Chocolate Cake with Grandma’s Chocolate Frosting

This chocolate cake is very basic chocolate cake, something that my mom used to make when I was a kid. It is not as soft as a sponge cake, and not as rich and gooey as a brownie, it is somewhere in between, and a very standard cake texture for Danish cakes.
My mom used to bake a whole pan filling the entire oven for cake fundraisers and similar when I was kid, she would decorate it with colored icing, usually a landscape with a rainbow. The rainbow pieces always got sold first . Sometimes, she would use Grandma’s frosting, which is richer than icing, and not too sweet. I love it, and it reminds me of being a kid.

Cake Ingredients (recipe translated and adapted from God Mad Let at Lave, a basic Danish cookbook)

• 200g sugar ( 7 oz)
• 150g soft butter (about 1.5 stick) (if using unsalted butter, add a little salt with the flour)
• 3 eggs
• 50g melted chocolate
• 1 tsp instant coffee
• 1 tsp vanilla sugar*
• 3 tbsp cocoa powder (unsweetened)
• 1 tbsp orange zest
• 200g all purpose flour (7 oz)
• 1 tsp baking powder
• *Note: Vanilla sugar is often used in Danish recipes, it is powdered sugar with some vanilla seeds in. The sugar absorbs the flavor wonderfully. You can make this by scraping vanilla seeds into some icing sugar and keep in a patent jar, or you can simply substitute liquid vanilla essence about 1 to 1.

Method

1. Grease a cake pan (9×13 inches or a little smaller, 9×9 is probably too small) and preheat oven to 175 C.

1. For this one, an electric mixer gives the best result.  Mix the softened butter with the sugar until smooth.

2. Add one egg at a time and mix after each.

3. Add the melted chocolate, and vanilla (if using). The add the instant coffee.

4. Add the cocoa powder, baking powder, flour and orange zest.

5. Scrape everything into you pan and spread in an even layer.

I used a 10×14 pan, and it was definitely too big, making them come out as bars more than cake

6. Bake for 45 min or so, less time for a bigger pan. When I toothpick inserted comes out clear it is done, start checking around 2-30 min mark in using a 9×13 pan.

7. Let cool completely before frosting.

You can eat it without frosting too, use icing sugar frosting or any other kind of favorite frosting. Below is Grandma’s frosting, and you need about 2 portions for this cake.

Frosting Ingredients:

• 2 tbsp cocoa powder (unsweetened)
• 2 tbsp icing sugar
• 1 tbsp milk
• 4 tbsp melted butter (unsalted)*
• 1- 1.5 tbsp pasteurized egg or egg substitute (or 1/2 egg)
• *Note: The original recipe calls for 2 tbsp of melted butter, and 2 tbsp of melted solid coconut oil. I don’t see coconut oil in the stores here in the US, and besides it has very high level of saturated fat. It was used for frying a lot when I was little, but I am not even sure you can get it easily in Denmark today. Vegetable shortening might be a better substitute than butter if you keep it around.

Method:

1. Mix everything together, it should create a shiny, not too thin frosting.

2. Spread on your cake and enjoy!

Due to the eggs and dairy in this one, it doesn’t keep for that long, but as long as you are using pasteurized eggs I personally don’t think you need to keep the cake in the fridge.

Of course, growing up we just used eggs, and no one seemed to get bad even if we ate it a few days later.

The cake and frosting are both very easy and fast to make, and a sure crowd pleaser. It is easy to double and bring along to an event.

Buttermilk Blueberry Pancakes

I love fluffy, homemade pancakes, and so does my son. My favorite recipe is from Alton Brown, these are delicious every time.

I don’t make his ‘instant’ mix, I just make one portion (about 12 pancakes) right away. Note that you can make these with milk instead of buttermilk, but they don’t become as fluffy and yummy, and you should replace the baking soda with more baking powder.

