Ben Benner’s Blog

I am having trouble getting to sleep tonight, so I figured I would knock out a quick blog post. I would be coding, but I just cannot for the life of me focus enough to code. So hopefully I can focus enough to write a little bit.

I mixed up some honey wheat bread the a couple of days ago. The bread didn’t get as good a proofing as I would have hoped for, it didn’t get as tall as I would have liked. The actual proofing of the bread I think was good, in that when it was baked it did not bust open. Bread that hasn’t proofed long enough will “explode” when baking, still edible, but ugly.

Now, let me try to explain the title of this post a little bit. I think I have come up with a decent recipe for Honey Wheat bread. I made the first version of this bread in mid December. I believe that had the desire to try and make a Honey Wheat bread because of the Brioche bread that I had made earlier in the month.

I wanted to add something else to the bread, in part to add some flavor and make it look prettier, but also to help clear out some of the spices I bought previously. I settled on adding some black sesame seeds to the bread. I think it would likely work well with poppy-seeds as well, but I haven’t had the chance to buy any.

I baked the Honey Wheat in a loaf pan instead of on the baking stone. It was tasty, but the bread didn’t quite have enough of a honey flavor for me. I augmented the recipe the second go-around, I doubled the amount of honey that I had put in the first time.

Here is the recipe (as best as I can remember it, really need to start writing these down).

Honey Wheat With Black Sesame Seeds

• 1.5 Cups of lukewarm water
• 1 Cup of Whole Wheat Flour (unbleached)
• 2 Cups of All-Purpose Flour (unbleached)
• 1.5 Tbl Active Yeast (I believe this to be a 1.5 packets)
• 1.5 Tbl Kosher Salt
• 2 Tbl Spoons of Black Sesame Seeds
• 1.5 Cups of Honey

You can mix by hand or with a stand mixer. I mix all of the wet ingredients with the salt and yeast and allow it to site for about 5 minutes. I then mix in the whole wheat flour, after the flour has been mixed into something that can only be described as ‘gruel’, mix in the all-purpose flour, I did it one cup at a time.

If you are mixing by hand, then mix until it feels like you cannot mix it any more and when you see that all of the flour has been mixed in. If you are doing it in the stand mixer, make sure to use the dough hook and stop it when it looks like all the dough has pulled away from the side of the bowl.

Allow the bread about two hours for it’s first rise. You can bake the bread after the first rise, but as I have said before, I really believe that the bread needs to ferment in the fridge over night at least, possibly two nights even.

On baking day, take out the dough and roll it out with a rolling pin, all the while dusting with whole wheat flour to avoid the dough sticking. I like to do a three fold of the rolled dough, folding the two outer edges towards the middle. Then tuck the edges of the bread underneath and place into a greased baking pan.

If your kitchen is fairly warm 70-80 degrees, then you might want to try and break the above recipe into two pieces. If your kitchen is cooler, more like mine is at the moment, then you will likely want to keep this as a single loaf of bread. You can improve the rise of your bread by allowing your bread to rise near the oven, which you should have started preheating to 400 degrees.

Allow your bread to proof for at least 40 minutes, if your kitchen is cooler, then you will want to allow it to proof longer. Bake the bread for about 20 minutes. If the crust has turned a nice brown, then you should lower the temp to 350. If not, then allow your bread to bake for another 5 minutes and check again. After the crust has reached a nice color, bake on 350 for another 15 minutes or so. (might want to check on it 10 minutes in)

Remove the bread from the oven and place on a cooling rack, as soon as the pan is cool to the touch, remove the bread from the pan and place on the cooling rack.

In recent discussion the subject of a ‘proofing box’ came up. I am going to look into the subject some more, as one of the aspects about my bread that I wish to improve is the rise of my bread, my bread tends to be very flat.

Note: Both my first and second batches of this bread were stated to be good. I had at least one co-worker inform me that he thought it was my best bread yet.

Ok, I am not finally sleepy.

Laterz

bdbenner baking baking, bread, bread recipe, honey wheat, recipe

For the last couple of weeks I have been baking bread and bringing it into the office. I usually bring in one loaf to share with everyone in the office. I slice it up and steal two beautiful slices for myself.

