Best Baguette of 2013 by Ridha Khadher

Peter’s birthday is coming up soon. He doesn’t want presents, a party or surprises. He’s really happy when I bake good baguettes to join his favorite birthday meal. Since he’s a young boy he loves to eat vegetable soup with baguette and French cheeses on his birthday. 

I’ve baked some different baguette these last months. And today it’s time to bake the Best Baguette of 2013. Ridha Khadher won the title Best Baguette 2013. 

Stefanie of Hefe und Mehr was able to build the recipe based on the rough information mr. Khadher gave in an interview. He uses nearly ice cold water, kneads his dough more and uses a long (24 hour) and cold (refrigerator) fermentation. I just followed Stefanie’s recipe and I’m lucky I did. It’s a delicious baguette. Of course there are more delicious tasting and smelling baguettes. But, this one is also very easy. The most difficult part for me is shaping baguette without destroying the bubbles. I’m still working very gently on that part.

Thanks Stefanie for building a recipe for us to work with.

Sweet Bread with Dutch applesauce

Anusha of TomatoBlues is the lovely host for Bread Baking Day #61. She came up with the lovely theme: Stuffed bread.

I made a mistake and made bread with Thai sausage and Anusha asked us not to use meat. I still wanted to joint Bread Baking Day and started to look for a sweet stuffed bread. 

Because of my mistake I found this delicious sweet bread on King Arthur Flour. The original bread is called Brazilian Sweet Bread and is stuffed with bananas and pineapple, plus rich cinnamon filling. Ricardo Neves Gonzalez makes it at his bakery. It sounded delicious and we almost always have pineapple and banana in our house. But, today our bananas weren’t ripe yet. Then I thought of the Dutch Apple sauce I made and lays waiting in the freezer.

That night we had our Thai friends over for dinner. Even though we don’t like to eat a lot in the evenings we all had to taste this enormous sweet bread with Dutch applesauce. It came out of the oven during our dinner and the smell was all over the house. And what a hit it is. It’s not too sweet and the crumb is deliciously open and because of the topping the crust is crunchy. This will be back on our table, with pineapple, banana, mango, coconut, or …

a big sweet loaf (35 x 25 cm)

Thanks Anusha and Ricardo!

White loaf with home made Thai sausage

Anusha of TomatoBlues is the lovely host for Bread Baking Day #61. She asked us to bake stuffed bread. 

There are so many delicious ingredients for stuffed bread, but I had this Chiang Mai sausage in my refrigerator since I made it myself yesterday. We found a package of herbs and spices and 5 pieces of sausage skin. Tonight we are also eating it on a pizza, but the rest goes in this soft white bread. 

The sausage is called Sai Ua, also known as Chiang Mai sausage. It's famous in Chiang Mai and is filled with minced pork, herbs, spices and  kaeng khua red curry paste. It's spicy and goes well with the slightly sweet dough. 

We like to eat vegetarian food, but this sausage keeps us from become 100% vegetarians.