Ingredients (original recipe from Food Network) :

• 2 eggs, separated
• 2 cups buttermilk (475 ml)
• 4 tbsp melted butter
• 2 cups all purpose flour (475 ml)
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp sugar
• butter for the pan
• blue berries

Method

1. Melt the butter

2. Separate the eggs with the whites in a bigger bowl and a yolks in a smaller.

3. Add the buttermilk to the whites and mix well.

4. Mix the butter well with the yolks.

5. Pour the buttermilk mixture into the yolk and butter one, and mix well.

6. Mix all the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and sugar) in the big bowl. Make sure the baking soda and powder is completely mixed in.

7. Pour the wet ingredients over the dry ones, and mix lightly, take care not to over- mix. The batter should be slightly lumpy. It should be thicker than cream, almost like a muffin batter. If it feels a little too thick, you can add more buttermilk or regular milk.

8. Heat a big non stick pan or griddle, and add some butter, about 1/2-1 tsp.

9. Drop pancake batter on the hot pan, how much depend on how big you want your pancake. I usually use 1/3 cup measurer.

10. Gently drop blueberries onto the pancakes, and press them into the batter.

11. When the dough has set and the bottom of the pancakes are brown, flip them over.

12. Transfer to a plate when the other side is browned, add a tiny bit of butter to the pan and repeat.

You can make them without blueberries, of course, they are great either way. I have also made them with chocolate chips instead, but you have to be very careful to press them deeply into the pancake as they will burn more easily than the blueberries.

I like Alton Brown’s way of adding blueberries, if you add them to the batter it is hard to get an even distribution in the batter.

Hveder

Hveder are Danish holidays rolls, literally ‘Wheats’ eaten at ‘General Prayer Day’ (Store Bededag). It is a holiday dating from 1686 as a collection of a number of minor Roman Catholic holidays which survived the Reformation (the transition of Denmark from a Roman Catholic country to a Protestant country), merged to one day. It is held on the 4th Friday after Easter, and is a bank holiday – everything is closed.

Most people in Denmark are not very avid church goers, but as Danish Protestantism is the state church, most people belong to it, and does some observations of the holidays, regardless of how much of the faith the choose to include in the celebrations.

When the holiday was introduced, work, travel, trade, gambling and play was forbidden, which meant bakeries was closed. Bakers would bake these rolls for people to buy Thursday evening for the next day. Today, most people eat them fresh Thursday evening as well as Friday morning, and they are great toasted.

The Hveder themselves were a specialty for a long while, and probably not common in the average population even when the holiday was introduced. Most people ate rye breads, as wheat did not grow well in most of Denmark due to the cold climate. It was only later more hardy species of wheat was introduced, and it was still an expensive specialty. Besides being made from wheat, the rolls also are made with butter, egg and milk, so they are an enriched bread, though not as much as challah or brioche.

This year, the Danish newspaper Politiken ran an online article (source of most of this information!) on them, with a bunch of recipes. I decided I should make some, even if the holiday had long past.

Ingredients: (Original in Danish from politiken.dk)

• 500g bread flour* (17.6 oz, about 4.2 cups)
• 100 ml milk (0.4 cups)
• 100 ml water (0.4 cups)
• 50g butter (about 1/2 stick)
• 50g yeast cake (3 tsp active dry yeast)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 egg
• 2-3 tsp ground cardamom
• milk for brushing

*Though you don’t normally use bread flour a lot in Denmark, it is well suited to these rolls, as they are meant to rise a lot.

Method:

1. Gently melt the butter and mix in the milk and water. Transfer to a mixing bowl and let stand until lukewarm ( 90-100 F / 32-37 C).

2. Beat the egg together.

3. Add the yeast to the lukewarm butter, milk and water mixture and mix well until dissolved.

4. Mix in the sugar, flour, salt, cardamom and egg.

5. Transfer dough to a work surface and knead well, about 5 min or more. This dough does not have a high water content, so it will feel a little hard.

6. Form a ball and place in the bowl, cover with film and let stand to rise until doubled, about 30 min.

7. Punch down dough and knead well again.

8. Spilt the dough into 12 equal pieces, and form small rolls from them.

9. Place the rolls fairly close together on a baking sheet, they should be touching when they are done rising. I ended up with mine just a little too far apart. Let rise for 20-30 min more.

