Are you Pregnant…With Questions?

I have questions, questions that need answering…and I bet you do too! Questions like,

“What is the difference between baking powder and baking soda,”

and,

“Why does eating bread make me fat,”

and,

“Does this apron make me look…”

on second thought, I’m not gonna touch that last one. But if you have questions that you would like to submit to be answered in future blog posts, then head on over to my facebook page and give me a like and send me a message and I’ll add it to the cue.

In the meantime, S.D. Whitey had his first feed last night and is looking on track to start fermenting here in the next couple of days. I’ll keep you posted! Looking forward to hearing from you and all of the crazy questions you might have. Cheers!

What Happens When You Try to Slow Roast a Pavlova?

This idea intrigued me so I took a crack at it and in the end made some interesting discoveries about heat dispersion in a £30 slow cooker and the cut off heat of a mid-range electric whisk…I don’t think it’s broken, but we’ll let that be the last pavlova it ever makes.

So what I did was take Jamie Oliver’s 6 Egg Pavlova recipe and try to slow cook it in a Cookworks 230-240V slow cooker. Overall I wasn’t real happy about the peaks I got without corn flour in it so I added it in after the fact not really knowing how much to add. In hindsight I should have found a recipe that had corn flour in it from the start so that I could have been more exact with my measuring.I’m not sure why it burned where it burned except that maybe underneath that side is where the heating element starts and could have been avoided by a midway turn…but I think most of the pavlova is salvageable anyway. If I try this again, I won’t preheat the slow cooker but I think that it is still important to cook it on high to achieve that 90 minute bake time. I might in future try a low roast one just to compare time and quality and if I have a good afternoon and some product to waste maybe we’ll go for the warm setting. If you have a go at this please take pictures and share your method, because I still think that with some fiddling you could get a pretty crackin’ pavlova out of this.

S.D. Whitey

Please Welcome Sour Dough (S.D.) Whitey to the world! He was mixed at 16:30 (that’s 4:30pm for our American friends). He’s 1 part white flour and 1 part water. I’ll have to feed him the same amount every 24 hours and I’ll make a post every day until he can swim and then I’ll probably document his first day of boule. I’ll also make a post about the science behind harvesting wild yeast from your environment.

What’s the Substitute for an Insult?

Let’s be honest–whatever it is about baking that you want to know is just a google away, you just can’t be bothered (great now I’ve insulted them!). No, no it’s not like that; sorry, let’s start over. My name is Daniel and I’ve been a Baker’s apprentice for the past two years or so and have fielded questions from family, friends and midwives (true story) about this or that aspect of the science of baking and how to trick and finagle your way past tricky food allergies and personal restrictions. I won’t say that I was diligent at the time to backlog those answers but let’s move forward with the basics and when I hear a particularly interesting question then you will be the first to know the facts from a frequently asked baker–no google required.