Sauerkraut & Red Onion Sourdough

I managed to bake something nearly every day this week, but didn't bother updating any of it. I had hoped to update about twice a week, but I guess I get busy. And lazy. And uninspired. (I do have something interesting in the works now though.) Still, this week's baking was mostly sweets, and I want to get back to baking bread.

The first time I tried to make this bread, before I had started this blog, it came out light and airy, like a foccacia, but with no crust to speak of, and all the rolls melted into each other to make one big pan of bread that tasted sort of like onion bagel. Everyone who tried it, save myself, thought it was delicious.

Vietnamese Bánh Mì Gà

About half a year ago, when I was first looking into baking bread more seriously, I happened to read about Saigon baguettes: a French bread made with half rice flour and half wheat flour. It sounded really interesting, so when I found a recipe, I tried it out. I had a lot of difficulty with it, and ended up with only a somewhat-edible loaf of bread. Later, when I found out there is a sandwich made with the baguette, I decided I'd have to give it another try.

Plum Spice Pound Cake

My good friend at Glaukôpidos was bugging me for an update, which I've been putting off because I lack an ingredient for my next planned baking project. After being unmotivated to bake anything that wouldn't require two or three days of proofing, I remembered and idea I'd had over the summer, but wanted to save for winter, when the taste might be more seasonally appropriate. And if you can't bake a wintery cake on a day when most of the city is shut-down due to snow, then when can you?

Cherry Chocolate Rolls

If you should find yourself, like I have, without any one particular person to impress on Valentine's Day, but rather with a lot of friends who want treats, in a more time-consuming version of the elementary school Valentine's card exchange, you can't do much better than bread. (Unless maybe you prefer cupcakes, the current height of food fashion, or brownies or cookies, but I don't. I like bread.)

Bagels!

After making the sweet fougasse, I put my leftover poolish in the freezer, planning on using it for pizza dough. It took a surprisingly long time to defrost, so that didn't happen, but I ended up making bagels instead. I doubled the recipe in Crust & Crumb so I could take them in to eat at work for the next week or so, depending on how many get eaten at home.

I'd never frozen poolish before, and it was disturbingly fluid. I was also a bit worried by the fact that there were no air bubbles or foaming, as I'd read that yeast dies out in old poolish and makes it unstable for baking. But I went ahead with it anyway, because that's what I do (mostly out of sheer laziness) and it turned out well.

Pain au Maïs

Pain au maïs is turning out to be more of a challenge than I expected. It started when I was in France for Thanksgiving. An American friend and I were trying to put together a dinner and needed several kinds of bread for my mother's stuffing recipe. We had a white bread and a wheat bread, and went down to a good bakery around the corner from my friend's apartment. We asked what they had in the way of whole grain breads and were given some pain au maïs. A lot of it went into the stuffing, but we each tried a few slices plain and it was fantastically delicious.