tartine

Tartine Bakery Morning Buns

/ Susie / 1 Comment
Unrolling as I eat (doesn’t everyone do this?)
The best part (the gooey center!)

Question:   What do you get when you cross a croissant with a cinnamon roll?

Answer:   A Morning Bun!

Other acceptable (also right) answers:

  • A rather messier kitchen
  • Contentedly pudgier than you were before

I tried an experiment last week with adding sugar and cinnamon to the Joanne Chang croissant butter block. This was successful in only one way: They tasted great. In every other way, they were a failure. It was basically impossible to contain the butter/sugar for the lamination turns, Stuff was bursting out all over the place. Also, the sugar massively leaked out during baking, so the croissants were basically stewing in syrup on the baking sheet. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but the croissants weren’t pretty, and they didn’t retain enough sugar to be the sweet treat I had imagined.

So then I googled “laminated cinnamon rolls” and found myself staring, mouth agape, at another Chad Robertson recipe (found via this article and shown in this video). His morning bun recipe is in their book “Tartine: A Classic Revisited“, which I found available as a Prime Reading title on Kindle (free for Prime members). I had not been familiar with the term “morning bun” before this, but apparently it’s “not a big thing on the East Coast.” Well, it should be!

I used Joanne’s croissant dough and then Chad’s morning bun recipe from there. The only other changes I made were:

  • I didn’t have oranges to zest, so I put 1.5 teaspoons of Penzey’s orange extract in the filling. It’s amazing how nicely the orange flavor boosts these, even though it’s not evident that that’s what’s in there.

I need to note that after 35 minutes (well before the morning bun recipe’s 45 minute baking time) the tops were overdone and the bottoms weren’t quite done enough. Eating them, though, the textures felt right, so I wasn’t too far off the mark. I suspect that the bottoms didn’t brown as well because the muffin pan needed to be placed on a sheet pan to collect the anticipated overflow of butter, cinnamon, and sugar. Next time, I think it would help to shield the tops with a piece of loosely placed foil after maybe 15 minutes. Another possible step is to reduce the 400°F oven temperature to 375°F.

Another note is that in the video of Chad linked above and in the photo provided in the recipe itself (shown here), his filling looks totally different from the one I got from following the recipe. I checked it three times, and I’m reasonably sure that the recipe has an error. It says that the filling has only white sugar, cinnamon, and orange zest. No moisture. I substituted orange extract for the zest, but that wasn’t much moisture and the result was a pale brown sandy mixture. It was wonderful, but I noticed afterwards that the video and photo show a darker brown and lumpier mixture.

I think that the recipe omits stirring in melted butter and/or including some brown sugar. Melted butter is on the ingredient list, but is only called for as a brushed-on layer before spreading out the sugar/cinnamon filling. The large amount of melted butter is reasonable for spreading, as his croissant recipe yields a massive amount of dough (nearly 1,000g of flour compared with 410g in Joanne’s recipe) rolled out to a very large 1/4″ x 10″ x 32″ rectangle. But, I suspect that some of the listed melted butter amount was meant to be combined with the sugar and cinnamon. I did check for book errata and found one, but not this one.

So, next time I will put some melted butter into the filling until it looks like his photo.

Thanksgiving 2021

/ Susie / Leave a comment

I’m sad that I forgot to take photos, but here’s what I baked for Thanksgiving:

  • I made really terrible sourdough rolls. We ate them, and they didn’t taste terrible, but they really were a colossal failure. The primary issue was that I didn’t leave myself enough time, combined with my inexperience and ignorance about turning my usual Tartine sourdough recipe into rolls. The result was that the rolls looked OK, but inside were horribly dense and heavy. I mean, they had the density of bowling balls. I’d like to give this another go and see if I can make this work. This was definitely an example of my being unjustifiably cocky about what I can do with sourdough. I’m really still just a noob, and was robustly reminded of that with these rolls.
  • I made my classic apple pie, but this time I pre-cooked the apples on the stovetop. I think this helped with my usual problem of ending up with a gap between the apples and the top crust, but I changed another variable that also helped: I made a lattice crust rather than a solid crust. So, not enough data, but at least I didn’t have the gap.
  • I made the Joanne Chang Rich Chocolate Cream Pie, and it was great. Following the instruction to chill before blind baking the crust seemed to really forestall any “slumping”. I did fill the thing up with foil and pie beads, and will continue to, but the dough seemed quite sturdy this time.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sourdough Research

/ Susie / Leave a comment
My Tartine bread project has spanned most of 2021. There have been many loaves produced: some quite successful and some rather less so. All of it has been edible and yummy, but it’s been both fascinating and frustrating to try to master this particular thing.

One of the issues that still puzzles me to some extent is how to know when the sourdough has proofed enough and not too much. It seems like something that could be described and explained in words, pictures, and/or video, and many have tried, but it still feels elusive to me.

I wrote earlier that I feel the particular qualities of a certain starter will have a big effect on the length of time that proving can take. To learn more about my three starters, I learned how to do time-lapse photography and took a 24-hour time-lapse video (20 seconds) showing when the starters peak, and showing the time and temperature each step of the way.

The three starters are:

  • TOP: Ken’s sourdough starter from Alaska
  • MIDDLE: A starter I created using the “pineapple juice method” (h/t Debra Wink in the Fresh Loaf blog community)
  • BOTTOM: A starter I created just from thin air, using all-purpose flour

During the spring when I made this video, I was in the habit of feeding the three starters once per day. Their behavior was relatively consistent each day, though the temperature in my house varies more it did in this video. Anyway, Ken’s sourdough peaks about 12 hours after being activated/fed.