These ended up a little too far apart

10. Preheat oven to 390 F/ 200 C. If your oven is part of your stove, it is great to let the rolls rise on top of your stove for some extra warmth.

11. Brush the rolls with milk.

12. Transfer to oven and bake for 20 min, until risen and golden.

13. Let cool and break apart to eat. Toast well if you eat them the next day.

Someone couldn’t wait

I was happy with how these turned out, it is an easy luxury bread. They are traditionally a little more square, but they were well risen and delicious.

Whole Grain Pizza

I recently got the magazine Cook’s Illustrated recommended, and the magazine is really interesting. It has fairly long articles on the how and why’s of the recipes, and some of the experimental steps the authors go though.

The latest issue (May/June 2013) had an article on thin crust whole wheat pizza, and it looked really delicious. My mom used to bake a whole sheet pan of pizza, and I have not made it ever myself (not counting providing toppings at a party I held years ago, an Italian friend of mine insisted that she brought the dough when I wanted to make pizza – of course I didn’t get the recipe).

I love thin crust and whole grain stuff, so I thought I would try it out. The recipe also required the use of a pizza stone, and I have been thinking of getting one for baking too. Cook’s Illustrated is great in that it also contains equipment (and ingredient) reviews and recommendations, I got an Old Stone Oven pizza stone, so far I like it.

I cut the recipe in half to only make one pizza, and I made it by hand though the original calls for using a food processor. I prefer doing anything but pie crust by hand, and it was really easy.

Ingredients: (orginal recipe from Cook’s Illustrated, June 2013)

• 3/4 cup whole wheat flour (120g)
• 1/2 cup bread flour (75 g)
• 1 tsp honey
• 1/4 + 1/8 tsp instant dry yeast
• 1/2 + 1/8 cup water (150 ml)
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp olive oil

Method:

1. Mix together whole wheat flour, bread flour, honey and yeast.

2. Add water until the dough is just coming together, then make it all come together with your hands. Let stand for 10 min.

Adding the water and mixing

After gathering together with my hands

3. Add olive oil and salt, knead it in and keep kneading for a couple of minutes.

4. Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover tightly with plastic wrap (I use a big elastic band to keep it tight) and refrigiate for 18 hours or more – up to 2 days.

Ball of dough

After 36 hours in the fridge

5. About 1.5 hours before you are ready to have your pizza, take the dough out of the fridge, punch it down and form a ball. Leave it to rest on your work surface with some oiled plastic wrap over for an hour.

6. Mean while, place your pizza stone about 4.5 inches/10 cm from your oven’s broiler and turn oven to 500 F/ 260 C (check you pizza stone instructions to make sure it can take 500 F and broiling).

7. Prepare your toppings while you wait.

8. After the dough has rested an hour, press flat to an 8 inch/20 cm disc. Keep stretching it at the edges, partially by lifting it up, until it is 12 inches/30 cm across. I found this quite difficult, it probably requires a little practice!

Stretching to a small disc

Working it out to a big disc. It was a little hard not to get it too thin in the middle

8. Turn on broiler to run 10 min before the pizza goes in the oven.

10. Transfer pizza dough to a well floured pizza peel or cutting board – I used a bamboo one iand it worked ok. Stretch to maintain the shape, but make sure the pizza can move freely on the board.

Not quite perfect round on the board. I found it hard to have it stay in shape when it didn’t stick to the surface

11. Top your pizza.

I choose goat cheese and pesto

12. Slide the pizza from your board to the pizza stone. Turn oven back to 500 F / 260 C.

13. Bake for about 8-12 minutes, until well browned and crisp. If your oven is uneven it is a good idea to turn the pizza half way through.

14. Take pizza out by sliding it back on your board or peel, and transfer to a wire to cool a min or two. Enjoy!

Despite my dough-stretching being less than perfect, the pizza turned out really well. I was surprised how filling it was, the whole grain made it hearty in the good way.

