I was in the mood for some pancakes. I also wanted to try a sourdough version. There is quite a bit of discarded sourdough mixture when I go through a couple of feeding cycles. So I searched around for a basic recipe and found this. It seemed that you mix flour, milk, scrambled eggs, melted butter, and baking power together and cook them. I took the sourdough mixture and poured off the hooch (water/alcohol) and then poured the thick spent flour into a bowl. I added one scrambled egg, two tablespoons of melted butter, maybe half a cup of extra flour, and enough milk to bring it to the desired consistency. Turned out great! But maybe I was just hungry…

Well, I keep playing around with my self-saucing pudding recipe. I want to balance the major flavors in this recipe. Right now, there is Molasses, Chocolate, Chipotle, and Beer. I wanted to sneak in some coffee in there as well. So I added three teaspoons of instant expresso coffee grounds. But I couldn’t really taste the coffee. I think that there is a bandwidth problem for taste. You can only fit so many flavors at one time. And the coffee was not intense enough to be seen with the molasses in the picture. I think I am calling this recipe complete at this point.

When I was processing the picture, I noticed quite a bit of difference between a single image and the HDR merged pictures. The single picture is washed out and has a yellowish tint to it.

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I’m in your bread killing your baby yeast!

I came across this recipe for a self-saucing pudding and thought it sounded interesting. The results were disappointing. It was not mangoie enough for me. Perhaps the next time, I should remove the water and use only mango juice (for a total of 1 1/2 cups). And, at the same time, remove the sugar from the sauce. Oh, and some salt too. I don’t know why salt is missing here.

However, when I search for “self-saucing pudding” on google, the first couple of hits are for chocolate puddings. Now those sound more enticing than a second try at mango pudding…

I will say that the whole concept of this recipe seems like a fortuitous mistake. You take a cookie recipe, pour a lot of liquid on it, and then bake it. I would have guessed that the cake part of it would not have survived the boiling liquid. But it did.

Equals good. Different tasting, that’s for sure. I think that the balance is tipped towards the plantain in this equation. So, the next time I will use more sweet potatoes.

I removed the skin of a plantain banana and roasted it in the oven. I also roasted one whole sweet potato until it was a charred and blackened lump. I placed the banana and the scooped out potato into a blender and added some of the left over caramel. And blended it until it was smooth. Or at least I tried that. It seemed like it needed a little bit more liquid to get it blended fully. So I added some of my holiday eggnog (heavy cream, rum, brandy, and whiskey).

Wow, its been a while since I have made a loaf of bread. I wanted to make a no-knead bread recipe. So I looked around for it in my Cook’s Illustrated magazine. I found the version 2.0 of the recipe in the January/February 2008 issue. But that version uses white vinegar and lager. Which I did not want to use. I wanted it to be a pure sourdough and not a simulated version.

It did start off by mentioning that the 1.0 version used a hydration level of 85%. Which means that, for every 10 units of flour, there are 8.5 units of water. I decided to stop right there with the instructions and see where a pure 85% hydration level would take me. My starter mixture uses 96 grams of flour and 132 grams of water (a whopping 137.5%). I pour the usually discarded starter into a bowl and measure it. It comes out to 207 grams. I then added 300 grams of flour. Next, I needed to figure out how much water to add to bring the resultant hydration down to 85%.

if starter=207g,
then w=207*132/(132+96), f=207*(1-132/(132+96))
then w=120g, f=87g

adding 300g flour, then f=(300+87)=387
water is 85% hydration, then w=387*0.85=329

solving for x,
then w=(x+120)=329
x=209

the final weights would turn out to be: w=(209+120)=329, f=(300+87)=387

I put the mixture into a bowl and then covered it with saran wrap. I left the bowl in the oven with the light left on for six hours. After that amount of time, it certainly looked like the yeast is active and working. I floured a kitchen table, scraped the dough out on the table, and rolled it out into a ball. However, the dough was incredibly sticky! So I went off script again and kneaded some more flour into the dough. I should have at least recorded how much was used. Next time, for sure. I can only note that the mixture was still sticky — just not incredibly sticky.

I completely lined my Le Creuset Dutch oven with parchment paper. A cylinder for the sides and a sheet on the bottom. I placed the ball of dough into the Dutch oven and let it rise a second time in the oven. After a couple of hours, I turned the oven on to 450. And after twenty minutes of cooking time, I dumped the loaf out and removed the paper. I put it back into the oven for another 40 minutes (after turning the temperature down to 350 after the bread was nice and brown).