Today I had a bit of fun...
I made two batches of Hot Cross Buns
Batch 1 was using dry yeast using the recipie from Emmanuel Hadjiandreou's book "How To Make Bread" (ISBN 9781849751407). I added about 50g of Yoghurt to Emmanuel's recipie.
Result: almost perfect, soft, great crumb, buns rip apart and are very easy to eat... perhaps too easy.
Batch 2 was a sourdough recipie using my rye starter. The recipie was taken from Yoke Mardewi's book "Sourdough" (ISBN 9781742571317) with a couple slight alterations. Where Yoke uses white icing for the crosses I used a mix of water, flour, oil, salt. I also decided to use the same glaze I'd created in making the previous batch from Emmanuel's recipie.
Result: almost perfect, wish I didn't rush to bake the buns, I put them into the oven slightly under-proofed causing a few cracks to open up on some of the buns. I knew what I was doing, my wife wanted the oven to bake something else and I pushed it through.... They were probably only underproofed by about an hour though.
This did raise an interesting observation though, the yeast buns with the egg didn't crack, while I was prety certain they were slightly underproofed also (although my test tray worked 100%) while the Sourdough ones did crack, and the crust was a fair bit crisper on the SD batch also. Anyone know what the differences might be between using yeast and starter in so far as crusts?
That's it... just wanted to bragg a tad...
D
Replies
I made about 12 batches of hot cross buns yesterday.
The Thurston before Easter is very busy for bakers.
We have found sometimes the border between the cross and the bun splits too.
My theory is the cross becomes hard while the bun is still expanding in the oven.
It seems thicker cross mix (less water) seems to fix this.
thicker cross mixture
thats a great idea, will give it a go...
actually, i had the thought that the primary purpose for the flour mix we use to put crosses on the buns is to protect that part of the buns from going brown...
the thought was that if we were to have small silicon crosses we could just place them onto the batches of buns and peel them off after the bake and hey presto you'd have white crosses...
Though I haven't tried it, I read somewhere that some slash the cross - though it might brown some it would still be a visible cross.
I tried a new recipe that included sugar in the crossing mix and that browned but differently to the bun and so was still visible if not quite so obvious as the plain white ones.
Keep on bakin'
Farinam