Category: Mellow Bakers

I am a little late posting this. I baked these buns on Sat 21 April, but life got in the way of me posting before now. Ah, well; it won’t be the last time this happens!

And now for something completely (well, slightly) different. This is my next bake, for the Mellow Baker’s, from Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf, and it’s not a loaf of bread. These are flaky butter buns – a sort of savoury croissant – and quite unlike anything else I have baked.

This was not a difficult bake, but it did take three days from start to finish. It’s not as labour intensive as that makes it sound; for most of that time the dough sat in the fridge.

Thursday

This bake began, as most do, by weighing out the ingredients. This is where I made two mistakes: firstly, instead of letting the milk warm to 20°C, I used it straight from the fridge. What a mistake! No dough is going to rise like that… except my second mistake was to add three times the required amount of yeast, so I reckon they cancel each other out! The yeast error is due to me using instant yeast, whereas Dan Lepard’s recipes specify fresh yeast. In practice, they are interchangeable as long as you remember to divide the fresh yeast weight by three; I forgot until it was too late.

When mixed together, the dough was very stiff. The recipe tells us to “mix with your hands until you have a firm dough”. Well, to achieve that, I had to tip it all out onto the workshop and give it a good kneading.

After that, followed by Dan Lepard’s customary “knead for 10 seconds, leave for 10 minutes” cycle, it was looking like a nice dough and ready to retard in the fridge overnight.

Friday

The next morning, I removed the dough from the fridge and let it come back to room temperature. Then I rolled it out…

…and layered with butter. I should point out that this is as close to a rectangle as I could manage to roll. If anyone has any good tips for improving that (other than trimming it down) then please leave a friendly comment!

Next the folding and rolling cycle began, which I found to be easier than I expected. Having failed at croissants in the past, I really appreciate Dan Lepard’s “slices of butter” approach, instead of the “roll out the butter” method which I have tried to follow previously.

The next three images show my interpretation of the “book fold”. I know other people in the group have interpreted the instructions differently, but this way made most sense to me.

Followed by another (poor) attempt to roll out a rectangle!

Now to cut out the buns. I managed five from my “rectangle”.

I struggle to throw out any dough I work with, so I reformed the offcuts, rolled and cut again. The front five were the first set; those behind represent various generations of reformed offcuts. I know the layered structure will be malformed but, when the alternative is through them out, what did I have to lose?

As for shaping the buns, I found the instructions to be quite vague. I think this image succesfully shows how I interpreted them:

And here are all of the shaped buns about to be placed into the fridge again, ready for breakfast baking in the morning.

Saturday

Not much to talk about day three. Once I had been woken (far earlier than I would have liked!) I removed the buns from the fridge, heated the oven and then baked them in time for breakfast. I followed Dan’s advice and stuffed them with bacon.

It was a very nice breakfast. However, we struggled a little to find good ways to eat the rest. It seemed odd to eat then plain, but we didn’t want to add much in the way of toppings, considering how much butter was already present! Probably the best use we found was to accompany some home-made soup.

Would I bake them again? I’m not sure; probably not. But I am glad I baked them this time, and feel I have learnt a lot about how to handle dough/butter layers. Maybe I’ll give croissants another go.

It’s April and the Mellow Bakers Handmade Loaf baking group has begun its challenge.

As is the norm, we have three breads selected at random, from Dan Lepard’s book, for baking during this month. Some members of the group have been very keen and already baked all three of them, but I plan to spread them across the month. Today I baked the first one: quick white loaf.

I can’t take all the credit for what I have baked today; I was ably assisted by my 2 year old son, Sebastian. He provided moral support and entertainment!

Dan Lepard describes this bread as, “a close-textured, soft white bread, with no pretence to be anything other than that.” Exciting! That sounds like exactly the kind of bread I would never bake because anything else I bake would be more interesting and tasty. But one of the reasons I am in this group bake is to force myself to try out recipes I wouldn’t touch otherwise. And, as Seb will be with me for the session, isn’t this the ideal bread to get him into baking? He is usually happy to eat any “Daddy’s Special Bread” that I offer to him, but this promises a quick turnaround from mixing to eating.

As I was preparing for this bake, I decided this would be an ideal dough for making simple bread buns, so the two loaves which this recipe is supposed to yield would actually become one loaf in a tin and six buns. The total flour weight seemed little on the light side for this outcome, so I decided to increase the weights by a third. This was an easy calculation for the 300g bread flour (becoming 400g) but led to silly figures for other ingredients (eg 266.666…g plain flour). Ah, well.

Thoughts on the finished bread? It’s a bit bland. To be fair, for crust alone it beats supermarket sliced white, hands down. But we don’t buy that bread, and I wouldn’t pay much for this.

Saying that…

Sebastian was very excited when I presented him with a slice. I cut it into quarters and he spread honey on each piece before wolfing them down. He got very upset when he discovered he wasn’t allowed more (it wasn’t long till tea time), although that may say more about 2 year olds than it does about the bread!

Once he finished, he decided to make more in his play kitchen; he remembered all the key steps, including rolling the dough on the table and making it into a ball.

Would I bake it again? For me, no; I’d prefer something with more bite and flavour. But it was an easy bake and, if it encourages him to bake bread himself, I’d gladly do it with Seb – or Orion (four months old) when he’s a bit bigger – again.