Cook’s Illustrated recommended non-tomato based toppings and had a couple of suggestions, we used pesto and goat cheese, others were things like mushrooms and cream sauce or braised onions and gorgonzola. I used a great pesto recipe from simplyrecipes.com.

I can’t wait to try some breads on the pizza stone, and maybe also some different pizza dough recipes.

Buttermilk Scones

There a lot of different recipes on scones out there, and not everyone agrees on what is meant by scones. This is adapted from a recipe in Wenche Frølich’s Brød on Irish Scones, and they are not like the sweet scones you get at Starbucks and similar, but not quite like biscuits either. I changed the milk in the original recipe for buttermilk, as I think it gives a much more moist and flavorful scone.

Ingredients:

• 300g all purpose flour ( 10 1/2 oz)
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 100 g cold unsalted butter (3.5 oz, almost a one stick)
• 200 ml buttermilk (scant 1 cup)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 225 C/ 440 F

2. Mix all the dry ingredients – flour, salt, baking soda.

3. Cut the cold butter into small pieces, and add by working through the dough with your fingers and squeezing the butter into the dough. There should still be lumps of butter left, and in the end the mixture should be lumpy.

Butter in pieces

Working through the dough

Done

4. Mix in the buttermilk, and knead lightly until a dough forms. You don’t want to over-knead and have the butter be worked completely in.

5. Form 2 flat round breads on a parchment lined baking sheet. Cut the breads into 4 parts, and prick the surface lightly with a fork.

Form the breads

Cut them into scones

6. Bake for 15 min.

7. Transfer to a wire rack and let cool a little and then break apart.

These are definitely best when they are newly baked (and takes less than an hour to make), but they can also be toasted slightly and reheated later. You hardly need any butter on them as they are pretty buttery all ready, they are great just with jam.

Sourdough bread – take 2

As I wrote about earlier, I tried 5 & Spice’s recipe for sourdough bread and was partial successful. I updated how I maintained my sourdough and tried making it again the other day, this day with more success.

I had fed the sourdough starter the day before, and left it out that night. Next day it was nice, risen and ready to use. I mostly changed what I did on day 2, leaving it out much longer. The bread was not uniform as the original recipe, but with some large holes in it, I am not sure if it rose too long in the end, but it was much less dense and just as moist.

Here is the recipe again, for reference, and the steps I ended up doing, still very close to the original.

• 200 g sourdough starter (1 cup)
• 400 g bread flour (3 cups)
• 8-10g salt (2 tsp)
• 300 ml room temperature water (1 1/3 cup)

Method:

1. Stir together sourdough, flour, salt and water and mix well. It is pretty sticky. Turn the dough out on a working surface and see if it might need a little more flour, but be careful, it is a sticky dough at this point. (I know that where I store my flour it ends up having a high moisture content, so I usually need to add a little more flour than a recipe calls for).

2. Stretch the dough to a rectangle, and then fold one end 1/3 over the piece, then again with the other end, so you end up with a 3 layer rectangle. Turn the dough 90 degrees and fold again. You can’t really see the layers at this point, it is that sticky.

3. Oil a clean bowl, and put the dough to rest in it and cover with plastic wrap. Leave it to rest for 1 hour.

4. Take the dough out and repeat the stretching and folding like before, 3 layers one way, 3 layers the other way. Put the dough back in the bowl, cover and let rest for another hour.

5. Repeat the folding again, the dough should be less sticky now. Rest for another hour.

6. Stretch and fold again and put the dough in a large, clean bowl. Cover with a damp towel or plastic wrap and and rest overnight in the refrigerator.

7. Take the dough out of the refrigerator the next day, about 2-4 hours before you want to bake. Now is a good time to pull a little of the dough from the top to put back in your starter, if you like to do put developed dough back in there. Be sure to close it up nicely. Let it stand to rise at room temperature for about 2-3 hours. It should be puffed up a little bit.

