I had never heard of simits before reading this recipe, but I was excited to try something new, and these turned out so delicious! As always, I started out with the mise en place:
I mixed and kneaded the flour, water, salt, and yeast together in my stand mixer for several minutes until the ingredients were well-incorporated and the dough was smooth.
Meanwhile, I had a lot of fun beating the butter with my rolling pin to soften it without warming it up too much.
I added the (still cold) butter to the dough bit by bit until it was all incorporated and then continued to knead the dough until it was silky smooth.
I covered the dough and let it rise. After 45 minutes I did a fold. The dough was super supple and extensible and was such a pleasure to handle!
I let the dough rest for another 45 minutes. Toward the end of this time I prepared the molasses bath and sesame seeds for the topping.
Shaping was surprisingly easy. I cut the dough into 24 pieces, then rolled each one out into a long rope. Then two ropes were twisted together by rolling up with one hand while rolling down with the other. Then the twist was wrapped around the hand and rolled together.
Before setting the simits aside to rise I dipped each one into a molasses bath and then into sesame seeds. I covered the trays and let them rise for half an hour while I preheated the oven.
My husband was preparing to fry some chicken while I was making the simits and he suggested frying a couple. Friends, this was a very good idea! They were wonderful fried, and a bit of cinnamon sugar on top made them even better!
With the fried simits consumed, it was time to bake the rest of the batch.
These simits turned out so well! They have the slightest hint of sweetness from the molasses bath, but the dough and sesame seeds are savory. We enjoyed them with breakfast until they were gone (and I was sad when they were gone). If you have never made (or tried) simits before, I would definitely recommend them.
Until the next time: may your yeast always rise and your flour never run out.
I love a warm, soft pretzel, and I was super excited to make my own! As usual, I started with the mise en place for the dough.
I mixed the ingredients together on my KitchenAid mixer on the “stir” setting for 3 minutes, then on speed 4 for 5 minutes, then set the dough aside to rest.
After an hour the dough had risen, so I divided it into 12 pieces and roughly preshaped each piece into a log.
Then I shaped each piece into a pretzel. First I rolled each log into a long snake, about 2 feet long. Then I twisted the ends around each other twice. I brought the ends down to the base of the pretzel body and smushed them into place. Finally, I shimmied the pretzels into a nice shape and placed them on a pan to rise.
The pretzels were visibly puffy after 40 minutes. I boiled water and baking soda for the water bath.
I boiled each pretzel individually for 10 seconds on each side. It was a little tricky to get the pretzels into the water without deflating them, distorting the shape, or sticking to them.
After a few minutes all 12 pretzels had been boiled. I sprinkled them with salt and put them in the oven.
I baked the pretzels for 22 minutes, which was the maximum recommended baking time. I rotated the baking pans throughout the bake to get even colour on the pretzels. The pretzels baked to a deep golden colour, as specified in the directions, but not to a darker brown as shown in the picture and as is typically seen on pretzels.
The last step before we could eat a pretzel was to brush them with butter.
The pretzels are delicious. They have a buttery flavor (not surprising, since they were brushed with butter after baking). They taste pretzelly, but not super pretzelly. Commercial pretzel bakers boil the pretzels in a lye solution, which is more caustic than the baking soda solution I used. This impacts both the flavor and the colour of the pretzels. I have read that you can bake baking soda to change it into Carbonate of Soda (rather than Bicarbonate of Soda), which is more caustic than baking soda, but less caustic than lye, so I’d like to try either that or a lye bath next time. I also wonder how much deeper the colour would have gotten if I had left the pretzels in the oven for 25 minutes. Would they have been over-baked at that point? Clearly more experimentation is needed.
Until the next time: may your yeast always rise and your flour never run out
Words are funny. When I picture a “multigrain” bread I think of something brown, made with whole wheat flour. This loaf, however, is made entirely of white bread flour, but incorporates whole grains and seeds. Surprise!
The night before baking I weighed out my grains and seeds and set them to soak. I used 20 grams each of poppy seeds, quinoa, and Old Fashioned oats, and 25 grams of rye grain (I used my grain mill on the largest setting to crack the grain).
The next morning I prepared my mise en place. Other than the soaked grains, this bread is extremely simple: just flour, water, salt, and yeast.
Per the instructions, I mixed all the ingredients together, then kneaded the dough (I kneaded by hand for 4 minutes). I still find it difficult to gauge when I have kneaded enough since a dough that is “smooth and elastic” is rather subjective, so I try to err on the side of too much kneading rather than too little.