What can I say I need a couple of good pieces of toast in the morning to go with coffee. I am not sure if or when I will start charging for this bread, so in the meantime I joke about how ‘The first one is free’, you know drug dealer style.

I have been experimenting a little bit with different forms of buttermilk bread. Having made the buttermilk bread in the past I knew how the consistency of dough varied significantly than the artisan breads that I have been making. The dough is gooier and when it bakes up it has a spongier feel to it.

Previously, I made raisin bread with it. The process is relatively easy, you roll out the dough, spread a mixture of melted butter, cinnamon and brown sugar out on the flattened dough and then you roll it up, it will resemble a jelly roll. However, before rolling it up you have to remember to put some raisins in.

The first time I made the raising bread, I felt there were not enough raisins. As you might expect, the next time that I made it, I overcompensated and put too many raisins in.

In the experiment that I conducted earlier this week, I decided to put the cinnamon directly in with the yeast, buttermilk, water and salt. This gave the dough a nice cinnamon smell with just a hint of cinnamon flavor. The first loaf of this experimental dough I felt was OK, but could be better. I agreed with Gina’s assessment that it needed brown sugar (and butter).

The next loaf of this cinnamon infused bread was baked jellyroll style, with melted butter and brown sugar rolled up in the middle. However, I opted to leave the raisins out, figuring why not try the only remaining extreme.

The bread was mutant looking in my opinion (sorry for got to grab a pics before serving it). Myself and most everyone at the office felt it was just great. A few felt it was too sweet, almost candy like.

I decided to try and find a happy medium between the two extremes. Except in an effort to try and evenly distribute the cinnamon and brown sugar flavors, I mixed the brown sugar straight into the dough, foregoing the whole spread it out and roll it up part aka jelly roll style.

I have gotten into the habit these last few times of mixing up and baking the dough the same day, for the most part I usually am only dealing with dough that has been in the fridge for overnight (or a couple of days). I am not entirely sure which version of dough I prefer better. I have found that cold dough is easier to handle is not very sticky. However, a liberal dusting of flour will help keep the dough from being too sticky, regardless of temperature.

I mixed up a batch of cinnamon, brown sugar, buttermilk bread this evening and it is currently baking in the oven. I will remove it from the oven before I go to bed, but in the meantime it is filling the house with a positively fantastic smell of cinnamon (and butter).

I am calling this bread “Fajita’s Sans Raisin Bread”. Here is the recipe that I used for this go around.

• 2 cups of luke warm water (distilled or reverse osmosis)
• 1 cup of buttermilk
• 1.5 Tbls of yeast (I use Fleischmann’s Active Dry)
• 1.5 Tbls of salt (I use Kosher salt)
• 6 Tbls of Brown Sugar (heaping tablespoons)
• 3 Tbls of Cinnamon
• 1 Cup of unbleached whole wheat flour (King Arthur’s brand)
• 5 cups of unbleached all-purpose flour (HEB works OK, King Arthur is better)

Directions

Mix the yeast, salt, water, milk, sugar and cinnamon together. I usually let this sit a minute or two before mixing in the whole wheat flour. After the first cup of flour has created sort of a ’slurry’ I proceed to mix in the remaining flour 2 cups at a time (last cup is solo of course).

The last cup of flour is something that I generally have to mix in by hand, the dough does not mix well via wooden spoon at that point. The recipe book states that you can use a mixer for this, but I have never tried.

After it is all mixed up, I generally sprinkle it with some flour and punch it down to the bottom of the bowl, after it has been pushed out to all the sides, I dust it again and then proceed to pull the edges underneath, sort of pulling the middle out and forming a ball.

Then I let it sit in the bowl/tub for a couple of hours. Afterwards, I dust it again and form another ball with it. Depending upon how much the ball has risen, I will determine (by eye-balling it) whether or not it is ready to bake. If it looks good to go, I set the oven to preheat at 350 degrees.

I grease up a loaf pan and then take 1/2 the dough from the tub and sort of make a cylindrical object out of the dough. I put it cylinder in to the loaf pan and allow it to sit for at least another 20 minutes.

