Cookies are a combination of flour, sugar and fat (including eggs), and the ratio of the three is the major determinant on whether it is flat, crisp, chewy, etc. Alton Brown did an episode on sugar cookies that explained this very well.
Without looking at the recipe (and possibly trying it), I can't say for sure, but flat cookies generally have more sugar. Sugar melts in the oven (that's why it is often grouped in with the liquids in a recipe) and that causes the cookie to flatten out. Fat gets crisp, so cookies with more fat in them get crunchy.
I'm not sure refrigerating the dough would cause them to get flatter, though. That seems counterintuitive.
Tonight I made chicken thighs roasted on a bed of sweet potato, apple, onion and Brussels sprouts, with diced uncured bacon. The herbs were fresh rosemary, dried thyme and dried sage.
It was good but I think it can be improved upon. (I left out the garlic the recipe called for, of course.)
Next time I'll cut back on the onion, increase the amount of sweet potato and apple, cut the apples into larger pieces, and leave out the bacon or at least cut way back on it.
Finding the chicken thighs was almost the hardest part, and I wound up with bigger ones than the recipe called for (8 ounces vs 6 ounces). That increased the cooking time a bit.
It was about an hour and a half from start to ready to eat.
I have been working, off and on, to develop a non-butter maple cookie over the past two years. I want a cookie that I can imprint with the Nordic Ware Halloween designs (or other cookie stamps). I baked my recipe again on Friday, but this time replaced the canola oil with avocado oil and added a tablespoon of milk powder. I also mixed the dry and wet ingredients as if I were making a pie crust, and that resulted--perhaps along with the avocado oil--in more of a shortbread texture, which I like. My recipe made eighteen cookies, so I made six of each design (pumpkin, cat, spider).
We had a threat of frost earlier this week, so my husband picked any tomatoes that seemed ready, as well as our second hybrid spaghetti squash-pumpkin. (I need to cut one of those open and see if it is edible, and if so, for what.) Oh, my husband also found two more green beans! They will go into the soup that I am contemplating for this weekend.
I got my booster (Pfizer) on Saturday - my arm was a little sore and I had a minor headache but that was about it - the injection site is sore tonight, but we had a busy day at work.
I was in Harris Teeter yesterday. I’m surprised at some things that aren’t available right now, like my favorite flavor of salsa - they had the other flavors from the same brand. The pasta shelves have plenty, but not completely stocked - no orzo and hasn’t been there for a while. I needed AP and bread flour. They had KAF AP, WWW, organic bread flour and organic AP - no whole wheat or regular bread flour. I bought the regular AP and the organic bread flour which was a dollar off the price.
And, they didn’t have my favorite whole milk - organic valley
For lunch on Tuesday, and into the week, I made tomato soup—much better than the canned soup—and had it with a tuna sandwich.
Tuesday’s dinner was Crispy Oven Fish and Chips with Dill Tartar Sauce (recipe that I recently posted here at Nebraska Kitchen) with microwaved mixed vegetables.
Monday was a day for baking. It had rained all night, and it rained most of the day--nearly 3 inches. I had some zucchini that needed to be used, so I baked my adaptation of the squash bread in Ken Haedrich’s The Harvest Baker. I also baked my variation of the Shipyard Galley’s Zucchini Muffins that was featured in a King Arthur email years ago. I added some of my stash of cinnamon chips to both, as I need to use these up. I will freeze the four loaves of zucchini bread (baked it in a 4-loaf Nordic Ware Bundt pan). I made six of the muffins as large ones, and I will freeze those as well. I made the rest as 12 regular-sized muffins in Halloween papers for us to have for breakfasts this week. I baked the larger muffins a little too long, and the bottoms are slightly scorched, although they were not done when the smaller muffins came out. I should have checked them again after another two or three minutes rather than waiting five minutes.
For dinner on Monday, I made my sourdough pan pizza with the usual toppings. The tomato sauce was made from tomatoes from our garden, and the red bell pepper was grown in our garden.
I baked my focaccia today and the color is beautiful, but it did not rise very much on the end I cut into - it wasn’t as airy as it should have been and the crust is crackly.
