Inventing a Recipe

Happy Jewish New Year! One of the staples of the holiday is round challah, a rich egg bread in a round shape. Yesterday I experimented with creating a recipe for it on my own. Well, not entirely all on my own. I had a ration to work with: 5:3. Five parts flour (by weight) to three parts liquid. That, plus the fact that I already know how to make bread (i.e. techniques for mixing ingredients, kneading, etc.) and away I went. I also took pictures: First I measured out 40 oz of flour: That meant I needed 24 oz of liquids. I had 5 eggs left in the box, so I took one of them, separated it, and saved the white to brush over the loaves before baking. Then I threw the rest in. That added up to about 8 oz. Next I added 4 oz of honey, and 4 oz of shortening. Just for the hell of it, this time I decided to try coconut oil. I usually use butter, but this way the bread would be pareve; neither meat nor dairy, if anyone who cared about keeping kosher happened to eat some.  That left 8 of my 24 oz, so I used a cup of water which I heated in the microwave, and then dissolved the yeast in it. I mixed the wet ingredients up really well with a fork, then threw about a teaspoon or two of salt. Then I started stirring in the flour:   See that plastic yellow thing the size of a miniature painter’s pallette? That’s my secret weapon that I use to mix in the last third of the flour; it’s really more like kneading than mixing, and it works great. As it turned out, I didn’t ...
Source: Musings of a Dinosaur - Category: Primary Care Authors: Tags: Food Source Type: blogs