Sacaduros

The blog’s been quiet for a couple of weeks. Sorry about that! I spent one weekend judging robots at FIRST robotics, then the next one, mostly recovering from a cold that knocked me out for a couple of days. On Sunday, I managed to make this month’s recipe for the Bread Bible baking group, and did a little flour mill maintenance at the same time! I’ll catch up with the Baking Bible group at some point – I’ve now missed birch meringue twigs and ChocolaTea cake. I’m sure I can find some excuse to make those.

I made chocolate chip cookies this weekend, too, and noticed that my mill seemed to be a lot slower than I remembered. So, I took it apart.

I only ended up really needing the screwdriver, the Allen key, and the pliers (not needle nose). Once we figured out that the bottom stone was a slip fit, it was easy to get out.

In the picture above, you can see the difference between the clean stone, and the dirty one. Flour was really caked on there. Now that I know how easily it comes apart, I’ll do better at regular maintenance.

The amount of flour that was caked on to various parts of the mill shouldn’t have been surprising, but for some reason, I hadn’t thought about it.

The stones each come out of the plastic parts, and there’s a flexible plastic sleeve that the bottom stone sits in, with an opening out to the chute. The bottom stone has a brush on the bottom to sweep the flour out the opening, too.

All that to get a couple of tablespoons of fresh whole wheat flour to make the dough for basic hearth bread, to make sacaduros. 🙂

I let the dough rest for a fairly long first ferment (sponge stage), but after I mixed it up, I used it right away. The recipe didn’t really specify, so I just went for what was easiest for me.

The shaping for this basically involves folding dough around a small cube of butter and salt. What could be better than that?

Dunk them folded side down in flour, then bake. Easy peasy. Except most of the butter leaked out, and the folds didn’t really open like I think they were supposed to. Oh well?

These made a great side for the beef stew that we had for supper on Sunday, but I’m not sure they turned out “right”. I found them rather chewy, which was probably due to the lack of time I gave the dough. I probably should have let it go through the regular rising processes before shaping. Nancy got something that looked closer to “right” to me, and Kim has some lovely pictures of the process.