Bread recipes written in baker’s math format can be intimidating. How do you know how much of each ingredient to measure out? I think recipes written in baker’s math format are easier to use once you know how much dough you want to produce, which is almost always the case in a commercial bakery. If they…
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The Pie (Dough) Chart
Or, How to make the right amount of pie dough regardless of your pie pan size. If you’ve ever wound up with a bowl full of extra pie dough cut off the edge or had to roll your pie dough really thin to get it to fill the entire pan, this article is for you. Pie dough…
Beginning the low-salt journey
A week ago my cardiologist put me on a low salt and restricted liquids diet. Yesterday was my first trip to the grocery store since this life-changing event, and I have to say I’m both depressed and frustrated by the limited options available to me and the millions of Americans like me who need to reduce…
Getting Seeds to Stick to Bread
In a recent thread on My Nebraska Kitchen, the issue of how to get seeds to stick to bread came up. So, today I tried an experiment. I made a batch of Chicago-style hot dog buns (the KAF recipe), making 12 buns. (We like our buns a little smaller than what the recipe suggests.) I divided…
Aspen House Restaurant — Great Dining in the High Plains
Rawlins, Wyoming, is not the sort of place where you’d expect to find a great restaurant, but we did. The Aspen House restaurant is in an old Victorian-style house built in 1905 that has been converted into a restaurant. The room we were in was probably a parlor or breakfast room, although it may have also…
Gravy — the real Mother (and Father) sauce
Classically trained chefs, please stop reading this column now. OK, you’ve been warned. In classic French cooking there are five mother sauces, as first set forth by Marie-Antoine Carême and later revised by Auguste Escoffier: Béchamel, Velouté, Espagnol, Tomato and Hollandaise. These are called mother sauces because they’re the starting point for hundreds of sauces. James…
Uncle George and the (Pepper) Dragon
A Christmas tradition in my wife’s family is to serve oyster stew on Christmas Eve, with the men doing the cooking. For years, this task fell to my wife’s Uncle George. One year he was humming along, the oysters had been butter poached, the milk was nearly hot enough, and he reached for the ground…
The Butter Did it–The Art of Reading Cookbooks
Most people have a few authors or genres that they prefer to read, often reading the same book many times. I’m fond of the novels of Tom Clancy and Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children series, for example, as well as the Emma Lathen mysteries series and the works of Ayn Rand. But I’m also fond of reading…
Published:November 20, 2016 View Post
My Kind Of (Restaurant) Town
One of the best parts about spending most of a week in Chicago for Chocolate Boot Camp was that Chicago has always been a town that I’ve enjoyed eating in. It’s never really been a ‘fancy restaurant’ town, even though it has two restaurants that have earned the elusive three-star rating from Michelin. Chicago’s more…
Published:October 18, 2016 View Post
My Week At Chocolate Boot Camp — Day 4
It’s day 4, the last day of Chocolate Boot Camp. (Most Chocolate Academy courses are three days long, but this is a four-day course, because there’s so much material to cover. Click here to read the report on Day 1 and Days 2 and 3.) Today we need to finish everything, and there’s a lot…
Published:October 16, 2016 View Post
My Week At Chocolate Boot Camp — Days 2 and 3
Day 2 of Chocolate Boot Camp started out pretty much where day 1 left off, tempering dark chocolate. (Here’s Part 1 of this series.) On the table in the morning, using the seed method in the afternoon. I figured out what I did wrong with my seed method batch on Monday, I misread the scale, so I…
Published:October 15, 2016 View Post
My Week at Chocolate Boot Camp — Day 1
Chocolate is something I’ve dabbled with over the years, covering home made candy (especially sponge candy) with milk chocolate, for example, but I really didn’t know anything about working with chocolate, much less making items that would look professionally made. Well, to correct that, I recently attended the course called ‘Chocolate 1.0 — Discovering Chocolate’ at…
Cooking an Eye of Round Roast
If you do a search on how to cook eye of round, one of the most commonly suggested methods is to preheat the oven to 500, salt and pepper the roast, drop the temp to 475 and cook it for 7 minutes/pound, then turn the heat off and let it coast for 2 1⁄2 hours…
The Cutting Edge or How Sharp is your Knife?
Take your best knife out and look at it closely. How sharp is it? Probably not as sharp as you think it is. Here’s one of my favorite knives, a 7 1⁄2 inch Chinese cleaver: Looks pretty sharp, eh? Let’s look at it a bit closer, at about 3X power: Still look pretty sharp? Let’s try it at 150X power:…
Delicious Liasons — the Science and Art of Thickening
Liason. The very word conjures up images of entanglements, and well it should, since it comes from the French verb lier, to bind. In cooking, a liason is something added to a liquid, like a sauce or a soup, to bind or thicken it. There are two basic kinds of liasons–starches, like flour, and proteins, like egg. Both…
Vinagrettes — Traditional and not-so-traditional
The textbook definition of a vinagrette is a suspension of an oil and vinegar, an acid, possibly with other seasonings in it. Sometimes, depending on what you add, it becomes an emulsion rather than a suspension. (A suspension usually separates, requiring it to be stirred or shaken again, an emulsion doesn’t, because there’s an emulsifier…
Things they don’t tell you about home grain milling
A few years ago I received a Nutrimill machine as a Christmas present from my older son, along with a big bucket of soft red wheat berries. As Christmas presents go, it’s probably been one of my favorites over the past 25 years, certainly one that opened up a new world for me. Milling my own flour…
No Garlic, Please!
“Hello, my name is Jeff, I’ll be your server today.” “Hi, Jeff. My wife has an allergy to garlic, can you tell me what’s safe for her to eat?” “Gee, I’ll have to check with the kitchen, what are you interested in?” “Can you check on today’s soup, on the fish, on the chicken and on today’s special?” A…
Published:May 14, 2016 View Post
Welcome to My Nebraska Kitchen
Welcome to My Nebraska Kitchen! We are a site for discussing cooking and baking that is functional, easy to use, entertaining and informative. Available Now: A Discussion Forums area. A number of the people who were active in the King Arthur Flour Baking Circle are reading and posting on this forum, but it is open to any…