I think I can figure out ALL the mistakes I made starting with the liquid, over mixing, then I think my first proof was too long and over baking.
So to start, Claire uses ADY and I have never figured out if you add the amount of proofing liquid to the liquid in the recipe - I googled it and could find it. I called KABC and asked the baker on the hotline. He said just follow the recipe without adding it. I’m wondering if I should have since the dough wasn’t very loose - ½ water for proofing + 2 ½ cups for the recipe an 6 cups bread flour. The dough wasn’t as loose as it was the last time I made it (I’m pretty sure I added it in). She says you can’t overmix it, but I thought maybe I had. Even though I marked the bowl, I do think it was overproved. Then I had to relax the dough twice for stretching in the pan. The overnight rise was fine, but since it’s hot and humid here, I may have left it on the counter a few minutes too long attempting to multitask.
I should have gone with my gut and switched it to the top rack after 20 minutes - it was golden and she said it should be brown - I know better for next time. We’ll still eat it and I nay still give part of it (the higher end) to my friend who I’m taking dinner to after her mom’s surgery on Thursday.
Italian Cook--I have a Cuisinart hand mixer, and I am pleased with it. Hand mixers are more powerful than they once were. Mine also has a whisk attachment, which is handy for whipped cream. There were two "kneading" beaters, but my experience is that the mixer really cannot do dough. I bought my mixer about 11 1/2 years ago, and the company honored the warranty when I had a beater issue within two years and replaced the mixer. (I did have to pay the cost of mailing it back to them, but it was worth it.) My Cuisinart replaced a less powerful Kitchen Aid hand mixer, but I keep the KA one as a back-up.
I had made some pizza dough last week, equal parts of semolina, durum, whole wheat and AP. I used the last of it for tonight's pizza (Italian sausage, onion, green pepper). I was able to roll out the dough very thin.
Here's the finished loaf of Altamura-style bread (100% semolina sourdough):
The oven spring was very good, the finished loaf is a little over 8 inches long, about 5 1/2 inches wide and over 3 1/2 inches high.
I wound up re-shaping it after it had risen for about an hour because it was flattening out too much, so I did a couple stretch and folds to tighten up the loaf and reshaped it back into a football shape. It still flattened out a bit with another hour of final proofing but the oven spring rounded it out very nicely.
Here's a slice:
The bread has a nice open crumb and is quite chewy, like one would expect from a sourdough bread, but it does not have much of a sour taste.
The taste is quite a bit different from the semolina bread I've been making using Hamelman's recipe.
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The other day, one of my co-workers was chatting with a guest and asked her if she had started her Christmas shopping yet. She replied that she wasn't going to shop for her family and go all out. But - what she was going to do was wait until November, buy up all the hot things she could find and put them up on eBay - Merry Christmas! (eye roll)
Tonight we had baked breaded fish (from Costco) and steamed broccoli.
On Friday, I baked my adaptation of Skeptic’s Pumpkin Biscotti. (Adaptation consists of using white whole wheat flour, reducing the sugar to 2/3 cup, cutting the cloves to 1/8 tsp., and adding 3 Tbs. milk powder.) I am grateful to Skeptic every time I bake this recipe, which is frequently.
The third edition of Jeffrey's book came out recently, I've got the first edition. I know he's revised some recipes (fixing some errors, including one in the semolina bread recipe) and adding some new ones. It's kind of pricey, but maybe not so much when compared to the Modernist series. Modernist Pizza just came out, and it only weighs about 30 pounds.
A new edition of Emily Buehler's Bread Science just came out, that one I may order from her (she self-publishes), she has a PhD in chemistry and does a pretty good job keeping track of the scientific literature on bread. I don't have access to all the technical journals, and I'm not sure I understand even half of the articles when I read them.
I'm still trying to get my head around the presentations on sourdough that were part of the Johnson & Wales bread symposium; much of what I thought I knew about sourdough appears to be wrong. The presentations from the symposium will be available on Youtube next year. When they're up, I'll post links to several of them.