An individual loaf of bread will need to bake for 45 minutes. I have done more than one loaf in the oven at a time and do not yet have a great feel for how this alters to the time frames.

That is the recipe for Fajita’s Sans Raisin bread.

Oh yeah, I should note that if you don’t get the chance to remove the loaves from the pan after they cool initially, then you will have a bit of a soggy spot on the bottom of the bread. Throw the bread in a paper bag for a little bit and everything will be OK.

It is way past my bedtime and I do believe I need to take the bread out of the oven.

Laterz

bdbenner baking baking, bread, cinnamon raisin, Fajita's Sans Raisin Bread

I was going to start this post with the usual sort of ‘I am sorry for not blogging more.’ type of apology. But in an interest of being different, I am just going to say that I have been hella busy.

At the beginning of the year I made the decision that I needed to be more social, get out of my comfort zone, etc. As part of those efforts I started ‘hanging out’ on Twitter, which led me to hearing about ProductCamp. I heard rumor about the 2009 Winter camp about 2 weeks after it had been held. So when I saw folks chatting about the upcoming Summer 2009 ProductCamp on Twitter, I decided to jump in and volunteer.

Right about this same time I happened to see something about about a company known as ‘Tech Ranch’ doing something in Cedar Park. I immediately took interest, given that i live in Cedar Park and Tech Ranch is a company that is in the business of fostering, growing and accelerating the entrepreneurial community. I re-tweeted some announcements about their upcoming town hall meeting. Due to my re-tweeting, I was invited to come on down to the Ranch (of Tech) and meet with the founders.

The Tech Ranch folks were looking for a ‘Wrangler’ or a ‘Mobilizer’ to help build and foster an entrepreneurial community in Cedar Park.  I volunteered to help them and the City of Cedar Park build the community.

ProductCamp was GREAT! Over 300 product development/marketing related professionals showed up to the UTC building down on August 15th. I showed up to the planning meeting back in June and had the intention of just volunteering to help with something minor, but instead I ended up volunteering to the be the Volunteer & Logistics Coordinator.

I recruited and organized all of the volunteers for the event. However, I cannot take all of the credit, I had some absolutely fantastic team leads that helped pull it all together. At several points during the process of trying to pull it all together, I might have thought that I never wanted to volunteer for anything again. In the end though, I am looking forward to the helping with the organization of the Winter 2010 ProductCamp.

I have been working on a few side projects, so my evenings have not been filled with the usual TV watching and video games, it has been filled with coding and having Hulu on in the background. I found a couple of great shows, Defying Gravity and Greek.

To be completely honest, there has been a little bit of video game playing. They released Civilization Revolution for the iPhone, which is a very good port of the game in comparison to the Nintendo DS version, which in turn was a fairly good port from the XBOX-360 edition.

I have still been baking bread, my last few loaves of Pepperoni-Cheddar bread were good, but I think I still need to find the perfect ratio of pepperoni and cheese. My last batch of Rye bread was GREAT. This evening I baked up an artisan loaf of mustard seed wheat bread. I also prepped a batch of pizza dough.

It is really late and I need to get to bed.

bdbenner Personal, baking, video games baking, catching up, video games

Just a quick update.

The 4th of the July part over at the Wights (which was also a surprise 40th birthday part for Tim “Timmy” Wight) was really great. They had a keg of Labatt’s tons of good food, including this buffalo chicken dip that my father-in-law created. I will have to snag the recipe from him, but let me just not that it includes one whole bottle of Frank’s Red Hot sauce (12oz size I think).

I fell asleep on the couch watching The Soprano’s and when I awoke to the 4am infomercials I decided it was time to crawl into bed. I managed not to wake Gina.

While I slept, Gina and her parents made a run into one of the nearby cities, Gaylord, there they hit Meijer’s and Wal-Mart. I sort of remembered telling Gina to pick up some flour and what not but overall I didn’t remember too much of the conversation that we had.

As soon as they got back it was time for breakfast, Tom (my father-in-law) started cooking bacon, eggs and hashbrowns. My mother-in-law, Brenda’s laptop needed the drivers for the Belkin wireless adapter that is part of the DIY wi-fi extender kit that I have left up here. I booted up my laptop, which I must not have shut-off properly as the battery was completely drained, and downloaded the drivers.