After the dough had risen for an hour I divided it in two and preshaped shaped it.
I let the loaves rest for 15 minutes, then did the final shaping.
I let the loaves rise for an additional 45 minutes before baking. When I took the covers off them to put them in the oven I noticed that they had risen sideways instead of up, which was concerning.
But there wasn’t much to do except bake them, so I scored them (the dough was quite wet and didn’t want to score nicely), put them in the oven, and crossed my fingers.
Since I had two free-form loaves, I once again decided to test the impact of my baking cloche on the bread.
I removed the lid of the cloche after 15 minutes of baking and found that both loves had risen very little, and that the loaf inside the cloche seemed to have spread outward a little more, possibly because of the extra steam generated within the cloche chamber.
I finished the bake, but wasn’t very happy with these “long and short” loaves.
The bread tasted quite good, so I decided to try again, this time baking the bread in loaf pans.
I am much happier with the bread in this shape, although I did still notice that the dough rose outward to fill the pan before it started climbing up, and I was a little disappointed that the oven spring was so little. This bread is quite tasty, and I can definitely see myself making it again.
Until the next time: may your yeast always rise and your flour never run out.
My mom is known for her cinnamon rolls. I remember staying up with her until midnight to make the cinnamon rolls, and then she would get up at 5 or 6 AM to bake them. And when she made the cream cheese frosting my brothers and I would always fight over who got to lick the beaters. Yum!
As I prepared to bake the next recipe in the King Arthur Baking School book I wondered how these would compare to my mom’s cinnamon rolls. This dough starts with a tangzhong. I weighed my ingredients, then whisked them together on the stove until the mixture thickened. This only took a minute or two.
Then all the ingredients went into the stand mixer, starting with the hot tangzhong.
I mixed the dough in the stand mixer until it was elastic and no longer stuck to the sides of the bowl.
Then I allowed the dough to rest for an hour. During the rest I prepared the filling. I have never used a cinnamon roll filling that incorporates melted butter into the filling. I’ve always spread room-temperature butter on the rolled-out dough and then sprinkled the cinnamon sugar over top. This filling also incorporated flour, which was new to me as well.
After an hour the dough was ready, so I rolled it out into a rectangle and sprinkled the cin Amon sugar mixture on it.
Then I rolled it all up into a log, pinched the seam closed, and cut the log into 8 pieces.
I greased a 9×13 pan, arranged my cinnamon rolls in the pan, and left them to rise for an hour.
When the rolls had risen I baked them for 18 minutes: a shorter time than I would have expected. The rolls were just barely golden on top when I took them out of the oven.
While the cinnamon rolls baked I made the frosting. This is a butter-based frosting that does not use any cream cheese. The frosting was very easy to whisk up by hand.
At last, I frosted the warm cinnamon rolls and tucked right in.
Ok, don’t tell my mom, but I think these might be better than her cinnamon rolls? The short bake causes the cinnamon rolls to be extremely tender. I do think 18 minutes was slightly underbaked (a few of the rolls were slightly doughy) and I would bake these for 20 or 22 minutes next time. The dough has great flavor and doesn’t taste yeasty at all (a yeasty flavor is the only gripe I have with my mom’s cinnamon rolls). The filling is perfectly spiced and is ooey-gooey without running out of the baked roll. I prefer a cream cheese frosting because that’s what I grew up with, but I didn’t miss the tanginess of the cream cheese with these cinnamon rolls. If I were to open a bakery selling cinnamon rolls, I would absolutely use this recipe.
Until the next time: may your yeast always rise and your flour never run out.
The next recipe in the King Arthur Baking School book is called Tender Sweet Bread. The recipe makes two loaves, and once again I am trying two variations.
Mise en place:
I started by combining my dry ingredients …
… then added the butter and worked it in by hand. The recipe instructed that the butter should be worked into the flour until it was “evenly dispersed,” but did not recommend a method to achieve this, so I rubbed the butter into the flour in the same way I would for biscuits or a pie crust.
Finally, I added the wet ingredients and mixed the dough together.
I kneaded the dough for 4 minutes, then set it aside to rise for an hour.
Once the bulk fermentation was complete I divided the dough in half and pre-shaped it. One half was further divided into three logs for a braid. The other half stayed in one piece.
While the dough was resting I mixed up the poppy seed filling for the 2nd loaf with canned poppy seed filling, egg white, and orange zest. Prior to reading this recipe I didn’t even know that poppy seed filling existed! My local grocery store does carry it, but I had to go twice to find it. If you’re looking for canned poppy seed filling, look in the aisle with the canned pie fillings.
