Product Review: Hi-maize Natural Fiber

I seldom bake a straight loaf of white bread. I'm always looking for new types of flour, new grains, and interesting add ins. Sometimes it's just a random mad addition when I look into the fridge and pull out some leftover item and toss it into the bread.

And sometimes there's an actual plan. Like when I find a new ingredient, and that's all I add to my basic recipe to see what the result will be.

King Arthur Flour is one of my favorite places to order baking supplies. The service is good, the selections are interesting, and customer service is great. And I'm always finding new things to try.

When I saw Hi-maize Natural Fiber on the King Arthur website, I had to try it. After all, fiber is a good thing, and although whole wheat bread can be tasty, sometimes you just want a nice loaf of white. And according to the King Arthur website, a loaf of bread baked with this stuff can have more fiber than a loaf of whole wheat.

Hi-maize, according to King Arthur Flour, is made from corn, it's actually a corn starch, but it's made from a different strain of corn, so the starch isn't digestible the way regular corn is, and it behaves like the fiber in whole wheat. So, okay, it's good for you. Now what?

The Hi-maize fiber looks a lot like cornstarch. Same color and texture. Not something that I normally toss into bread, even on my craziest day. But it's made for baking, so in it went. When I first added it into the bread dough, the texture of the dough changed. It got sort of spongy and marshmallowy and fluffy. Which is quite odd in a bread dough where you're looking for a shiny, stretchy dough.

After some kneading, though, the fluffiness disappeared, and the dough looked like any normal bread dough. The rising and the punching and the shaping and the baking was pretty unremarkable, as well. I added some sesame seeds to the top of the loaf, and slashed and got a nice oven spring. All still pretty unremarkable.

The bread itself was, well, it was bread. The Hi-maize didn't seem to change anything at all in terms of taste or texture. Which in this case is probably the most desired result. I ended up with a nice loaf of white bread with all the fiber of a loaf of whole wheat. Not bad at all.

I'm curious to see what Hi-maize will do in other baking recipes. That fluffiness that I noticed might be an asset when making cakes or cookies or muffins, or it could be a disaster up here at high altitude. More experiments await.

Making Vinegar

One of my cooking goals is to make as many items from scratch, at least once. Not that I’m going to keep on making these things forever, but I want to know how the food I eat is made.

Some things, I continue making. Others, it’s a one-time event. And some I’ll buy sometimes and make other times. Vinegar falls in that last category. Yes, vinegar. It’s not hard, once you capture a mother.

A mother is what turns wine into vinegar. The mother is composed of cellulose and a bacteria. It’s the bacteria that turns the alcohol into acid, thus creating wine vinegar. As far as the cellulose, I haven’t a clue why it’s there or where it comes from. But that’s the information I found online.

The first step in making vinegar is finding an active mother. It took me over a year to find one, but I’ll admit that I wasn’t going to great lengths to find one. Bragg’s apple cider vinegar claims on the label that it contains the mother, but I used up two bottles of it without ever seeing the slightest hint of anything.

Then one day I was pouring out the last bit of a wine vinegar onto some lettuce, and a slimy blob landed on the lettuce. At first, I thought “yuck” but then I realized I had a mother.

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Danish Pastry Dough

Danish braid with almond paste with a coffee-almond drizzle.

When I was a kid, my mom would get "coffee cakes" from a local bakery. They came in a long paper bag, and they were crisp on the outside, buttery and flaky inside, and filled with something that was sweet and nutty.

Mom called them coffee cakes, but they were really Danish pastries filled with almond paste.

There are a lot of different forms that a Danish can take - there the long, large pastries that mom used to buy, along with individual triangle-shaped turnovers, squares, or fancier shapes.

The pastry is flaky and buttery, something like sweet croissant. But then they're filled with interesting things, and usually drizzled with icing, and maybe sprinkled with almonds or pearl sugar

For years, I went hunted for coffee cake recipes that might turn out like the ones I remembered from my childhood. But they were always ... well ... cakes. When I discovered the recipe for Danish braids,  I figured I'd give it a try. When I tasted it and realized this was the "coffee cake" of my childhood, I was giddy happy.

Sour cherries in a Danish.

This is a pretty long recipe, so I've broken it up into several posts. It's not terribly difficult, though, if you take it one step at a time.

This first post is just for the pastry, the next step is in this post, which covers fillings, and then folding and baking. Then, in this post, you'll find instructions for making a Danish Braid, which is one of my favorite forms. And the braid looks impressive.

The photos here are some of the Danishes I've made, including those filled with almond paste, lemon curd, and sour pie cherries. I've also done peach, apple, chocolate, blueberry, and pineapple. Some included a pastry cream with the fruit.

The options are endless, limited only by your imagination and your taste.

The sugar in this dough makes it a little bit sweet, but it's not so sweet that you couldn't use this for a savory recipe. I've used it to make Reuben Danishes, filled with corned beef, sauerkraut, and Swiss cheese and drizzled with Thousand Island dressing.

Danish Dough
Adapted from a recipe by Beatrice Ojakangas in Baking with Julia written by Dorie Greenspan

Lemon curd-filled Danish.

1/4 cup warm water
2 1/4 teaspoons (one package) active dry yeast
1/2 cup room temperature milk
1 large egg at room temperature
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 cups (11 1/4 ounces) all purpose flour
2 sticks butter*

Put the water and yeast into a large bowl and let it sit for a few minutes to soften. Add the milk, egg, sugar and salt. Whisk to combine and set aside.

Put the flour into the work bowl of your food processor. Cut the butter into chunks – about 8 chunks per stick, and drop them into the food processor. Pulse until the butter is cut into pieces about 1/2 inch diameter. Don’t get carried away – you want fairly large pieces.

Empty the food processor into the bowl with the wet ingredients and fold gently with a rubber spatula, just until all the flour is moistened. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge. At this point, it can rest overnight or as long as four days.

Cherry danish with sliced almonds and a drizzle of icing.

When you’re ready to work the dough, lightly flour your work surface and dump the dough out. Dust it with a little flour to keep it from sticking, and pat the dough into a rough square shape.

With your rolling pin, roll the dough into a square about 16 inches on each side. You don’t have to be precise, but if you get close to this size, the dough will be as thin as it needs to be, and that’s the key.

If you need to add more flour to the work surface or rolling pin, do so sparingly. Work quickly, but not frantically. If the room is warm and the dough gets too sticky or the butter seems to be getting soft, quit rolling, wrap it in plastic, and put it in the fridge for a little rest.

Fold the dough into thirds, like a business letter. Roll the dough again, into a rectangle about 10 inches by 24 inches.

Fold in thirds again. Roll to about a 20-inch square. Fold again, like a business letter.

One more time, roll into a long rectangle, about 10 inches by 24 inches. Fold in thirds, wrap it in plastic, and stash it in the fridge.

At this point, the dough should rest for at least 30 minutes before you shape it and bake it, or up to four days. Frozen, it will keep up to a month. Each batch of dough will make two Danish Braids or eight individual pastries.

Notes: 

I’ve sometimes added vanilla or almond extract to this dough, depending on what filling I have in mind.

*The original recipe calls for unsalted butter, but I prefer it with one stick of salted and one of unsalted.