Baking misadventure on the weekend.

We have this old 5lb sack of cake & pastry flour in the pantry that has been there forever. I think we bought it by mistake one day. Anyways, we tried making some bread rolls out of it this weekend and the results were pretty bad - the flour wouldn't knead nicely and wouldn't rise properly, and then after baking they were dense, crumbling little bricks. Actually it reminded me a little bit of biscuits, so maybe I'll try a biscuit recipe on them instead tonight when I get home. Biscuits are supposed to be crumbly right?

Where are the bubbles?

I also tried making a yeast starter out of the cake flour and an old mostly-used jar of dry yeast - old as in years past it's stamped date, but it is just yeast after all. The only thing that would mean is that there is less live yeast and you won't get the expected amount of rising activity from it. But drop it in a starter and maintain it for a few days, it should become a viable yeast culture again right? There were a lot of recipes on the net about yeast starters, they basically all said the same thing - once started, they are virtually unkillable. Every so often, get rid of some of it somehow (bake with it or toss it out), and feed the remainder with some water and flour to make it it's original size again. Once a day if you leave it out, once a week if you refrigerate it. I will find out how it goes soon enough, if it works I wont need to buy yeast any more, haha.

We did pick up some unbleached all purpose flour so we could do some actual, successful baking as well: I made a batch of nice looking rolls, using the same recipe that the cake flour failed miserably with. What a difference the right flour makes. I used the recipe from here. The best part of this recipe is that there is no milk or eggs in it, cause we are always missing either eggs or milk.


Allen.

French Bread Rolls to Die For

Here it is in the oven
Here they're starting to brown
Here they are shortly before devouring

edit - the biscuit idea was edible but did not look too pretty - white as a sheet of paper even though fully cooked. I tried browning the top with the broil mode but it browned skipping the 'golden' part entirely.

This photo somehow looks better than the actual biscuits on the counter