I transferred the drivers to her laptop via my handy Jaduka branded USB memstick. After getting her online, I sat down and scarfed up breakfast.

I don’t remember how much time went by, but I mentioned to Gina that I needed a couple more things. A few minutes later we were in the Vibe and heading to Gaylord. Gina took the backroads and got us there much quicker than the 52 minutes that Google Maps had predicted.

We did the bulk of our shopping at Wal-Mart, given that Gina had already scoped out both Meijers and Wal-Mart earlier that day. However, Wal-Mart did not have my PBR, Pabst Blue Ribbon. I know it is an old-man beer, but I just really like the taste it gives the chicken that I marinate in it. Furthermore, I have started to like the taste.

It was a little weird having to pay ‘deposit’ again, so the 30 pack of beer cost an extra $3.00, the nice part of that though is you get back $0.10/can.

A batch of caraway-rye is sitting there rising, at least another hour before it can go into the fridge. I needed to boot up the laptop to figure out how much chicken broth goes into the dog treats, I promised Curly and Killer I would make a batch while I am here. Therefore, I figured i would do a quick blog post before turning the machine off.

Time to make the dog treats.

Laterz

bdbenner baking, vacation baking, beer, Dogs, shopping, vacation

I figured a big loaf of bread deserved a BIG picture on the blog here. This loaf was created using twice as much dough as I normally use for a loaf of bread. I was originally thinking about giving it away, but Gina said that it wasn’t allowed to leave the house.  I think that it is definitely a good size for sandwhiches.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner baking baking, bread

Just doesn’t have the same ring to it as, “Bad Moon Rising” but all I could come up with at the moment.

I just baked what looks to me to be one of the most beautiful loaves of bread I have baked just far. (I have taken pics, but I need to upload them still.)

I have made a couple of dozen loaves of artisan bread now and feel like I am getting the feel for what a good artisan loaf looks like. Have started experimenting as well, trying to get a feel for what you can do, outside the regular recipe.

I have experiemented with adding more whole wheat flour to the dough, I like it, though Gina only like the white bread (unbleached all-purpose flour). I have even gotten a little adventurous, we had a spare jalapeno and some shredded cheese in the fridge, so I whipped up a half batch of dough and made some Jalapeno Cheese bread. It turned out pretty well.

The Jalapeno Cheese bread turned out well enough for me to ask the folks in the office if they wanted some. I got six takers. In retrospect, I should have whipped up a double batch of dough, but I managed to stretch the full-batch of dough into six loaves (I gave Jeremy the smallest loaf).

I got a few compliments and no complaints, so definitely a good sign in my book. When I was originally taking orders, Eryn asked me if “Is this for profit?” I had not thought about charging my coworkers, though I have thought about trying to perfect a few breads and maybe, just maybe trying to get into a farmers market.

I think I could easily get $3-5 a loaf. I mean for the loaf of bread I just baked I definitely think $4 would be a fair price for a GOOD sized artisan loaf. I think that a decent size loaf of Caraway Rye would go for at least $5. And I am certain that the Jalapeno Cheddar bread could snag $7 for a big loaf and $4 for a small.

Jeremy is planning to delivery some fresh basil from his herb garden, meaning that I will be doing a thing of herb bread this weekend.

After all of the excite of the storm this evening, I am beat. I think I am going to try to read a little then go to bed.

Laterz.

bdbenner baking baking, bread, farmers market

I didn’t burn the bread, but I am still attempting to master the art of bread baking.

This last loaf, which I took out a few hours ago, stuck to the stone.

I believe that my problem is that I have not been putting enough cornmeal down. I bought some shakers at teh restaurant supply store in an effort to get more even spread of the cornmeal, vs just kidna shaking it out of a measuring cup.

This last time around, I was fairly certain that I had spread enough out, but the bread says otherwise.

I am going to put the next batch of dough into the freezer soon as it has almost been two hours.

I gave away my first loaf of bread to Jeremy and Nichole.

