Thought Bloggles

My recent breads have been of a good structure and have risen nicely, but have almost invariably fallen again when baked. I tried some variations in flour combination and amount of kneading, but to no avail. Then I thought, maybe there's just not enough there  to keep up the holes made by (mostly) steaming water. After all, while I use 500g of flour with 350g of water, I also thereto add about 150g of mostly water in the form of eggs, plus up to 50ml of oil, and some water in the soaked seeds. That adds up. So for this bread, I decided to use less water and add more flour, to see if the dough would form up more and stand up better while rising. I used 50g gluten, 150g wheat flour (type 550), 150g whole-wheat flour, and 150g sunflower seed flour, a scant tablespoon salt, 50g soaked seed mix, 50g walnuts, 300ml warm water, 20g yeast cake, 3 large eggs, and 20ml oil. Then while kneading, I added another 250g of the type 550 flour, getting the dough from super-sticky to only somewhat...

This year's Sotahuuto has some really good strategists. This is one example where the outcome particularly surprised me. See the video here: https://youtu.be/T1I22U5nEbY?t=3032 There are two sides in this battle, but each side is split in two starting points. The side I was on has (among many others) Imperiumii Etelan in black and purple as well as Gobliniit in off-green. The other side most notable has Mahekainen in blue and white with a red blazon. The field is roughly rectangular and has a small dense forest off-center, and the half of our army I was in started in the corner farthest from the forest, while the other half was behind the forest, with the opposing armies in the other two corners. At the start of the video, you see the opposing forces that were on our right when looking into the middle. Our strategy was (roughly) to move as fast as at all possible across to the forest, presumably (I wasn't there for the strategizing) to meet the other half. The opponents...

I've had a string of failures with my bread recently. They just don't rise much, most of the time - once or twice they rose nicely, but most of the time they're kinda flat. Not inedibly flat, mind you, but flat enough that they aren't very enticing, not that great for things like french toast, let alone bread pudding. I have a number of hypotheses of why this could be, but rather than trying them meticulously one at a time and keep making uninspiring bread, I decided to throw them all in at once, check that I got something that works, then go from there. So I took my standard bread recipe (except I see now I've been using 3 eggs most of the time where this post said 2, as did my older 1:1 bread post ) and made the following changes: In case the yeast has too little starch to feast on: Drop the flax seed flour (which has a rather strong taste also) and increase regular flours instead. In case the walnuts contain something inhibiting the yeast: Drop the walnuts...

The Kreuzpflicht  has now become the law of my adopted home state, requiring crosses to be on display in all public buildings. As an avowed atheist (there's enough trouble in the world already without having to come up with supernatural trouble) and constitutionalist, this troubles me greatly. But what can one do? It's the law, right? Here are some ways you can stay within the law and help avoid enforced religion. As a private person, your options are limited: - Take the cross off its hook and leave it on a table. Or under a table. Under a chair. In a remote corner. As long as you don't take it with you, it's not theft. - Bring an extra hook and mount it on the bottom of the cross . - Hang other religious symbols near the cross. Sticky-tack is nice for quick mounting. As someone in charge of a public building, the possibilities are nigh endless: - Hang the cross in the company of other religious symbols. For agnostics, add a question mark, for atheists th...

Furthering my inquiries into high-protein baking, I tried out a recipe for no less than the "Ultimate" keto burger buns . Based on my previous experience, I didn't have high hopes for it turning it as ultimate as indicated. Sure enough, what the recipe calls a "batter" that can be poured into the forms turned into a sticky dough that had to be scraped out with a spatula and sat stiffly in the forms. After 18 minutes of baking, as suggested, they were nicely browned, but didn't rise much, and were tough and crumbly: This recipe, however, has a link to the (an) almond flour, and in one of the pictures the nutrition info was visible (not explicitly listed, alas), and it listed about 50% fat, where my almond flour comes with 10%, having being partly de-oiled. So I figured - maybe adding back some fat would help? Thus experiment #1: To a half recipe I added 50 g of canola oil. I also instead of the staff blender used the exceedingly handy beater whisk from...

Oddly, I've been doing bullet journaling for 15 months and only now got around to watching the original video that introduced the concept in August 2013 (I was several years behind this particular trend). I no longer remember which page I took my original style from, possibly this updated version , but there are some differences: The original bullet journal (OBJ) uses boxes for tasks and dots for notes, whereas I've followed the updated version (UBJ) with dots for tasks and dashes for notes. Originally, done tasks were marked with a checkmark in the box, the updated version uses an 'x', I turn the dot into a checkmark - checkmarks look more "done" than 'x'es. The "migration" marks work differently in both OBJ and UBJ: A forward angle means it's moved from a day to the next month , while a backward angle means it's moved to the long-term list. Since I have four, count them, four, levels of lists (daily, "soon" (roughly w...

I just made the Low-Carb Carrot Cake from ditchthecarbs.com. I used Xylitol as sweetener, added another tsp of vanilla (because that's almost always a good idea), and used a heaping tablespoon of "Mickey's Five-spice" instead of the other spices. The batter was quite satisfying and not very sweet, but the cream cheese frosting part of the recipe is all manner of wrong. The carb/protein ratio is really good, we could use 50/50 whole-wheat and almond flour and still be balanced. Let's see the results: It set fine, but was somewhat dense and dry, falling apart too easily. It was not very sweet at all, possibly due to using a sweetener with a different amount of sweetening power But what I really want to write about is the process, and how this was the most stress-free baking experience ever. I think of it as "prepare and repair". The "prepare" part is also beautifully known as " mise en place " ([mi zɑ̃ ˈplas]) and basically mean...