Once the dough had rested for 15 minutes I shaped it. The three logs were rolled out very long and thin and braided. I learned that rolling dough into a thin log works best when you only roll one direction (toward your body or away from your body) instead of rolling back and forth (toward and away from your body).
The other half of the dough was rolled out into a large rectangle (yay! I got to use my rolling pin!), spread with poppy seed filling, then rolled up like a cinnamon roll. Finally, I used a bread knife to cut the roll down the center and twisted the two halves together decoratively.
I left both loaves to finish proofing, which took about 30 minutes.
Before baking I mixed up an egg wash and brushed it over the plain braided loaf.
Then both loaves went into the oven. They both baked up beautifully in 30 minutes.
This bread is quite good. It is sweet, but not too sweet. I plan to make this bread again, but I will leave the vanilla out next time. I found the vanilla flavor to make this bread less of a multipurpose bread and more of a dessert. I do not want a sandwich with vanilla-flavored bread, for instance. The bread excels as French Toast, though!
We tried French Toast with both the plain bread and the poppy seed bread. The orange zest in the poppy seed bread was a bit strong for us in this application. Frankly, the orange zest was a bit much in the poppy seed bread for me overall. Lemon zest would have been better here. My husband made a lemon frosting to eat with this, which was divine.
Until the next time: may your yeast always rise and your flour never run out
This week something very exciting happened: I got a grain mill!! Specifically, a Mockmill Lino 200.
I couldn’t wait to use it, so I skipped ahead a few recipes in the King Arthur Baking School book and made whole wheat sandwich bread. But because I’m me I couldn’t just make the recipe. I had to do an experiment. I was curious how the freshly-milled wheat would compare to store-bought flour, so I setup a head-to-head comparison.
I keep my whole wheat flour and my grain in the freezer, so I put them both out on the counter and weighed out the amount needed for my recipe the morning of the bake so they could come to room temperature. I milled my flour, then realized it was significantly warmer than its store-bought cousin and let both flours sit for a while longer so their temperatures could equalize. I was surprised by the difference in colour between these flours, but that is likely due to the type of wheat used. My flour is milled from Hard White Winter Wheat. The store bought flour is Lidl brand. I can’t find a definitive answer on what kind of wheat is used in Lidl brand whole wheat flour, but whole wheat flour is typically milled from Hard Red Spring or Winter Wheat.
The fresh-milled flour is on the left. The store-bought flour is on the right.
For all steps in the baking process I worked with the fresh-milled flour first, and pictures of the fresh-milled flour will be on the left where there is a comparison.
When I couldn’t wait any longer I laid out my mise en place for both recipes. At this point the freshly-milled flour was 76 degrees F, and the store-bought flour was 61 degrees F. I used water from my fridge dispenser and was surprised to see a 10 degree (F) difference between the first and second cups of water (58 vs 67 degrees F), but that ended up working in my favor to equalize the temperature between the two batches of bread.
First I mixed up the dough with fresh-milled flour.
Immediately after, I mixed up the sister dough with store bought flour.
The doughs both felt quite sandy at this point. I left them to rest and hydrate for 15 minutes.
After the doughs had rested I incorporated the All Purpose flour into the dough with fresh flour and then kneaded the dough for 5 minutes. I didn’t stir all of the AP flour into the dough, but whatever was remaining (plus a little extra) got used during kneading.
I followed the same process for the dough with store-bought flour.
After both doughs had been kneaded I took their temperatures (the freshly-milled dough was 75 degrees and the store-bought dough was 76 degrees F), covered them, and let them rise. My kitchen was at a balmy 74 degrees F. After about an hour they passed the doorbell test and were ready to be divided and shaped. Before dividing I weighed both doughs: the dough with freshly-milled flour weighed 1357g and the dough with store-bought flour weighed 1367g.
I watched the video showing how to shape this bread and followed the recommended shaping method for all 4 loaves. After shaping the dough rested for another hour.
Once the final rise was complete the bread went into the oven.
The colour differences between the loaves continued into the baked bread. The bread made with store-bought flour rose higher than the bread made with fresh-milled flour, which I half-expected after reading this article. However, the bread with fresh-milled flour had much better flavor. It had a sweetness and freshness to it, whereas the bread made with store-bought flour (while still tasting very good) had a bit of a bitter flavor.
Both breads had a buttery flavor and a very tender crumb. In my opinion the crumb is too tender to be used for sandwiches, but the bread is excellent toasted.
