My rye bread is excellent. Increasing the spices and pickle juice made the flavor perfect. The extra oil (in this case I used olive oil) and water also gave the bread a soft interior texture. It goes very well in ham sandwiches.
I baked my oil-based cranberry scones on Wednesday evening, so that I have some quick breakfasts for the freezer. I usually use half Irish Whole Meal flour, but this time I made it 2/3 of the flour. I also deleted the salt, given the amount of baking powder and baking soda.
I'll report tomorrow on the results.
I've made more errors rescaling recipes than I care to admit.
I find it useful to run the final numbers through a baker's math analysis tool I wrote several years ago whenever I've tinkered with a recipe. I can see if the hydration is where I expect it to be, if the fat/flour ratio looks right, salt content, leavening, etc.
Rewriting this tool to handle multi-stage recipes and possibly using the BBGA formatting structure, then making it generally available has been on my 'todo' list for a long time. (I was going to add nutritional analysis, but the USDA database isn't as useful as it used to be.)
I'm tempted to add a fat/sugar ratio for things like cookie recipes.
I baked the last of my dough and it was chilled but not frozen... Same, flat results. I'm going to figure this out because it tastes really good.
I'll make more dough and freeze it this time. I may also reduce the amount of butter.
Maybe I'll ask the folks over at the BBGA, too. I added a picture of my brown butter. It is unsalted, Trader Joe's. I wonder, too, if a different brand would work. In my laminated dough class they talked about about fat content. In Cook's Illustrated (this is going back MANY years) I remember articles about the shape of the crystals in the butter and how they were aligned. As you all has said, this stuff is complicated.
Thanks for your help and patience!
Like you all
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Butter is a fascinating substance, and the more I read about it, the less I'm sure I know about it. I recently read an article that claimed that creaming butter and sugar has no impact on a recipe, I'm not sure I believe that.
But my instructor at SFBI pastry school was absolutely convinced that freezing butter changes it in a way that impacts making laminated pastries, and I've seen several articles that appear to refute that claim. I did raise this question on the BBGA Forum, most of the professional bakers there say freezing butter has no impact on laminated pastries. It also appears to be the case that butter is often frozen by suppliers for long-term storage, so the butter you buy at the store may have been frozen long before you bought it.
When you melt butter, it separates into (at least) three components: Butterfat, water and milk solids. As far as I know, once you melt butter, there's no way to get it back to its churned state, which is a suspension of water and milk solids in butterfat.
Removing the milk solids produces clarified butter. Removing the water (and chilling it) produces ghee. I'm not sure if ghee has the milk solids in it or not, I suspect not. Ghee never gets very hard, even if chilled. I've never tried freezing it, though.
Browning butter is basically toasting the milk solids in the melted butter. I think the act of browning butter usually boils off the water.
It would be interesting to study the impact each of the over a half dozen different states of butter has on recipes, but I doubt I have the tools to do a serious scientific study along those lines, and the number of different sets of states to test is quite large. Even just testing the impact of butter that has never been liquified vs ghee would be interesting.
This is probably not that helpful to Aaron's shortbread issues, though.
I had to undo a couple of things I had added to help deal with bogus registrations. (I had to delete over 40 such registrations a week ago.) As soon as you find something to keep the hackers out, they find a way around it!
I don't see how brown butter (vs regular butter) would make much difference in how much the dough spreads, though.
I've looked at Brunswick stew recipes a few times, but I'm not sure Diane would eat it. She won't eat corn in vegetable soup or a stir fry (unless it is the baby corn that shows up in some Chinese take-out dishes), and corn is a common ingredient in most Brunswick stew recipes.
Our 'daily bread' changes periodically, currently it's semolina bread, but in the past it has been honey wheat bread (an adaptation of my mother-in-law's recipe that is in the favorites tab here), the Clonmel Kitchens Double Crusty Bread or the Austrian Malt bread, both are also in the favorites tab.
