11/11 Olive Sourdough, Apple Cinnamon and Chocolate Cherry Breads

by | Nov 11, 2018 | Bread, Favorites, Sourdough

photo: Chocolate Cherry (top), Olive Sourdough (bottom)

Today we made sourdough (prep’d yesterday, baking today) in the oven and two dessert breads in the bread machine. The first desert bread was Apple Cinnamon with the apples Barbara picked with Becky a couple days ago. I don’t think I used enough apples. Next time we’ll try two cups. Barbara thinks the sweetness is about right and I think it’s not sweet enough so it’s just right! 🙂

We tried the Cinnamon-Apple-Pecan Bread recipe from The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook by Beth Hensperger.

Cinnamon-Apple-Pecan Bread

For 1 1/2 lb loaf

  • 1 1/8 cups buttermilk
  • 2 tbsp walnut oil
  • 3 cups bread flour
  • 3 tbsp light brown sugar
  • 1  tbsp gluten
  • 1 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1 tbsp ground cinnamon
  • 2 tsp SAF yeast or 2 1/2 tsp bread machine yeast

Added ingredients (add at beep)

  • 1/2 cup chopped dried apples (or pre-chopped apple nuggets)
  • 1/3 cup chopped pecans

We diced the enough apples for 1 cup but next time we’ll try 2 cups of cubed apples and a little more cinnamon. Maybe some extra brown sugar if I can sneak it in. It came out pretty good but the bread machine really needs help combining the extra ingredients (we add those at the buzzer, 5 minutes before kneading is complete).

Chocolate Cherry Bread

(from the Zojirushi Home Bakery Virtuoso Plus Recipe Book Chocolate Bread recipe)

  • 320 g milk
  • 1 large egg (beaten)
  • 2 1/2 tbsp unsalted butter
  • 545 g bread flour
  • 3 tbsp sugar
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 2 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 2 tsp Rapid Rise yeast

Extra Ingredients:

  • 90g (9 tbsp) chocolate chips
  • 1/2 cup chopped dried cherries

Course I (White)

We added 3/4 cup Ghirardelli Chocolate Chips and 1/2 cup of chopped dried cherries. It’s cooking now. I really had to help the bread machine fold in the extra ingredients (added at the buzzer). Otherwise it just beats them to death at the bottom of the pan. This is especially key for our olive bread but vital to the chocolate too to get them evenly mixed into the dough. It’s cooking now. I think it’ll be good!

Update: Turned out great! Maybe less cherries next time.

Bab’s House Olive Sourdough

  • 380g water
  • 320g starter
  • 600g white bread flour
  • 200g wheat flour
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 2 tbsp sugar
  • 1 1/3 cups sliced olives (thickly sliced)

The olive bread we made last night with the usual house recipe but with 1 1/3 cups of olives (we cut down after the disaster last time but that was actually due to a beatdown by the bread machine), we lowered the water to 380 grams which after mixing seemed about right. We left it in the fridge overnight and took it out this morning. By mid-day it was still cold so I punched it down and shaped it into two 8″ boules. We baked the first one at 425 F for 25 minutes with covered (this was an accident but a mistake we’ll repeat from now on when we have added ingredients, especially wet ones like olives which really slow things down and increase the chance of undercooking), and the usual 10 minutes uncovered to get the crust golden brown. We haven’t cut into it yet but you can see it at the top of this post. The second one is ready to go in the oven now. I think this one is going to be good.

10/17 Passion Fruit

by | Oct 18, 2018 | Favorites, Kombucha

It’s passion fruit season so we used fruit from the liliko’i vine in our back yard to flavor our big batch. We added some sugar and water to the passion fruit puree and used 1/4 cup and 1 tbsp sugar (the buch was strong) to flavor. The small batch we made into our usual house buch with 1/2 tbsp of sugar. We’ve been letting the passion fruit go about 5-7 days in second fermentation. It has been turning out great!

 

9/21 LB David’s Breakfast aka Psycho Buch #21-26 Grape Ape

by | Sep 21, 2015 | Favorites

Grape Ape

While we usually blend in some green tea for this SCOBY family, I kinda forgot and went with 14 grams of David’s Breakfast tea. It looked pretty dark. This is definitely our blackest tea and almost makes a strong (vinegary) buch. Temperatures have been in the 90s this past week and after 8 days our previous batch using this tea was not used. Temperatures are cooling off now so we will ferment this for eight days as usual but we will flavor it with something that complements a strong buch.

We harvested this on 9/30 for a nine day first fermentation. We bottled it in #21-26 with 1/4 cup of Concord Grape juice and the usual tbsp of sugar. We’ll do a five day second fermentation.

9/6 RB Oolong #91-94 Plain

by | Sep 6, 2015 | Favorites

oolong

For this batch we used 23 grams (more than the typical 15 g of DavidsTea) of Oolong tea from Rainbow Grocery.

We first blamed the light color on the fact that our first loose leaf Oolong was from Rainbow Grocery but DavidsTea Oolong used in our next batch was no darker. We harvested this on 9/16 and flavored 4 bottles, #91-94 with just 1 tbsp of sugar. It tasted light and still sweet so we’re looking forward to trying it after a nine day second fermentation.

8/11 LB English Zen #61-65 Plain

by | Aug 11, 2015 | Favorites

lit jars

This is our English Breakfast and green tea blend. We are experimenting with reducing the amount of tea so for this batch we used 3 bags of Tazo English Breakfast and one hand-packed bag (probably double) of loose leaf green. We also increased the sugar from 3/4 cup to a full cup. We are now using 1 1/2 cups of starter buch.

We harvested this on 8/19 after eight days. We added only a tbsp of sugar so that we could taste this new blend. This probably isn’t a good test of 4 bags because the green bag was double so this is more a test of 3 EB bags and 2 green.