featuring bread and yeast (to which this post has been submitted!).
You should really head over to read Susan’s original post of this recipe, because not only is it witty, it is also very informative. I’ve never made bagels before, but I do agree with many of her opinions, including the one that the only good bagel is a chewy bagel. This means kneading the heck out of the dough, and unless you have arms of steel and a lot of free time, you’re going to “knead” a stand-mixer. (Sorry, that was terrible.)…
This is the first post in a series of three – click to read Part II and Part III.
In my last post, I was extolling the virtues of making something simple from scratch. Now I am going to extol the virtues of making something rather complicated from scratch: Danish pastries using sourdough starter. Yes, we are doing this!
At the end of April, I wrote a list of stuff I wanted to make for this blog over the summer, and Danish pastries was on it. I had my first taste of making laminated dough when the Daring Bakers made croissants a while back, and I wanted to try it again. But I was kind of putting it off because it’s a lot of butter and a lot of work: all that rolling and folding and rolling and folding and resting and waiting. Then, during the Daring Bakers reveal last month, I came across Sourdough Surprises, which is another baking group that a few Daring Bakers members have created to bake together once a month using their sourdough starters. And their recipe for May was sourdough Danishes! Well, it seemed like fate. I was in….