Goth Panda

I already had a go-to corn bread recipe before trying this one. I like my corn bread sweet, and I wasn’t sure how this recipe would play out; there was more sugar than my normal recipe, but it also made more batter.

I knew I was going to have to make some modifications to this Corn Bread recipe. For starters, no bacon, since despite the urgings of my friends, I am still “not on the food chain.” I decided to make muffins, as Reinhart suggests in the commentary, because I don’t have a 10-inch cake pan or a 12-inch square pan. I do have a 9 by 13 inch baking pan, but I liked the idea of muffins better.

I also didn’t have polenta so I substituted medium-grind cornmeal this time:

I set my cornmeal soaking in buttermilk, but Reinhart says to leave the soaker at room temperature overnight. Now, I don’t know about the weather where you are, but here we are having a mini heat wave. I was pretty sure that if I left out the soaker overnight, I would wake up to a bowl full of spoiled buttermilk with flakes of cornmeal. So I stowed it in the refrigerator overnight.

This recipe is quick and easy compared to most of the others we have done so far. I didn’t have any trouble finishing it up after work yesterday, since I spent the weekend driving home from our mountain vacation. First I sifted the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in my handy sifter:

Then added the white and brown sugars. I think I could have done a better job of breaking up the brown sugar lumps.

Mixed melted butter and honey – a combination that, much like the creaming butter and sugar from the cinnamon roll recipe, almost always means good things to come.

Then added it to my lightly-beaten eggs:

Then added this to my soaker, and then added all the wet ingredients into the dry ones. Reinhart says this should be the consistency of thick pancake batter. He seems to like that description, since I know we have heard it before.

Then we are supposed to stir in a full pound of corn kernels (I used frozen). After last week’s cinnamon raisins and this week’s corn kernels, I am starting to think that the amount of add-ins in these recipes will stretch our dough’s capacity to the limits.

I started with the big muffin cups. I just sprayed the cups with spray oil, so didn’t end up adding any extra vegetable oil to replace the bacon fat.

I was a little concerned because Reinhart says to fill them to the tops, but I did so.

Then I put them in the oven. I checked them after 25 minutes, and they weren’t done and also seemed to be baking unevenly, so I rotated the pan and let them bake for another 10 minutes. In the meantime, I set up another pan to bake.

The only problem with the muffin option is it doesn’t say how many muffins the recipe will make. So after I filled up the 12 standard muffin cups, I switched to mini muffin cups, and filled up 19 of those.

You know how when you have empty muffin cups in a metal pan, you need to fill them with water so the pan doesn’t warp? Do you have to do that with silicone?

I did, but I don’t know if it’s necessary.

I also remembered something that I had forgotten on the big muffins, but usually use: sprinkling sugar for topping them. I put some on the mini muffins, at least.

I took the big muffins out to cool and put the minis in. I think they lasted for 20 minutes, but I might have taken them out too soon.

Neither batch really rose too much, so I didn’t have to worry about overfilling. I guess Peter Reinhart knows what he’s doing.

Corn bread is one of Mike’s most favorite things, so I have a feeling this might be the second recipe that we eat all by ourselves. (The first was the bagels; everything else we have had to give away part of the batch). I liked these a lot. They weren’t as sweet as my normal recipe, but I think all of the corn kernels contributed sweetness, too. So it was a milder flavor, but still tasty. I give them a 4.5.

I baked this bread on location in a vacation house in the middle of the Adirondack mountains in New York State. The good parts about baking bread on location are that the oven is usually bigger than my oven (I have a small oven at home) and there are plenty of people here to eat my bread. I made the bread yesterday, and I think it is already gone. The bad parts are that I have to drag a huge bagful of ingredients and equipment that they are not likely to have here and that I have to leave my trusty KitchenAid behind and knead by hand. All things considered, however, the challenge was excellently timed to make this the bread for our vacation week. We are staying through next weekend, too, but I think Mike would object if I were to make cornbread and he was not around to partake of it. So that will have to wait until I return.

We start with some dry ingredients: flour, sugar, salt, yeast, and cinnamon.

We add some wet ingredients, which I didn’t get a photo of: buttermilk, shortening, an egg, and water. I did manage to get a quart of buttermilk up here, which surprised me a little. Usually I don’t like to use shortening (although the Crisco label says it has no trans fats – can this be true?) and I substitute butter. I did this with the cinnamon rolls, since it is given as a choice. This time butter was not listed as an option, though, so I didn’t want to risk the substitution.

I kneaded by hand until I had a nice ball of dough:

Then I added the raisins. There were a lot of raisins. There were so many raisins that I wasn’t at all sure they would fit in the dough.

They did.

I brought my dough rising bucket. I think I have mentioned before that I have a hard time determining if dough has “doubled” without it.

I thought it might take a while for my dough to rise. I took its temperature before I put it in the bucket, and it was a little lower than Reinhart asks for. But I got a windowpane, and I was sick of kneading, so I went ahead. It has also been very cool here, barely in the 70s. But my dough got nice and doubly before the two hours were up.

Reinhart offers a cinnamon swirl as an option, along with brushing the tops of the loaves with melted butter and cinnamon sugar. I had already decided I didn’t want to add walnuts, but since we were on vacation, I decided to go with both of these options. The guiding principle of vacation is surely to add calories whenever possible.

I divided the dough roughly in half, rolled out each half, and sprinkled on the swirl.

I baked them in the oven for twenty minutes, then did the by-now standard switch and turn, and let them bake for another twenty minutes. They both passed the temperature test. I brushed them with the melted butter and sprinkled more cinnamon sugar on top.

Somehow we managed to wait an hour and a half to cut into them.