Jeremy has not tried it yet, but he said that Nichole has enjoyed it.

The majority of the next batch is destined for John, as he requested the regular Boule bread. After that is all baked, I am going to make a deli style rye, as I finally bought some carroway seeds. Thank you Central Market!!!

I want to give a quick shout-out to AustinTweetup.com, Jeremy and a couple of his Tweeps are organizing a an unofficial SXSWi party.

I need to get ready for bed.

Night!

bdbenner baking artisan bread, austintweetup.com, baking, bread, tweetup

For those of you that haven’t heard about the wild and crazy weekends that the Benners [of Cedar Park] have had lately, then you are missing out on the fact that I have recently been stricken with a terrible affliction, such a rare and horrible malody that it doesn’t even have a name yet. So let’s make one up, how about…

Artisan Bread Craving Disorder, ABCD

or

Small Loaf of Expensive Bread-itis, SLEB

or maybe,

Farmers Market Bread Blues, FMBB

Whatever it is called, I have recently become addicted to artisan bread from a guy who’s name I believe is Neil. Below is a picture of the man I believe is named Neil, who I sometimes refer to as “The Bread Guy”.

[Note: I asked him if it was OK to take a picture before doing so. He said "Yes".]

Now, Neil’s bread is good, I mean honestly the few times I have had it, the bread has had a similar consistency each time. I have found myself running out of Neil’s bread before the next trip to the farmers market. This has led me to think more and mroe about baking my own bread. When I have mentioned this before in the past, Gina has told me that bread baking is TOO much work to do on a whim.

I completely agree with her. But due to the beautiful randomness of the Internets, I found a great book that makes bread making painless enough that you can do it every day.

So we hit a local restaurant supply company and bought some much needed essentials.

1 Large plastic tub (with lid), able to easily hold at least 5qts (this one does 6qts)

1 Pizza Peel

We had to hit up Williams Sonoma for the baking stone as the supply company did not have any.

So I mixed up my first batch of dough, in the hopes of being able to bake it for dinner that Saturday night, but as luck would have it, we ran out of time to bake it on Saturday night. (The dough is supposed to refrigerate for a minimum of three hours before use.)

Then the plan was to bake a loaf to have for breakfast, but then well I did something very boneheaded. I mean, I thought about never admitting what I did to ANYONE. But I am a firm believer that honesty is best, because well it will come out eventually.

The instruction for the recipe called for a broiler pan, to hold water that in turn will create steam while the bread bakes. They recommend putting the pan in the oven when you are preheating, then adding the water after 20 minutes of heating.

Some of you might possibly see where this is going.

I asked Gina where our broiler pan was, as I couldn’t find it. I mean I am fairly certain we owned one, but maybe we didn’t. So, my thought was to use a pyrex pan.

Yup, Glass.

Glass heated to probably around 400 degrees, then doused with water that was no where near 400 degrees.

MORON!

It shattered, made a huge mess, which was fun to clean up. NOT.

The worst part was, I thought about the fact that pouring water into a hot glass pan was likely not a good idea, right before I poured it in there.

Luckily, I had not put the bread on the baking stone yet, so the dough was not filled with glass.

The destruction of the pyrex meant two things.

1. I owed Gina a new 13×9 pyrex dish.

2. I had to buy a broiler pan.

After a quick trip to Target, it was time to get back to bread baking.

I cleaned off the baking stone and started heating the oven again.

My first two loaves turned out, ok. Not fantastic though.

A couple of things might have been to blame. It could have been that the dough had been rising for too long, or it could have been that I didn’t adjust the baking time for me baking two loaves at once, or it could be that initially i used just a little bit more water than the recipe called for.

However, my second attempt was this evening before dinner. The recipe book had instructions for creating a baguette. The only real differences between the baguette instructions and the artisan recipe are:

1. It is elongated and cylindrical vs round and flat.

2. Instead of dusting the top with flour, you brush it with water.

Gina said that the baguette was GREAT!!!

She really, really loved it.

I can’t wait to try making some herb bread, but more importantly I need to get my hands on some Rye flour!

laterz

bdbenner baking, food baking, bread baking