8. Turn the dough out on your work surface, stretch it and form a round loaf.

9. Dust a cutting board with corn meal and place the loaf there. Let rest for another 1 hour or so. Score the top of the bread.

10. Preheat your oven to 475 F/ C and put a Dutch oven in there.

11. When the oven is ready, take the Dutch oven out, and take off the lid. Careful, remember this is all really hot! Gently life the bread up and put into the Dutch oven and put the lid back on.

12. Bake with the lid on for 25 min, then take the lid off and bake for another 10 min.

13. Take the Dutch oven out, and carefully take the bread out ( I used grilling thongs). Remember, HOT!

14. Put the bread on a rack to cool

I was pretty happy with this, and so was the family, it was perfect with some potato leek soup. It was not perfect, however, I might try some other sourdough recipes next to compare.

Soup and bread – perfect toddler meal!

Danish Pancakes

Danish Pancakes are basically crepes, but they are usually made on a regular pan and not a fancy crepe pan. My husband calls them ‘real pancakes’, as opposed to American pancakes. He enjoys these a lot more than the soft, risen American ones that I prefer to make.

This is a basic batter you can use for savory or sweet fillings, as these are not sweet in themselves. My husband decided to make these for dinner and dessert the other day, and I quickly snapped some shots of it. Making heaps of them is a practiced skill, and he is quite good at it, much better than me.

Recipe adapted from the Danish basic cookbook, Politikens Nye Kogebog.

Ingredients:

• 125 g all purpose flour (4.4 oz)
• 1 pinch of salt
• 1 egg
• 300 ml milk (1 1/4 cup)
• 50-100 ml water (1/4 – 1/2 cups)
• butter for frying

Method:

1. Line up 2 pans on your stove, and a plate to keep the cooked pancakes on, with another plate on top to keep them warm. Get your butter ready too.

2. Whisk all the ingredients together. In the end the batter should be a little thicker than heavy whipping cream, but not by much. Add a little more milk or some water if it is too thick, and continue to check the thickness as you cook the pancakes.

3. Melt a little bit of butter in one pan, about 1/4-1/2 tsp. When melted, pour batter on to cover your pan, tilt the pan to distribute it evenly. You should use just enough batter to cover the pan in a thin layer.

4. While the first pancake cooks, melt butter in the second pan and repeat. Flip the first pancake, and pour batter in the second pan. You want to stagger the cooking a bit.

5. When the pancake is nicely browned on both side, lift it to your prepared plate. ( You can keep the plates in the oven at a low temperature if you plan to make lots and lots to keep them warm). Don’t worry if your first one breaks apart or looks strange – usually the first one does.

6. Keep staggering your pancake making on the pans, buttering for every second pancake.

7. Serve warm!

You can make any sort of filling to go with it, like spinach, mushroom and cheese,  ham and cheese or even meat sauce and cheese for savory fillings. Fill them either by putting the filling on a quarter and them folding them twice, or put the filling down the middle and roll them up (the square fold you see for crepes are not really done with these small pancakes).

For sweet fillings we have lots of favorites, like fresh berries, whipped cream, jam, sugar, icecream, nutella, bananas and any combinations there off. Sugar & lemon juice is really good too!

Sorry there are no pictures of the rolled up pancakes, we were too  busy eating!

Enjoy!

Sourdough musings

Due to my latest sourdough experiment, I have been reading a bit about maintaining a sourdough starter.
In my original sources it said to keep the starter in the refrigiator and feed it every 3-4 days.

On a work trip to San Fransico my husband recently picked up the book Tartine Bread, which is an amazing book, though I have yet to try any of the recipes in it. I hope to review it a bit later, but he does spend some time discussing his experimentations (over years!) with sourdough starters.

There was a couple of things that stood out to me when reading about his sourdough.
The first thing was having a predictable feeding schedule, and feeding more often. His recommendation was every day, at the same time, with the same amount of flour water. This would lead to predictable yeast activity.
The second thing was discarding 80% of the starter every time it was fed, too keep it young and fresh, this should lead to a less sour sourdough.
Thirdly, he would keep it at 65-75 F. Two types of acids are formed in a sourdough, and the more sour one thrives better a lower temperatures.