I'm found a top round steak in the freezer. So I pulled out my slow(fast) cooker. I cut steak up in chunks, threw in a couple of carrots, beef broth, onion soup mix, pepperoncini and some liquid from jar, honey and several spices from my larder. It was delicious. I think I tasted the broth a few times to makes adjustments.
There are some interesting interviews coming out about Rene Redzepi shutting down his world-famous restaurant Noma (in Copenhagen) next year. A pastry chef who worked for them said that Rene really didn't like sweet desserts but wanted ones that were 'craveable' and also used locally sourced products. Not sure I'd want to eat ants, though.
David Zilber, who ran their fermentation lab for several years and co-authored the Noma Guide to Fermentation, was kind enough to answer several fermentation questions I asked him on Instagram.
There are some interesting interviews coming out about Rene Redzepi shutting down his world-famous restaurant Noma (in Copenhagen) next year. A pastry chef who worked for them said that Rene really didn't like sweet desserts but wanted ones that were 'craveable' and also used locally sourced products. Not sure I'd want to eat ants, though.
My doctor did not even mention diet and wanted to go straight to statins. After nearly four years of trying on my own to do it with diet and exercise, I faced the truth that I could not lower it more than 25 points, which was not enough. I still follow the way of eating that I worked out for myself so that I can take a lower dose. While my husband missed the chocolate chip cookies (as do I), he was pleased to have his best numbers yet.
Most health sites start off by saying that toast with cinnamon can substitute for a cinnamon roll, or that a piece of fruit makes a satisfying dessert. Get real. Nutritionists who develop recipes focus on the "health" and rarely have the culinary experience to turn out a recipe that tastes satisfying.
I am not pleased with having to eliminate some recipes that I really liked--and that makes holidays, particularly Christmas, challenging. I miss sugar cookies and being able to use my vast collection of cookie cutters.
I have been able to adapt certain recipes, and I actually prefer my oil-buttermilk crust to the butter crust I used to bake for pies. It has been trial and error because. there is no resource for low-saturated fat baking. I have, on a couple of occasions, suggested to King Arthur that they consider developing recipes in that category, but they remain on the Vermont butter train. I would be more understanding of that choice, but given that they went all in on gluten-free, keto, vegan--and it is nice for those who need to or choose to follow those eating modes--I would think that they could spare some attention and development time for those of us who need to restrict saturated fat, which is likely a larger group, and probably one of the reasons so many people give up baking. I skim their weekly recipe emails; rarely, is there a recipe I can bake or even adapt to my needs.
It would be nice to have suggestions all in one place. I learned how to bake excellent oil-based cakes after reading some discussions in the old Epicurious/Bon Appetit emails (before they erected the paywall). I worked out oil substitution for butter in some recipes by googling it, reading different sites, and personal experimenting. I think it was Chocomouse who suggested 2% evaporated milk in place of half and half and heavy cream, and that allowed me to make the occasional quiche.
I will keep on experimenting, but in my frustration, I see the frustration of a lot of people who probably just give up because the resources are so scattered.
Joan--I always stir the hooch back into my sourdough starter as well.
On Wednesday, I baked pumpkin biscotti (Skeptic's recipe). I also baked a loaf of Pompanoosuc Porridge Bread in my Emile Henry long baker.
We had tomato soup and fried cheese sandwiches. Meals are usually fairly simple here, with a lot of comfort foods, especially while Diane is recovering from some kind of virus. (Not COVID, not flu, but something that appears to be making the rounds at the U of Nebraska.)
I made English muffins today. I used a new (to me) recipe from the Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook by Beth Hensperger and they came out great. I'll be using this recipe from now on, although I will try subbing in one cup of whole wheat in place of one of AP.
I made two loaves of pumpernickel. I used the dill pickle brine (no cucumbers) that I made with fresh dill 2 weeks ago. It worked fine, so I will make more to have a supply in the fridge.
