Search Results for '("C'

[Mike Nolan]

How much cider do you use in a batch of challah?

I grew up in NW Illinois and the locals said some of the apple trees in the county were planted by Johnny Appleseed himself (John Chapman), though there's no evidence of that in the historical records. (He planted mostly cider apples.)

The u-pick orchard I go to that has the winesap apples I like lost its entire crop this year to one of the windstorms, so no fresh apples this year. They've had bad luck with weather, they lost most of their trees to a tornado a few years ago. I don't know if the orchards in Nebraska City have any winesaps this year, and they're 50 miles away. Maybe I'll check with them in a few weeks, winesaps don't get ripe until late September or early October.

I may have to do pizza on the grill again this weekend, yours looks really good, Len.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Len - that looks FANTASTIC!

Mike, BA,

I have not tried apple cider vinegar or boiled apple cider. We have vinegar so I can try that but I want things a little more stable and consistent before I start changing things up. I reluctant to start using an ingredient I can only buy from KAB and mostly only mail order so I'll probably just stick with straight cider.

We do have cider mills here. Many are seasonal but we're in apple season now so they should be opening. The bigger ones have cider all year. CT cider production went way down when we passed a law that the farms couldn't use apples from the ground. If I had to guess I would suspect that those places lose a lot of crop to little kids picking and dropping apples.

There are probably five or six farm stands within a few miles of my house. I've been volunteering at a local kitchen and I pass at least two on the way there (it's a five mile drive).

I need to find one I like and then buy a bunch and freeze it.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I've never seen piperade before. It seems like, as Choco says, it would be good any place you used tomato sauce. When we make our own we also try to sneak in some spinach just to get some into our kids.

Peppers and onions (usually sweet sometimes hot) are pretty common here with Italian sausage. Fry the all together. Standard fare outside Fenway before a Red Sox game. Tomatoes would be good addition to that.

[Mike Nolan]

When I put my plants in the ground, I make sure they have some fertilizer, I've been using Osmocote, it seems to be working OK for me, with the occasional calcium additions. I left the landscape cloth in place this spring, the previous year I pulled it up, tilled in several bags of peat moss, one bag of gypsum and one of bone meal and put the landscape cloth back down again. Next year I'll probably do that again, though the landscape cloth might need to be replaced by next spring.

We had a problem with tomatoes a few years ago that we thought might have been nematodes and/or cutworms, so I seeded the usual garden area in alfalfa and buckwheat for two years, then tilled that all in. I grew a few tomatoes in another area of the yard, most did reasonably well, but I didn't have space for all 24 cages. I went back to putting tomatoes in the primary garden spot 3 or 4 years ago.

I'm tempted to find another area of the yard to seed in buckwheat, it is really pretty when it blooms and the bees just LOVE it.

Our front yard is a mess, the heat a few years ago killed off a lot of the grass, probably because we didn't water it enough. (We did not put in a sprinkler system when we built the house, though there's a water line to the front corner of the house for that purpose.)

I'm thinking of putting in buffalo grass, a low-water native grass that one of the professors in my wife's department has been promoting; we've tried reseeding with fescue twice, neither took, don't know if it was bad seed or something else. What mostly came up was what my iPhone says is St. Augustine grass, which many northern gardeners consider a weed, though it is grown in the South, and it doesn't look too bad if you keep it short.

I wonder what a front yard of buckwheat would be like and what the neighbors and city would think of it? The listings say it isn't very drought tolerant, though. I may start using it to fill in some areas in the back where the grass won't grow, it is supposed to be a good cover crop for bare soil.

I should probably move this post to the gardens thread. :sigh:

[Mike Nolan]

Aaron, aren't there some cider mills near you?

This is kind of a strange idea, but have you tried apple cider vinegar in your challah? I've seen vinegar used in other bread recipes, notably the Clonmel Kitchen's Double Crusty recipe that Paddy L posted on the OBC years ago. (I wonder if she's still online anywhere, I know she had registered for this site but I don't think she ever logged in or posted.)

[Mike Nolan]

I just made a big batch of piperade (onions, sweet peppers and tomatoes) for my eggplant/zucchini lasagna, and it occurs to me that it might make a good pizza sauce.

Anybody ever seen a recommendation for that before?

[Mike Nolan]

Sprouted grain products (ie, malted grains) are more common in Europe than in the USA, where the grain most commonly malted is barley.

The malting process is probably something brewers are more familiar with than bakers.

For malted wheat flakes you soak the wheat berries until they sprout, which releases enzymes that start to convert the starch in the endosperm into sugars, among other things.