I decided I would try modify my own sourdough caretaking based on this, but tweak it so it fit my baking. I don’t plan on baking sourdough that often, and I plan on use it for different things and in varying amounts (for the basic Tartine bread, only one table spoon is used to create a leaven before making the dough, then you use the leftover leaven as your new starter). It needed to work for my Danish Rye bread too, and I didn’t mind it would be a bit more sour maybe.

I will try to a) discard about half of it when feeding. b) Feed it every second day instead of less often, and with different time intervals in between. I can probably not achieve feeding on the same time every day, but I can try. c) Feed it a predictable amount of food, 50g bread flour, 50g rye and 100ml of water. I chose to use whole grain rye, as it fit the types of bread I would like to make, and I think it would give it a unique flavor.

I don’t have anywhere it would always be between 65 and 75 degrees. In the winter our house is usually colder at night, and in the summer hotter in the day. I will keep leaving it out after feeding it, and then store it in the fridge.

After only 2 times doing this, I noticed a lot more yeast activity in the starter. I fed it in the afternoon, and forgot to put it in the fridge by bedtime, and I think that might actually work well me – feed in the evening, leave out overnight.

I also discovered that having a lot more yeast activity does lead to a lot more gas being created – the lid of my patent jar came off with a loud pop! when I opened it. I will probably just cover it with some plastic wrap going forward, even though those jars are pretty solid!

We will see how this will work for the sourdough breads I would like to make. I definitely want to try the Tartine bread too, as well as some other things from his book.

Blueberry Muffins

I wanted to make some blueberry muffins and I remembered a recipe I used from allrecipes.com years ago, probably 8-9 years or so.

I think it was this one, so I went ahead and made them, both as blueberries and as chocolate muffins (no lemon zest added). They were actually a little disappointing to me, not as fluffy, not as moist as I wanted them.

This led me to look at other recipes and see if I could find a way to make them better, without making them more complicated to make. My first idea was to substitute the oil for butter, but keep it melted so I wouldn’t have to deal with softening butter. Butter would give a much better taste in my opinion. I find that oil will add fat, but not a lot of taste to baked products, and while fine in (savory) bread it tastes a little ‘sad’ in cakes to me. It would of course be different if I was trying to do something dairy free, but the recipe already had dairy in it.
The next idea I had was to substitute 1 tsp of the baking powder for baking soda, I think using both gives a little more rise. I also saw that many muffin recipes called for yogurt to be added, so I wanted to try that to make it extra moist. Finally I wanted to replace the white sugar with light brown, as I think it gives more depth of flavor. I did like the amount though, these are not too sweet.

In the end I was pretty pleased with the result, so here is the complete recipe for my enhanced blueberry muffins.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups all purpose flour (475 ml)
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar (120 ml)
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1-2 tsp lemon zest
• 1/3 cup butter, melted (38 g)
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup milk (120 ml)
• 1/2 cup yogurt (120 ml)*
• 1 cup blueberries
• *Note: This is using American style yogurt which is pretty solid. If you are using pourable, European style you might want to use a little less milk

Makes 12 muffins.

Method:
1. Melt the butter and line a 12-muffin pan with muffin liners or grease it well. Preheat oven to 400 F / 205 C.

2. Mix all the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, salt, lemon zest). Make sure it is completely mixed.

3. Mix all the wet ingredients (egg, milk, butter, yogurt).

4. Pour the wet ingredients over the dry, and mix until just incorporated, batter will be lumpy. Be careful not to over mix.

5. Add the blueberries and stir a 2-3 times until mixed in.

6. Spoon the batter into the prepared tins.

7. Bake for 20-25 min, until golden and a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Let cool a few min in the muffin pan, and then gently take out the muffins.

