Tuesday, 16 August 2016

Recipe: bread rolls

As my kids love burgers and hotdogs, just like any other kid :-), I sometimes make some rolls for burgers or hotdogs for them to have with their burgers or hotdogs.
Now this is not really a very good traditional, full of nutrition, recipe, but for special days I find that it serves as a good compromise. It has taken me quite a bit of experimentation to get to this recipe. The worst ingredient is white flour, the rest is actually not bad at all.

As for the ingredients, the sucanat that I use can be substituted with maple syrup, that would really taste nice. The butter can be substituted with bacon fat, which would be really tasty, especially when the sucanat is  substituted with maple syrup, just imagine the taste. The suggestions for substitutions are below the recipes.

Origin: my home

Difficulty: easy
Time: a couple of hours
Serves: a crowd
Yield: 16 pieces 
Vegetarian

Equipment: I like doing this with my bread baking machine as it frees time up for me to do other stuff, but of course it is totally possible to do by hand. You'll need:
  • oven
  • bread baking machine or
  • kitchen machine or
  • bowl and hands


Ingredients:
  • 6 grams / 2 heaped teaspoons instant yeast (I use Doves farm yeast)
  • 2 tablespoons sucanat (I use Biona sucanat), maple syrup or such
  • 690 grams / 5.5 cups / 1.5 pounds organic plain white flour (I use Doves farm plain white flour, bulk)
  • 1.5 teaspoons celtic sea salt (I use Le Guerandais Coarse Sea Salt)
  • 57 grams / 2 oz butter (I use Isigny Sainte-Mère butter, which I purchase at Costco), you can also use lard, beef drippings, ghee or such.
  • 375 ml, 1.5 cups / 13 fl oz milk
  • 1 egg


Directions:
  • When using a bread baking machine, put it all in in the order that I used and turn it on on the dough cycle. The bread baking machine will do all the rising and such, so you can right away move onto shaping the buns once the machine is done.
  • When using the kitchen machine, put it all in the bowl and turn the machine on, until you have a smooth dough
  • When doing it by hand, put it all in the bowl and knead until you have a smooth dough.
  • Let the dough stand for about 30 minutes to rise and relax.
  • Divide the dough into 12 (for larger rolls) or 16 (for smaller rolls) bits of dough, as equal as possible
  • Shape into either a rond (for burgers) or oval (for hotdogs) roll.
  • Put them on your baking sheet, they can be somewhat close, it doesn't hurt when they rise onto each other and get baked while touching.
  • If you like you can put some egg wash on them and top them with sesame seed or poppy seeds.
  • Let them rise for 25 to 30 minutes. Meanwhile preheat your oven to 200C / 400F.
  • Bake for 10 to 12 minutes.


Possible substitutions:
  • dairy - coconut milk
  • butter - coconut oil, tallow, lard, bacon fat, etc.
  • sugar - maple syrup, honey


Thursday, 11 August 2016

Knitting: How to knit a wrapped stitch

As I mentioned in some other posts I have made several videos lately ahbout various knitting hacks. This one is about knitting wrapped stitches. In socks, when you knit the peasant or boomerang heel, you end up with wrapped stitches all over the heel. Some with one wrap, but most with two wraps. When I first learned about it I found it fairly confusing and wished I could have seen in a video how someone does this. So I decided to make my own video about this.
I will add the links to the videos to my patterns as well, so that when people are looking for how to knit something they can just click on the link in my pattern and see how it goes. This way I do not have to check all the time whether the videos that I have used from others will still work, as sometimes they just leave YouTube. I've had that several times myself when I wanted to access a video that was mentioned in a pattern and I simply couldn't go there and had to look for another.

So here is the video:

I hope you enjoyed my video!

I would love to hear from you, please leave a comment, ask a question or ask me to make another tutorial video.

Knitting: How to cast on a toe-up sock

Recently I made yet another video, I made several because of a toe-up sock pattern I'm going to publish soon. I made these videos because I have seen many links to various YouTube tutorial videos in patterns that couldn't be found anymore on YouTube, so I figured I'd make them myself and add them to my patterns, so that I'm sure that they will simply be there when people click on the link of a video.



I hope you enjoyed my video!

I would love to hear from you, please leave a comment, ask a question or ask me to make another tutorial video.

Knitting: How to wrap a stitch

Recently I made a video about how to wrap a stitch. This is because I have written out my toe-up sock pattern and would like to show people how wrapping a stitch works. So I've put it on YouTube, and will share it on this post, so anyone can see how it is done.


I hope you enjoyed my video!

I would love to hear from you, please leave a comment, ask a question or ask me to make another tutorial video.

Knitting: How to make a stitch

Recently I made a short video on how to make a new stitch in between 2 existing stitches. It is hardly visible in the finished work. This is my favourite way of increasing.

I hope you enjoyed my video!

I would love to hear from you, please leave a comment, ask a question or ask me to make another tutorial video.