Until the next time: may your yeast always rise and your flour never run out.
The first project in the King Arthur baking book is a basic loaf of bread. Bread is one of the items I’ve baked the most, and I considered skipping this bake, but I am a completionist, and I have yet to find a really good homemade sandwich bread, so I went ahead with the project.
I started with the mise en place:
I combined the dry ingredients…
Then stirred in the butter…
And added the water.
Next, I kneaded the dough by hand for 5 minutes. At the beginning of kneading the butter was still in chunks, but I worked them in as I came across them in the dough. I thought the kneading was done around 2 minutes in, which may be because I’m more used to making minimally kneaded artisanal-style breads. I kept kneading for the full 5 minutes, adding flour as needed, and I was surprised by how much bounce the dough gained as I worked it.
After kneading I put the dough back in the mixing bowl, took its temperature, covered it, and set it aside to rest for an hour. I took this opportunity to clean up my workspace.
After an hour I used the “doorbell test” to confirm the dough was ready to be shaped. It can be hard to measure when a dough has doubled from visual cues alone, so additional methods to gauge the dough’s readiness are helpful. In the picture below you can see that when I poked the dough it sprang back partially, but not all the way.
I used my dough scraper to scrape the dough out of the bowl onto a floured counter.
I divided the dough into two, then weighed it to make sure both halves had equal amounts of dough (610g). Then I shaped each loaf. With the first loaf I tried to follow the shaping instructions in the book, but I didn’t understand them well and I thought the loaf could have been shaped better (I figured out later that there is a video showing how to shape a sandwich loaf in the King Arthur Baking library). For the second loaf I used my preferred shaping method: stretch the dough out from the edge in 4 directions to make a rough rectangle. Fold the sides in, then fold the bottom up and press to add tension. Continue folding the bottom up and pressing until the dough is all rolled up. Roll the dough a little more against the counter to seal the seam, and tuck both side edges under.
I placed both shaped loaves into greased pans (I greased the pans before dividing the dough), covered the pans, and left them to rise.
The recipe says the final rise can take 45-90 minutes, which is quite a range of times! My kitchen is rather warm (74 degrees F), so I expected the final rise to be on the shorter end of that spectrum and began preheating my oven immediately after shaping the loaves. I decided to do an experiment in the oven: one loaf would bake regularly in the open oven, and the other would bake inside my clay bread baker. I wanted to see if trapping the steam from the dough would impact the oven spring and how big the impact would be. I do also have a baking stone on the lower rack of my oven for increased thermal mass.
45 minutes later the oven was preheated and my loaves passed the doorbell test, so I loaded the bread into the oven.
After 15 minutes I removed the cover from the clay baker to allow the second loaf to brown.
15 minutes later I checked on the bread. The covered loaf had good colour, but the loaf in the baker didn’t have as much colour as I would have liked, so I left both loaves in the oven for an extra 5 minutes. A lot of steam came out of the oven when I opened it this last time.
After a 35 minute bake I took the bread out of the oven. The loaf in the clay baker (on the right in all these photos) baked very slightly higher than its sibling, and was a bit paler on both top and bottom.
The hardest part about baking bread is waiting for it to cool before cutting into it. After an hour and a quarter I could no longer wait. I ate my first piece with butter and finishing salt: it was sublime!
This bread has good flavor and texture. It is tender, but not too tender for sandwiches (this is a problem I have seen with most sandwich loaves I’ve tried). It makes great toast! I recommend this bread.
I am starting off my education as a baker with Baking School: Fundamentals by Baker Bettie. While this is the beginning of my “formal” culinary education, I am not new to baking, so I watched through the first 6 videos before coming to a project that I just had to bake: angel food cake. This project combines prompts to pre-read the full recipe (twice) before baking, create a mise en place, and to explore sugar’s role in leavening baked goods.
I read through the recipe fully the day before baking, then checked to see which ingredients I had in stock and which I needed to buy. I ran out to the store to buy an angel food cake pan and about a million eggs (just kidding, the recipe only uses 9).
The morning of the bake I started by putting my eggs on the counter to warm up to room temperature. While the eggs warmed up I cleaned my kitchen. I am a chaotic baker most of the time, but I want to change that, and the best way to create new habits is lots and lots of practice. Once my workspace was clean and I had eaten some breakfast, it was time to bake.
I prepared my mise en place, then combined my dry ingredients with a whisk as directed.
Then I began whipping my eggs. I first whipped the egg whites alone, then I added Cream of Tartar and whipped again. Once the egg whites began to gain volume I slowed down the mixer and added the sugar slowly.