8. Cool some more before serving, they can be served warm or cold.

I thought these turned out really moist and fluffy, my husband thought they might be too fluffy for blueberries and wanted to try them with chocolate. Chocolate will probably be good in them too. I also think that adding a teaspoon or two of lemon juice to wet ingredients would be great, if you want a more pronounced lemony flavor. That will be for next time, for now we are all muffin’ed out.

A Sourdough Experiement

Last week I saw this post, and thought that looked like a really good bread. I also wanted to find a good recipe and opportunity to do an all wild-yeast sourdough white bread (many recipes I see use commercial yeast in addition to your sourdough).

I tried making it, and I wouldn’t say I was 100% successful. I have a few things I would do differently along the way when I try next time, and I think my sourdough might have been a little too inactive.

I started out by removing half the starter and feeding it the day before, this should make it less sour in taste. I did see yeast development, but maybe not enough.

Here is the recipe and how I did the steps, original at 5 & Spice.

Ingredients:

• 200 g sourdough starter (1 cup)
• 400 g bread flour (3 cups)
• 8-10g salt (2 tsp)
• 300 ml room temperature water (1 1/3 cup)

Method:

1. Stir together sourdough, flour, salt and water and mix well. It is pretty sticky. Turn the dough out on a working surface and see if it might need a little more flour, but be careful, it is a sticky dough at this point. (I know that where I store my flour it ends up having a high moisture content, so I usually need to add a little more flour than a recipe calls for).

Ingredients

Sticky dough

2. Stretch the dough to a rectangle, and then fold one end 1/3 over the piece, then again with the other end, so you end up with a 3 layer rectangle. Turn the dough 90 degrees and fold again. You can’t really see the layers at this point, it is that sticky.

Folded once

Folded twice

3. Oil a clean bowl, and put the dough to rest in it and cover with plastic wrap. Leave it to rest for 1 hour.

4. Take the dough out and repeat the stretching and folding like before, 3 layers one way, 3 layers the other way. Put the dough back in the bowl, cover and let rest for another hour.

Folded again

5. Repeat the folding again, the dough should be less sticky now. Rest for another hour.

Stretching, this time less sticky

6. Stretch and fold again, but when done fold the corners of the dough under to form a round shape and place on your work surface.

7. Rub a bunch of flour in a linen towel and use that to line a large, clean bowl. Put the dough in there, cover with a damp towel and rest overnight in the refrigerator.

Towel with flour

Ready for resting

8. Take the dough out of the refrigerator the next day, about 2-3 hours before you want to bake.  Now is a good time to pull a little of the dough from the top to put back in your starter, if you like to do put developed dough back in there. Be sure to close it up nicely. Let it stand to rise at room temperature for about 1-3 hours. I should be puffed up nicely at this point, which mine really wasn’t.

Just out of the refrigerator

9. Preheat your oven to 475 F/ C and put a Dutch oven in there.

10. Dust a cutting board with cornmeal and carefully turn out the loaf on the board. I found this to be quite hard, but in theory you should do it without ripping the bread. Score the top of the bread.

Ready

11. When the oven is ready, take the Dutch oven out, and take off the lid. Careful, remember this is all really hot! Gently life the bread up and put into the Dutch oven and put the lid back on.

Bread in the Dutch oven

12. Bake with the lid on for 25 min, then take the lid off and bake for another 10 min.

13. Take the Dutch oven out, and carefully take the bread out ( I used grilling thongs). Remember, HOT!

Done!

14. Put the bread on a rack to cool

The bread tasted good, but clearly didn’t rise enough, even if it did rise some.

I think that after resting the dough in the refrigerator it took a very long time for my dough to even get warmer, I keep my house pretty cool at the moment, so I should probably have left it out longer. I also didn’t like the method of resting the dough in a cloth, next time I will just rest in in the bowl, and probably take it out of it to reform the loaf and let it rise longer on day 2. I think a bunch of cold moisture was retained in the towel for me.

I really liked the high water percentage in this bread, as well as the Dutch oven method of baking, I will be doing that again for sure.