Then you dry the malted wheat and roll it into flakes. (Or grind it up into sprouted wheat flour.)

Why do you do this? Well, it adds some sweetness and usually a flavor that some might call nutty. It also changes the nutritional value of the grain.

Some sources say sprouted wheat flours store longer, but I'm not sure if that's accurate. Sprouted wheat flour performs differently when baking, too, I don't think it forms as strong a gluten matrix.

Being a whole-grain product could contribute to several of the above effects.

[Mike Nolan]

I need to practice some of my braids, too. I'm still mystified about the 6 strand one in the documentary movie, Deli Man, which is done like a 3 strand braid working from the center. Jeffrey Hamelman told me he thinks it is the same braid as the classic 6 strand one in his book, but I'm just stumped on how it really works. The way the movie is edited you never see one loaf from start to finish.

Thomas Keller has this recipe for dead dough (used for practicing braiding and shaping) in his Bouchon Bakery book:

500 grams AP flour
1 gram yeast
25 grams salt
325 grams water

Mix until smooth, around 15 minutes. Let it rest for about 15 minutes.

It can be refrigerated and reused. Discard when it becomes discolored or less pliable.

[BakerAunt]

We ran out of bread on Monday, and I wanted to move past my usual four recipes. I took the recipe I had worked out for Sunflower Oat Wheat Bread and altered it to use 1 cup of Harvest Grains and the last malted wheat flakes (1/4 cup). I baked it as two 9x5 large loaves, which are now cooling. One we will begin slicing at lunch tomorrow, and the other I will freeze for later.

[Mike Nolan]

Last night I got the steaks out of the fridge at 5:30, salted and peppered them on both sides, then let them sit (covered) until they went on the grill shortly after 6PM. They were excellent. About 4 minutes on each side and they were at about 158 internal temperature, and still quite juicy.

More than one of the 'restaurant kitchen secrets' posts has said that chefs will take the worst piece of meat they have and cook it to death if a customer orders a well-done steak, that's why Gordon Ramsay's challenge was so interesting to me.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks for the pie dough Mike.

My impression was that whole meat like steak could spend a little longer in the danger zone than ground meat. I know at Shake Shack they make the burgers in the morning and keep them by the grill in a refrigerator until they cook them. So they come from cold right to cooking.

I let steaks warm up some but I've never let it sit at room temp for four or five hours. And we would have advised customers against it at WF. We always offered to pack things in ice, too as did the cashiers and baggers.

I've seen several chefs say that a could chef can cook a steak to well done without leaving it burned to a cinder. I've never seen it done and my family likes medium rare so I aim for that (and I usually get medium).

[Mike Nolan]

My wife gave me an assortment of jars and cans of hot fudge. (We've been looking for some good hot fudge.)

[chocomouse]

I think he got your order, Skeptic, thank you. I have a lot of maple recipes; if you are looking for anything specific, just ask. My very favorite is a maple vinaigrette, a very light, not too sweet dressing for spring greens. I'm going to try a new recipe soon for roasted veggies (such as carrots, squash, parsnips) with warm spices (ginger, nutmeg) and maple syrup. You can always replace some of the sugar in scones, muffins, sweet breads, with maple syrup - and remember to brush a little extra syrup on them as soon as they come out of the oven. Maple is so good in most of our traditional fall foods.

[Mike Nolan]

We're having steaks on the grill, baked potato, sweet corn (probably), and salads with fresh Thousand Island dressing, with Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake for dessert. Oh, and probably some Crenshaw melon.

[Mike Nolan]

Water and kneading both develop gluten. That's why the vodka pie crust technique works, vodka doesn't bind with gluten. (I think oil also doesn't bind with gluten, which is why oil-based pie crusts work.)

You'd think there'd be other liquors that would be used with pie dough, but there really aren't a lot of those kind of recipes around, the flavored liquors must be too assertive. I've seen the occasional dash of rum in a pie dough, but that's about it.

Letting pie dough rest does relax what gluten there is, chilling it hardens the fat, which is also good.

The Kenji Lopez-Alt paste technique https://www.seriouseats.com/easy-pie-dough-recipe is worth playing around with, if only as a learning experience. I think it makes more of a mealy pie dough than a flaky one, we made both in pastry school (we also had to make pie dough where we cut the butter in manually with a chef's knife), the mealy pie dough was their preferred one for a bottom crust. I do a variant on it, reserving some of the flour until after the butter has been cut in, I think that preserves more of the flakiness. (He also developed the vodka technique when he was at ATK/Cook's Illustrated, but he can't write about it much because of non-disclosure agreements.)