With my last flour experiment, I found a reasonable proportion of gluten to flour for making simple baking experiments: 25g gluten to 100g water gives something that's roughly bread-like in texture, if somewhat wet. But what happens when you use not just gluten, but also other flours? How do the various flours compare in terms of water absorption and baking effect? Let's find out! Since I'd be adding other flours that have their own properties, I reduced the amount of gluten to 10g, and used 25g of each of the other flours. I still went with 100g of water, but this time I used a finer scale to make sure my measurements were much more precise. I also added 1g (a "dash") of salt, to make it potentially edible. I did three batches, because I only have four of the little baking pans, and because I don't want too much delay between the first and last concoction. This was my procedure: Measure out the gluten, flour, and salt in each baking pan in advance. ...

They said it couldn't be done! They called me mad! But I SHOWED THEM! Muahahaha! Yes, this is indeed a bread made without flour. Well, without wheat flour. Actually, without the carbohydrate parts of the wheat flour. It uses gluten and seed flours instead, but it comes out nice and springy, slightly denser than I would normally get it, but delicious. I ended up using less flour than usual for this, since my flour tests (post coming up on them as soon as I get the third part done) show that both sunflour and flaxseed flour soak up more water than regular flour. And indeed, with 4/5 the usual amount the dough was at the same time tough and sticky. Next time I'll lower the amount of flour a bit and see if that improves the oven spring by virtue of leaving more water available to boil and expand. Ingredients: 100g gluten, 150g flaxseed flour, 250g sunflower seed flour, 1/2 tsp baker's malt (Backmalz), 2 tsp salt. Mixed these together, but ended up putting 100g of the...

A simple but successful bread, made with flax flour and sunflour. After doing some testing of various flours (results to be posted later when I've tested the rest of my 12 different flours) and looking through my notes, I came to the conclusion that almond flour, even the fine varieties, is just not good for bread. So I used sunflower seed flour (sunflour) instead of the almond flour, plus I added just a bit (0.5% by weight) of baker's malt, which supposedly helps feed the yeast. The result was just excellent - rose like a charm, and did an oven spring I could palpably watch happening. I also this time put it into a hot oven, rather than as usual heating the oven with the bread in it. I still don't know which gives the better result - it seems to me the slow heating would allow the inner parts to get warmer and expand before the outer parts get too baked and fixed, but maybe that's not an issue, and the loss of gas by slower heating is counterproductive. Another ...

It's Saturday, and you know what that means: Baking experiments! Ok, maybe you didn't know, since I haven't posted so much about it, but at least today I did one, testing how gluten behaves in various solutions. Would it poof up in the oven? Would it form durable bubbles? How wet would it get? What would the final consistency be? I decided to keep the tests as simple as possible, using just a liquid and gluten, not even adding salt. I did four tests in little teflon pans: #1: I took 50ml cold water and poured 25g gluten into it, stirring as best I could, then let it stand for half an hour. #2: Seeing how #1 clumped up, I now took 100ml cold water and slowly poured 25g gluten into it while stirring, then let it stand for half an hour. #3: With the oven preheated, I again took 100 ml cold water and slowly poured 25g gluten into it while stirring. #4: Lastly, I beat one egg and slowly poured 10g gluten into it while stirring, then beat it some more. I pour four into t...

Due to  +Mickey Blake 's recent insulin resistance diagnosis, we've been eating a low-carb diet for the last several months. While I don't have a diagnosis myself, I have followed the diet, initially mainly to make cooking easier, but after a while also because it just made me feel better in several different ways: Disclaimer: I'm not a medical doctor or even close, this is just what changed for me. I have noticeably more energy. Where I would usually wear out in the late afternoon with my mind just fizzling until I got some food, I now keep fresh throughout the day. At the end of the day, I feel tired, but more in a physical way rather than a mental way. I still like to take a short nap mid-afternoon, especially on busy days, but I can certainly keep doing more things for longer than before. I need less sleep.  My daily sleep need has dropped from 8-9 hours down to between 6 and 7 hours. Even when I stay up late, like this New Year's Eve where I didn't get...

As promised, an update on the brunkager after they were done. They worked, and even though I used the sunflower seed flour together with baking soda, they didn't turn green. It appears this particular reaction also requires oxygen, and this is a very compressed dough that was then wrapped and put in the fridge. They came out quite nice (I forgot to get some Zitronat, so they were lacking that lemony taste), but definitely softer than the usual ones. Now I like a softer cookie and eschew the efforts to make them as crunchy as possibly, so this was very much my thing, but your mileage may vary. Over all it was a success that I will repeat and refine next Christmas. Brunkager This is a modified recipe based on  God Mad  (no, nothing to do with a Divine Hulk), 6th edition. I'll only write the recipe with my replacements and modifications, for the original, get the book. Note that this recipe takes some planning, so read carefully before commencing. 125 g butter 100 g xylit...