continuing the stollen drama from little_carrot
I decided to continue and add to my baking adventures this year, by messing up three entire batches of stollen. here's how.
1) in the first batch, baked last week sometime (Thursday maybe?), I baked one batch and divided it unequally. the larger amount of dough for a larger loaf was for the Chrisses, while the smaller was intended for Joe next door. standard stollen using unbleached flour.
unfortunately, the Chrisses have not yet returned our call. we even took their stollen all the way to the greyhound kennel with us on Friday! the intention was to drop it off at their house on the way home. we called on our cell phone when we got into town, and left a message. still no word. so... I opted to eat theirs and bake a fresh one for when we hear back.
sliced into the loaf, buttered it up, had a few bites, and hmm... weird. tastes like... no salt. and indeed, that is exactly what I did. I forgot to add salt. which means it tastes fine-ish, just a little... bland.
2) I made a second, double batch of stollen using half unbleached flour and half white whole wheat. I thought I had done this before. apparently I thought wrong. either that, or I used a different brand of white whole wheat flour. for the record, the Hodgson's Mill flour did not work well.
the end of that story is that we have three stollens that taste good [I remembered the salt!], but are very heavy, grainy, and crumbly.
so... I dunno. should I try again? I told David, as I was looking at the stollen doubtfully today, "What do you think about giving the Chrisses a gift card?"
he said that was fine with him.
1) in the first batch, baked last week sometime (Thursday maybe?), I baked one batch and divided it unequally. the larger amount of dough for a larger loaf was for the Chrisses, while the smaller was intended for Joe next door. standard stollen using unbleached flour.
unfortunately, the Chrisses have not yet returned our call. we even took their stollen all the way to the greyhound kennel with us on Friday! the intention was to drop it off at their house on the way home. we called on our cell phone when we got into town, and left a message. still no word. so... I opted to eat theirs and bake a fresh one for when we hear back.
sliced into the loaf, buttered it up, had a few bites, and hmm... weird. tastes like... no salt. and indeed, that is exactly what I did. I forgot to add salt. which means it tastes fine-ish, just a little... bland.
2) I made a second, double batch of stollen using half unbleached flour and half white whole wheat. I thought I had done this before. apparently I thought wrong. either that, or I used a different brand of white whole wheat flour. for the record, the Hodgson's Mill flour did not work well.
the end of that story is that we have three stollens that taste good [I remembered the salt!], but are very heavy, grainy, and crumbly.
so... I dunno. should I try again? I told David, as I was looking at the stollen doubtfully today, "What do you think about giving the Chrisses a gift card?"
he said that was fine with him.