Baking

Sometimes when we do pizza, we do one big one for the whole family, and vary things a bit by doing parts with some ingredients, and parts with other ingredients - so as to keep everyone happy. Mainly the boys since neither my wife nor I are particularly picky when it comes to pizza. But sometimes it is more fun to do personal pizzas and let everyone build their own from the bottom up. I'll roll out the dough and then let the boys have at it, dressing it up as they see fit. It is only slightly more effort than doing one big one, but it is a whole lot more fun!

A few days ago an old friend asked me to give him my bread recipe, so I did that and also pointed him at my video on Youtube. That is when I realised how terrible my video was, and decided I needed to shoot a new one! This uses my basic dough recipe, which is 600g flour, 1 tablespoon oil, 1 tsp salt, one tsp yeast, 1 tablespoon honey, and 350ml water.

I've been using my basic dough recipe the last while and experimenting with different combinations of flour. The recipe calls for 600g, but you can mix-and-match it just about any way you like. I've been on a bit of an oats kick lately, so that has been factoring into my bread as well. Oats are very low in gluten, so I've found that when using 1/4 of the flour as oats, you have to add gluten flour to account for this.

The loaf on the left here is made with barley, and the French bread is made with oats. Here is the basic recipe I've been working with :

• 75g gluten flour
• 125g oat or barley flour
• 250g whole wheat flour
• 150g white flour

I've made cinnamon buns, a fair bit of French Bread, as well as regular loaf bread.

Roasting pumpkin seeds is pretty easy to do - once you get the guts out of the pumpkin, just manually pick through and pick out all the seeds, then give them a good rinse under the sink, and put them on a baking sheet.

I've been pretty big into making desserts with vegetables as the late summer harvest goes into overdrive -- making a beet cake to use up those prolific, purple roots appearing in my CSA order seemed a no-brainer.

I'd been hearing a lot lately about people making their own tortilla chips, but never could have imagined how easy it is. I happened to be driving past the local latino grocery store La Tiendita today, and decided to pop in to pick up some corn flour. Someone on Ottawa Foodies suggested the brand name "Masa Mix", so that's what I got. I did notice they had 3 or 4 different brands that ranged quite a bit in price, and the lady at the checkout told me that each has a slightly different character - so I'll have to try the others eventually, too.

The instructions on the Masa Mix say to mix :

• 2 cups corn flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 and 1/4 cups water

They say to mix this up and then add 1 tablespoon of water at a time until it is just right. For me it was 3 extra tablespoons, but that varies depending on ambient temperature and relative humidity, so it may be different for you.

Yesterday was a banner day! I decided to make my own BBQ sauce and in order to do that I had to grill some sausages. But for those, I of course needed some sausage buns. Fortunately I had half of my batch of Basic Dough in the fridge, so I divided it into 4 and rolled each piece out and put it into my baguette pan. I preheated the oven to 485F and baked for about 18 to 20 minutes with the convection turned off.

This yeasted dough is really easy to throw together if you have a bread machine. Actually, even if you do not, mix it together just til everything is wet and then let stand covered in a bowl for 12 hours and let the gluten develop on its own. This is a new method I've just recently seen and will be doing a video for. Missing from this video is the addition of the 1/4 cup of olive oil - somehow I managed to mess up that clip while doing the video.

Mix

• 350ml water (or beer)
• 1 (generous) tablespoon honey