I tried to make German style breakfast rolls for brunch tomorrow. To put it nicely, I fucked them up. The key ingredient to failure in this case was covering the rolls with cling wrap on their second rise after shaping. The cling wrap pretty much mangled all of them. Beyond that, I don’t know how to correctly shape this kind of roll, while trying to create a steam bath for a nice shiny crust I sprayed the sides of my oven with a squirt bottle, this dislodged flakes of black stuff which is now embeded in the crust of the bread, I forgot to do the egg wash, and to top it all off I forgot to add salt, so they taste like shit too!

This is a comparison, the one on the right is closer but still not quite right.

Recipe

Brotchen (German Breakfast Rolls)

2 1/2 – 3 cups flour
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 package active dry yeast
1 tablespoon oil
1 cup warm water
1 egg white

Pour 2 1/2 cups flour into a large bowl and make a well. Pour yeast, sugar, and two tablespoons of warm water (the water comes from the 1 cup listed above) in the well. Mix yeast, sugar and water carefully within the well. Do not mix with the flour at this time. Cover the bowl with a cloth and set it in a warm place for 15 minutes. Add the remaining water and oil and beat until mixed.

Turn out on counter top and knead until smooth. Add the remaining 1/2 cup flour as needed. Put dough in a bowl, cover, and let it rise until double in size.

Punch down and divide the dough into 12 parts. Shape into oval rolls and place 3 inches apart on a greased and floured cookie sheet. Cover and let rise until double in size.

Beat egg white and 1 teaspoon water with a fork until frothy and brush on the rolls. Bake in a preheated oven at 450 for 15 to 20 minutes until golden brown.

Source: “Authentic German Home Style Recipes” by Gini Youngkrantz

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More info: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C3%B6tchen

My Comments

These are one of those things I grew up eating and promptly forgot about. I hadn’t had one in years and honestly they are better than I remember. And they are super simple and since there isn’t any leavening agent they are impossible to over mix and screw up. One key thing to remember is to use unsalted butter. I used salted butter and it was a little too salty. I also tried it a bunch of different ways, with jam, nutella, just powdered sugar. I think fried bananas would be good too though or end a meal with a 1/4 pancake and a scoop of ice cream.

These are also known as Dutch Baby Pancakes. Wikipedia says that the Dutch in “Dutch Baby Pancakes” refers to the Pennsylvania Dutch (who are German descendants), hence German Pancake.

My Comments

I looked at a few recipes before settling on this one. This is pretty much a straight rip off of Ina Garten’s recipe. I also tried Alton Browns recipe and from the stark similarity between the two I gleaned that granola bar recipes are pretty flexible, so I experimented a bit. As long as you have the right ratio of dry to wet ingredients, you can throw in anything you like. Some ideas that I tried were, flax seed (they have omega-3, a nice smokey nuttiness, and they add a nice crunch), sunflower seeds, dried apples, dried apricots, dried cherries, dried cranberries, raisins. Some things that I still want to try, macadamia nuts, chocolate, candied orange peel. One last note on why I like this version over Alton Browns, coconut. The shredded coconut adds another level of binding and a unique chewyness that Alton’s were lacking, so unless you hate coconut I’d leave it in there at the recommended ratio.

About a year ago I went biscotti crazy. I tried tons of different recipes looking for the perfect one. Believe me, there are a lot of biscotti recipes lurking on the internet. The biggest difference I have found is how soft the end product is. I’ve made ones that are so tender that they barely make it through the cutting stage and back onto the baking sheet and I’ve made ones that were tooth breaking hard. I think the harder they are the better they are for dipping, too soft and you end up with half a biscotti at the bottom of your coffee.

I really like this recipe because it’s right in the middle, soft like a cookie, but hard enough to hold up to the rigors of dunking in my tea. You could probably make them a little harder or softer by varying the time and heat of the second baking stage.

The base for this recipe is just Giada’s recipe and instead of pistachios and cranberries I added candied orange peel and and chocolate chips, along with a few minor tweaks.

Giada seems to think that these only last for 3 to 4 days. Personally I take a bunch with me to work and they hang out in my desk drawer for over a week sometimes two. I’m still here. My logic is that these are just cookies and cookies last forever right?

I linked to a candied orange peel recipe above. Candied orange peels are dead simple and taste great. I’ll try to write another post about them in the future. I didn’t really follow that recipe exactly because I only had two oranges. But I wholeheartedly agree that multiple boil and drain sessions are key.

The down side: I have to admit that after a few days the orange peels got really hard. If your aren’t going to eat them right away it might be worth experimenting with other candied orange peel recipes that leave you with a softer peel that might be less prone to drying out.

I was talking with my brother about this recipe and I think he said it best, it’s pretty hard to screw up bread pudding. I have to agree. As long as you hit the key bread, milk, eggs and sugar it’s probably going to taste good. So this recipe is more of a guideline than hard and fast rules. Feel free to change up the spices, skip the water bath, switch up the pine nuts, whatever, bread pudding is really hard to screw up. I liked using the muffin tins because I just popped them out and they were already divided and held up pretty well in the transfer over to a bowl. I actually threw most of them onto waxed paper and into the freezer once they cooled down. They come back to life in the microwave really well. So on a cold winter morning you can have a hot breakfast in a few minutes that isn’t oatmeal.

Here is a stop motion video of me shaping the buns from the previous post.

There has been a lot written about no knead bread at this point so I’m not really going to get into the history and details. I got the basic recipe here and it’s just the base recipe from this book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking.

I have a lot of trouble baking bread. I don’t know if it’s some kind of bread A.D.D., but going through all of the steps to create a perfect traditional loaf of bread kind of has me stumped. After trying this recipe (I only did a half for my first two attempts) I’m a firm believer in this style of baking bread.

Just a few last thoughts, For the buns I removed slightly large than golf ball sized chunks and shaped them into little boules. The steam part might seem a little weird but it’s really what is going to produce the perfect crust. And let me reiterate, the steam part is dangerous, be careful. In the bread bible aka Bread Bakers Apprentice goes into a lot more detail about the whole steam process and they suggest opening the oven and spraying the sides of the oven at 30 second intervals to really get a lot of steam going.

Now what should you do with these fine buns? I did end up smearing some honey butter on one of them but my favorite was this little bacon sandwich.

Here is a video showing how to shape the bread

Pretty… pretty shitty.

I already twittered about my tuscan bread failure so this is a little late. Over the weekend I made my first loaf of bread. I followed the recipe in Bread Bakers Apprentice (Google has the full recipe). I made a paste. Let it sit over night. The next day I mixed up the yeast, water, flour etc. Let the machine knead the life out of the dough. Then I let it rise (ferment). Punched it down. Let it rise some more. I rolled it out into two boules. Then Rachel and I had to run out to dinner so I decided to let it proof in the fridge over night. I don’t know where I went wrong (probably using AP flour for a recipe that said bread flour). End result the bread tasted kind of yeasty and bland and really just didn’t have the right texture. At least it looks like bread though.

To be continued…

I ran across these candied bacon recipes recently. So I wanted to do something with candied bacon but I don’t have an ice cream maker and the ice cream in a bag method is kind of a pain in the butt. I also had some blackberries left over from making jam so I figured muffins might be a good middle ground.

For the muffins I just used this blackberry muffin recipe. The main difference is the addition of the bacon and how I prepared them. I like to use a food processor whenever I can and this recipe seemed to lend it self to that. So if you don’t have a food processor or you don’t want to use one just refer to the other recipe.