Now that the beds are cleared out, we can start thinking about our garden plans for 2021. I'm still deciding what plants I want to try to start indoors. (I won't use the Aerogarden for that but I do have grow lights that should work well enough again this year.)
On Wednesday, I baked “Soft Oatmeal Raisin Cookies No Butter,” a recipe from Jenny Can Cook. (I am grateful to Len for directing us to her website.) I made a double recipe and used white whole wheat flour in place of the AP and added 2 Tbs. milk powder and 1 Tbs. flax meal. I used the Zeroll #16 scoop to make 15 large cookies. I used regular (old-fashioned) oats, as the recipe did not specify. I found that I needed to flatten the dough somewhat before baking. I baked them on the third rack up in my oven (a little above halfway) and found that they needed 18 minutes, and I turned them around after 9 minutes. I taste tested a slightly warm one—yummy. These are big cookies, so a single cookie is satisfactory.
I made BA's crackers. I've been using the pasta roller and rolling the dough at room temp. I chilled it to see if I could roll it thinner. Not only could I not roll it thinner it cracked and shredded even at the "1" setting. So I warmed it in my hands and rolled it out on "2".
My second batch of whoopie pies came out nicely. I may add a little melted chocolate to the recipe to see what that does. I thought the filling was too buttery and not marshmallow-y (is that a word?) enough. Kate disagreed which was surprising because she usually favors sweet over butter.
I made sandwich bread again but haven't had a chance to make raisin bread. I'll get up early one morning this week and make it.
Joan--I have a 4-qt. Staub, a 5 1/2 -qt. Le Creuset, a 7 1/4-qt. Le Creuset (all of these are round), and an oval 8-qt Staub. Except for the 4-qt. (a good King Arthur sale), the rest came from Tuesday Morning years ago. I prefer them for all my soups, for cooking beans, and for braising roasts. I can even put them on the wood stove top to cook although now that I have my gas cooktop, I have not done so. I have never tried any of them for bread, although lots of people use them that way, and I replaced the Le Creuset lid knobs with metal ones, in case I ever decide to try it.
The Emile Henry Dutch oven is supposed to work over a flame as well, but I prefer to keep it for bread. I'm planning on trying some round loaves. Some people have reported sticking issues, but given my other ceramic bakers, greasing with Crisco and coating with farina does the trick for me. I won't be heating up the baker and dropping in the dough--too much risk/excitement for me. King Arthur reports that letting it rise in the baker and then baking works just as well. I'll start by following their recipes, then try it with the rustic sourdough.
Some years ago, I bought the Emile Henry ceramic Dutch oven from King Arthur. I had never used it, so I decided that it was time and brought it into the house about a month ago. While sorting through some recipes, I came upon a King Arthur one for Dutch Oven Dinner Rolls that uses this pot, so today I tried out both the recipe and the pot. I made some changes, as the recipe calls for ½ cup of butter. In the dough, I replaced the 4 Tbs. with 3 Tbs. olive oil and an additional tablespoon of buttermilk. I replaced ¾ cup of the water with buttermilk. I do not have non-diastatic malt powder, so I used 2 Tbs. Carnation malted milk. (I know, not the same.) I added 2 Tbs. flax meal and 1 Tbs. special dry milk. I deleted the buttermilk powder and used fresh buttermilk. I reduced the salt to 1 tsp. and the yeast to 1 ¾ tsp. I always proof my active yeast, and I did so in ¼ cup of water with ¼ tsp. honey. I let the bread machine do the kneading. The first rise took an hour. I greased the baking crock with Crisco instead of melting 3 Tbs. of butter in the bottom, and I also sprinkled it liberally with farina. I had some concerns, as the dough seemed a bit dry. After shaping the balls and placing them in the pot, I spritzed them with water. The second rise took 45 minutes (in the front room where the wood stove made it warmer). I spritzed again before baking with the lid on for 15 minutes, then removing it and baking another ten minutes. We had a couple of warm ones with dinner: delicious!
On Thursday, I baked my adaptation of Grandma A’s Ranch Hand Bread. (The recipe is posted here at Nebraska Kitchen, along with a recipe for a scaled down single loaf by Zen.) It makes three 8x4 loaves. I will freeze two. My adaptation includes adding ½ cup flax meal and 1/3 cup special dry milk, replacing 3 cups of the water with buttermilk, using 5 cups whole wheat flour and a mixture of bread and King Arthur AP, reducing the salt, replacing the 3 Tbs. of sugar with honey, and using 4 Tbs. olive oil in place of the butter.
I made another batch of yogurt on Thursday.
I also made soup, using Bob’s Red Mill Vegi soup Mix (a combination of split peas, brown and red lentils, and some barley), most of the chicken broth I made yesterday, and carrots and celery sauteed in olive oil with browned ground turkey. I rehydrated 1 Tbs. dried onion and seasoned with 1 Tbs. of Penzey’s Ozark seasoning and 1 Tbs. tomato paste. We had some soup with the leftover stir-fry for dinner.
A major reason Project Warp Speed worked was because the government authorized and helped fund the research and then GOT OUT OF THE WAY while the researchers did their work. They also short-cutted the approval process more than for any drug since the 1960's, I suspect.