Even for a non-cinnamon lover, these were really good. I don’t think the cinnamon swirl should be optional, though. Without it, I don’t think there would have been enough cinnamon flavor. The butter and cinnamon sugar on top was fine as an option – it definitely added flavor (and calories), but I think the bread would have been okay without it. But without the swirl, the bread wouldn’t have been nearly as good.

All of my fellow vacationers had high ratings for this bread. I will give it 4.5 out of 5, which is probably the highest rating I could give to something with so much cinnamon.

I don’t really like cinnamon rolls. I told that to several people this week, and I don’t think any of them believed me. But I am not a huge fan of cinnamon. It’s okay in baked goods as a minor ingredient, but I am generally not a fan of things that are steeped in cinnamon flavor. I don’t like Red Hots. And as far as I am concerned, the best thing about cinnamon rolls is the icing.

Now that I have gotten that heresy out of the way, I will turn to the actual recipe, which struck me as pretty good, for a cinnamon roll.

It starts with creaming together sugar and butter (I used butter instead of shortening). You don’t know how excited I was to see that instruction. I am pretty sure that the best recipes on the planet usually start with creaming together sugar and butter. There is also some salt in there, and my powdered milk, since I didn’t have whole or buttermilk.

Then we add egg and lemon extract. I am using lemon oil from KAF instead of extract. It worked fine in the rolls, but I think it was a little overpowering in the icing. I might use less next time.

Then added flour, yeast, and water to make a nice dough. I did this all with my Kitchen Aid this time.

The dough was very smooth, and I think if I had the chance to do it over again, I might have added a little more flour. I don’t know if it was that or the butter instead of shortening, but the dough seemed too slack. I also had to let it rise for longer than two hours to double, even though it was in the 80s that day. My dough was not very ambitious.

I also didn’t even really need to roll it out. I could press it out with my hands into a vaguely rectangular shape.

I used the last of my Penzey’s cinnamon to make the cinnamon sugar filling. I thought it was almost TOO cinnamon-y, but I can’t really trust my judgment, since I am not a big cinnamon fan.

Does this look like too much?

I had a hard time rolling it up, too.

Since I was using my pastry mat, I used my plastic pizza wheel to cut the roll into 16 pieces. I definitely think that part would have gone much easier with a knife. As it was, I had to try and squish them together to keep them from completely unrolling. Learn from my mistakes!

I let them proof again until they were puffy.

Then baked them for about 25 minutes. In the meantime, I made the icing.

Luckily after all of my issues, they baked up fine. I don’t think they were as tall as I would have liked, but I don’t know if that’s because I cut them on the small side or because of my problems with the dough.

Can I properly ice a cinnamon roll? I think the answer to that question is no.

Those ones in the back are for me.

So, I think was a decent recipe, although I probably should have used a little more flour in the dough and a little less lemon oil in the icing. I’ll give this recipe 4 out of 5, although I think people who like cinnamon rolls might rate it higher than that.

I baked this over the weekend, but I’m just getting around to posting it now. I was a little concerned going into this challenge since I had been unsuccessful with my last attempt at ciabatta. I think my problem the last time was that I was so concerned about keeping my dough wet that I didn’t add enough flour to provide structure. So I ended up with something that resembled a cracker more than a nice loaf of ciabatta.

I was hoping maybe Peter Reinhart could help me out with a good new ciabatta recipe. This try turned out much more successful than the last attempt, but I think maybe either I or the recipe could have done better.

I made the poolish version, so I started with…a poolish. I made this on Saturday. Flour, water, and yeast. Reinhart says it should look like “thick pancake batter,” and mine did:

I let it rise for a little over three hours. It was warm that day, so it rose well.

Then I refrigerated it overnight. On Sunday, I mixed the dough. I used my Kitchen Aid with the paddle attachment as specified and then switched to the dough hook for the end. I started with 3 ounces of water, but that didn’t get anywhere near a “sticky ball.” I ended up added almost all the rest. I think there was an ounce left, so I added probably 5 ounces. But the dough stuck to the bottom of the bowl and cleared the sides, like it was supposed to.

For cleanup’s sake, I made my bed of flour on my KAF silicone rolling mat.

As directed, I stretched and folded it.

I let it rest and did it again.

Then I let it rise.

I prepared my couche for the very first time. I also ordered this from King Arthur Flour. I don’t know if they will be able to stay in business once I cut back on my ordering due to my upcoming mortgage.

I didn’t want to make it too complicated by getting out the scale, so I just divided the dough in half roughly and shaped. Then they went on the couche for proofing.

In the meantime, I prepared my pizza peel with cornmeal. My peel is small and my pizza stone is small, because my oven is small. I was worried both loaves wouldn’t fit, but they did fine.

Again, because of the heat, I didn’t let them proof too long. I think it was a half an hour and they were “noticeably swelled.”

This is the first time we have had to follow Reinhart’s “hearth baking” directions, which amount to preheating the oven higher than the final temperature, putting hot water on a steam pan when you put in the dough, and spraying the oven three times at 30 second intervals in the first few minutes of baking. I did all of this, but I wonder how much it helped. I almost would like to redo the recipe with a control loaf to see the difference.

I was very happy with the way the loaves turned out, visually.

They also tasted delicious. I did not get the full open holes, like the ciabatta photo in the book. Did I add too much flour this time? I know a lot of my fellow BBA bakers have noted the same thing. The consensus seems to be that the biga method worked better than the poolish method. Or maybe I should have added all of the water? Because of that, I give this recipe a 4.5.

My mom claimed a loaf of ciabatta before I baked it. It’s in the freezer waiting for you, Mom. Not quite bubbly enough, but it still tastes good.