When the sugar was incorporated I increased the speed and whipped to stiff peaks. The egg whites whipped up more quickly than I expected, so I added the lemon zest a little later than directed when the egg whites were already at stiff peaks.
With my eggs whipped to within an inch of their lives, I sprinkled the flour on top and gently folded it in. The folding process took me a little longer than the recommended 15-20 seconds because I was being extremely careful to not deflate the eggs while also making sure the dry ingredients were fully incorporated. Even so, I found some pockets of dry ingredients that I had to gently stir in as I was pouring the batter into the pan.
I smoothed the top of the batter and put it in the oven. I checked on the cake at 30 minutes. It had barely any browning and the toothpick did not come out clean. At 35 minutes the top was slightly browned and there were only a few crumbs on the toothpick. At 4 minutes the top of the cake was beautifully brown and no crumbs stuck to the toothpick when I tested the cake.
I took the cake out of the oven and inverted it (while still in the pan) over a wire rack to cool.
While the cake cooled I prepared my toppings. Baker Bettie serves her angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberry sauce. I wanted to make a sauce from fresh mulberries I grew in my garden. I followed the directions to make a fresh berry sauce, using mulberries, lemon juice, and lemon zest. I gathered my mise en place, then combined the water, lemon juice, sugar, and corn starch and whisked to combine.
Then I added the berries and turned on the heat. It was fascinating to see the liquid change colour from white to pink to red and to see the change in viscosity as the corn starch cooked and some of the berries burst.
While the berry sauce was cooling I removed the cake from the pan. I used an offset spatula to scrape around the edges and center of the pan, but since I have a 1-piece tube pan the top of the cake didn’t want to release and I had to tug it upwards very gently with the tips of my fingers to get it to release from the pan.The cake didn’t seem to suffer from this treatment. I noticed that my cake cooled a little lopsided. I think the pan was slightly tilted to one side while cooling, which led to the slight lean. My husband was kind enough to make the whipped cream. He used heavy cream, sugar to taste, and the tiniest bit of vanilla, and whipped it by hand.
Tasting Notes: The cake is very light and moist. It does not taste eggy at all. The first flavor I noticed was sweetness (the cake does, after all, contain as much sugar as egg white by weight), and then lemon. The whipped cream adds fat and sweetness, and the berry sauce adds both sweet and sour berry flavors. All in all, this is a delicious cake, not at all like the dry, flavorless Angel Food cakes one buys at the grocey store. Pair this cake with White Port for the ultimate dessert experience.
Until the next time: may your yeast always rise and your flour never run out.
I am a very creative person. I took art and music classes in high school, and I majored in music in college. Then after college I took a sensible office job and settled down to “real life.” I started baking during this time, but just the odd loaf of bread or birthday cake.
Fast forward 10 years: I feel stuck. A “normal” life with a stable job is all well and good, but every day when I log into work I feel like my soul dies a little. I need something more than this. I need to make things. I need a goal to work toward instead of circling the pool of existential dread every day.
Existential dread will certainly make you re-evaluate your priorities, and one day not so long ago I found myself telling a friend I wanted to open my own bakery. And in the instant I said it I realized how much I really did want that. So I sat down to figure out how I could make that happen. Bills are, unfortunately, a very real thing, and I prefer to keep my lights on and my cats fed, so quitting my job doesn’t make sense quite yet. But what if I continued to work my unfulfilling job while I studied baking? That seemed a reasonable path forward.
I researched pastry schools and found two options that stood out: an online course (I found that very surprising – an online pastry school??), and a pastry course at my local community college. Both had pros and cons, but after much deliberation I determined that neither were right for me, and both for the same reason: time. The online course requires 15-25 hours a week and the community college course would require me to be in class during my working hours. Necessity (or in this case, existential dread) is the mother of invention, so I decided to create my own pastry course using the class lists from the other two schools as a guide. My course is missing a few things, but I can take a few actual classes later on for the boring (but important) stuff, like creating menus and learning to run a business.
Here is my plan of attack (I provide it for you here in case you, too, have decided you want to be a baker, but do not have the resources or time to go to pastry school). I intend to bake my way through as much of this as I can in the next 2 1/2 years and reassess on my 35th birthday. Who knows what may have changed by then?
I am writing this blog primarily as a learning tool and personal record of my work. I hope it is also entertaining and perhaps even helps you, my audience, learn more about baking.
Until the next time: may your yeast always rise and your flour never run out.
A Baker's Education 