The reason the distribution system has had problem is because at every level (federal, state and local) government officials feel they have to have some say or control over who gets what, where and when.
But even then, when it works, it works pretty well. We got our first shots yesterday (the Pfizer vaccine) and from the time we left the house until the time we got back home was less than an hour and a half, and that included time spent at the drive-through at Arbys picking up some lunch. There may have been as many as 200 people working the site by the time you count in traffic control, check-in, seeing a doctor then seeing a nurse to get the injection and seeing someone else on the way out after a 15 minute wait in case there are any reactions.
Probably closer to 15 ounces of cheese by the time you add in the 4 cheese blend that I sprinkle on top.
But keep in mind this pizza is 15x20, which is the equivalent of a round pizza that is over 19 inches in diameter.
Godfather's Pizza used to advertise that they put over two pounds of mozzarella on their large (16 inch?) pizza.
I've done par baking for pizzas that I cooked on the grill, but not the ones I do in the oven. I pre-heat the oven to 375, the pizza is on the bottom rack (on an upside down sheet pan) and I bump the temperature up by 5-10 degrees several times during the baking cycle (about 25 minutes) so that the lower element in my electric oven stays on. I think that does a better job of cooking the pizza from the bottom up.
Len - your pizza is a work of art!
Mike - is my math right? Are you really putting 14 ounces of cheese on your pizza? Your my hero!
Does anyone ever par-bake their crusts? I'm thinking about it for my veggie pizza where the raw veggies give off lots of water and for my sausage pizza where the sausage gives of lots of grease (I went back to Chicago method for my sausage).
I've now made two batches of whoopie pies. The first spread too much. I then noted that I had changes the recipe and added more flour so my second batch of cakes looks very nice. I'll make the filling tonight. Violet helped with the first batch but not the second because I had to make them quick and early this morning. I'll let her help with the filling.
I was going to bake some crackers but ran out of time. I'll do that tonight or tomorrow. The dough is resting right now.
I have my first COVID 19 vaccine this weekend! The scheduling system here is a mess! Badly thought through and I'm not convinced that federalizing it would have made it any better. Yes, I know how hard building a massively scalable scheduling system is (I've worked on them). But they came up with multiple new vaccines in under a year which is MUCH harder.
Joan--If you can get some flat wood slats, about 1/16-inch thick, maybe about 14 inches long, you can put them on either side as you roll the dough (slats should be under ends of rolling pin), and that will help get the correct thickness throughout. I have a set of "pie wands" that I use for that, but it should be possible to find some thin wood slats of the proper size at either a craft store or maybe a home store.
I'm glad you liked the crackers!
Great news Swirth!
My friend and I got our 2nd Pfizer today - much quicker than first shot. The nursing student who gave us a first shot (didn't feel it at all) did a better job than the school nurse who gave it to us today 😁 so it hurts a little more at the injection site. I asked and was told ice is better than heat, can take Tylenol, drink lots of water and take things easy.
Will has adapted the Baking Steel House Pizza Sauce first off by halving it. We currently use a box (13-14oz) of Pomodoro crushed tomatoes - we like then even better than the Muir Glen or HT Organic ones. He adds fresh garlic, 5 grams salt, an assortment of herbs - fresh and/or dried and red pepper flakes. He used it on our 4 10"-12" pizzas last night and still has some left over.
Baking Steel has since added oil to their recipe, but not necessary. The recipe is similar to one I was using years ago in Marion that I got from the Grilled Pizza book from Taunton Press (no longer have the book, but I know the recipe is on my old computer)
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This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by
cwcdesign.
Recently I've been topping pizza with artichoke hearts, mushrooms, tomato chunks, 8 ounces of whole-milk mozzarella, 6 ounces of havarti and a sprinkling of 4-cheese blend (parmesan, asiago, provolone and romano.) This for a 15x20 pizza.
My sauce recipe, which I'll post after the next time I make it, makes enough sauce to lightly cover 3 of these pizzas. I brush it on so it is pretty uniform.
I think sauce is more important in a stuffed pizza than in a deep dish one, and for a thin crust pizza you really don't want the sauce to overpower everything else.
Fellow BBGA member Peter Goulding posted the following on the BBGA forum:
This is not a bread topic but it may be one of concern for food preparation that deserves wide attention. There are no science citations but I’m paying attention.
In an article in the New York Sunday Times on February 21 by op ed columnist Nicholas Kristof (p. 7 in the Review section), he wrote a number of practical suggestions for daily life and healthy living including this:
“Above all, don’t microwave foods in plastic or topped with plastic wrap”
I've had intuitive concern about this for years so I’ve switched to glass. And that warning provoked me to wonder why the water in my sous vide container is always cloudy. See photo below.
There are only four sources possible for the cloudiness but the plastic bags are the obvious first suspects. I use Ziplock brand plastic bags so I wrote to the company to ask if they could explain the contamination. I noted that the cooking water temperature normally varies from ± 75° F to 190° F depending on the food being cooked.
The company’s excellent customer service wrote the following (partial) response:
“…the bags have not been tested for any type of water bath cooking including sous vide, so we cannot recommend using them for such purposes. Our bags have a melting/softening point of 149° F.”
I am going to switch to the bags being made by Anova - a company that is environmentally proactive and claims complete food safety for their products for sous vide cooking.
