If you had a bale pot (the kind that hang over a fire), the handle probably holds the lid on somewhat, though if you buried the pot that should solve the problem. My Dutch Oven has a curved enough lid I think it'd stay pretty secure, but I could see some lids getting pushed off onto the oven shelf with a big clang.
As to the butter question, you can make butter from sheep's milk, but I don't know what it'd taste like, I see it for sale online but I don't think I've ever seen it in a store. Maybe they had some cattle on their drives as well?
If you've never made Tuscan bread (no salt), making it is an interesting project, you'll learn a bit about yeast doing it. The bread is a bit bland on flavor but good for dipping in strong sauces, which is what it's intended for.
See Tuscan Bread
Years ago a friend took me to a Basque restaurant in Reno, served family style, you ate what they brought and there were several groups at the same long table. They served an interesting bread there, a huge loaf that you ripped off hunks of, this recipe looks like it might be close. I love the bit in the instructions for how to know when it is ready to bake, I suspect the recipe needs to be sized to your Dutch Oven fairly closely.
See Basque Sheepherders Bread
Let's pick a date and time for a virtual pizza party, maybe late next week or over that weekend? (That'd give everyone time to make and age some dough, get ingredients, etc. I think I'm out of mozzarella cheese, for example.)
I'll start researching the hosting options. My wife is fairly familiar with zoom these days.
Thanks for calling our attention to the article, Skeptic.
Most recipes are written for 2 1/4 tsp. yeast simply because that is the content of a yeast packet. The assumption is that most people do not want to open a pack of yeast and have it left open, especially as those little packets cost so much. With such recipes, I always would reduce to 2 tsp. I've since discovered that 1 3/4 tsp. works just as well.
One point the article does not address is the amount of salt. While salt in recipes is partly for taste and, I seem to recall, also for structure (I'm hazy on that), a lot of recipes are designed to deliver that one hour rise for the initial dough and another hour for the shaped loaf. Salt helps control the rise. Reducing the salt allows the yeast to work more effectively. So, if you are reducing salt in recipes, you can usually reduce the yeast as well.
Aaaron,, most breads require about 1 cup of starter. My cracker recipe, since I always double it (might as well, since my husband is a Snack-a-saurus), requires 2 cups. It's also great for pancakes and waffles--and I suspect you make a lot of those when they are on the menu.
I use a glass jar with a silicone or rubber seal and a metal clasp that holds it completely shut. I had started with a small jar, but you need room for the starter to rise and fall. I moved to one that probably has about 3 1/2 cups.
A peculiarity of my starter is that the directions said to feed it by volume not weight. However, I stopped never feeding it the equal amounts of milk and flour that I remove because it increased too much in bulk. These days, if I take out 2 cups, I feed it 1 1/2 cups flour and 1 1/2 cups milk. That keeps about the same amount. However, that is my starter; you will get to know what your starter needs.
I'd say start with the quart mason jar and see how much you use it. You can always divide it, feed it, and keep a second starter in another mason jar on the go if you need it or else get a bigger jar. You might even want to temporarily increase it for a recipe that takes a lot, then go back to a smaller jar.
There was an interesting discussion on flour mills on the BBGA forum recently, in doing some research I found that according to the national association for millers there are 166 flour mills in the USA, the largest of which can process over 3 million pounds of flour a day.
By comparison, there are 8 mills in France, and the average US mill process 13 times as much flour as a French mill. In general, the flour processed at a French mill comes from farms within a 60 mile radius, and the grower cooperatives decide which farmer grows which type of wheat, so that they will know what they have to work with when blending.
I recently got a small amount of French traditional T65 flour, along with two specialty flours, some Kapnor and some Campaillou. I'm looking forward to researching them some more then trying them out. (I think I know what T65 is, Kapnor appears to be a bread flour, Campaillou appears to be a blend of wheat and rye.)
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This reply was modified 6 years ago by
Mike Nolan.
Yes, I posted the Breakfast Cookies recipe. It's a very flexible recipe.
BakerAunt, I was so disappointed a few weeks ago when I had used up the rest of my cornmeal and it was on my grocery list. The only cornmeal in the store was Quaker brand. I always buy my cornmeal at that store (a large, but Eastern chain) and it comes in a bag, from a small mill, and is much better tasting (and better price) than all the other cornmeal choices. The best cornmeal I ever had was from a mill northwest of Chicago, when my son's 2nd grade class had gone on a field trip to the mill, and each students was given a bag of freshly ground cornmeal. It was wonderful.
Thursday night's dinner was soup. I had a bean and barley mix (expiration January 2019--hey, these things happen!) and I soaked it in salted water overnight and into the next day. I drained and rinsed them, before putting them in a 4-qt. pot to cook for 90 minutes, covered with about an inch of water. In a separate large pot, I sautéed chopped carrots and chopped celery, then added large sliced mushrooms. (The grocery has had these at a better price than an equal weight of the small ones, and they seem to have a more intense flavor.) I added cooked ground turkey that I froze after we had pizza, and 2 Tbs. Penzey's dried onion that I rehydrated in 1/2 cup water. I then added about 4 cups of the turkey broth and let it simmer a bit. I used 2 tsp. Penzey's Bouquet Garni and 1/4 tsp. fennel, and freshly ground black pepper. I added the cooked bean and barley mix and cooked until the vegetables were done. I added some additional turkey broth to get it to a good soup level. We had it with cornbread.
My Bob's Red Mill order arrived yesterday. I think that I was lucky, as I went back to their site last night and whole wheat flour was listed as sold out. If you need one of their flours, it probably pays to monitor the site. I was lucky to get the steel-cut oats and wheat germ as well.
Based on what I'm seeing from the Bon Appetit and Epicurious (aren't they owned by BA?) emails, banana bread, focaccia, and sourdough seem to be leading the online baking. I've not seen much on chocolate chip cookies, but surely they must be in the running for most popular Pandemic bakes.
For cooking, I've seen a lot of cheesy casseroles (comfort food) in Martha Stewart and Real Simple emails. Bon Appetit, of course, is coming out with the usual very strange main dish recipes that always manage to have an odd ingredient or two that is not easily available even in the best of times--unless you work in the BA test kitchen--that will probably convince most millennials NOT even to attempt to cook. I read comics online at Go Comics, and Luann is about to attempt an online stew recipe that had a long list of ingredients, some of which are rather odd, not to mention expensive. She must have gotten it from Bon Appetit.
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This reply was modified 6 years ago by
BakerAunt.
Actually, Chocomouse suggested the virtual pizza party, and I agreed with her. Maybe we could coordinate it with Aaron's weekly pizza extravaganza. I've been wanting to make a thin-crust pizza, probably just for me for lunches, as my husband prefers the thick-crust. I can see one with artichoke hearts, mozzarella, some onion, mushrooms, and maybe some sliced black olives. (You can tell that my husband won't be eating this one!)
When we moved from Texas to Indiana, I lost the people at the office and at church for whom I baked. Only about three of the houses on this stretch of road are permanently occupied year round. Other than mailing cookies to my sister and her twin daughters, I've had to wait for my stepchildren to visit, so that I can spoil them with their favorite treats. I miss the social interaction that I had at work and have yet to find some groups here. The community here at Nebraska Kitchen has been my one point of social continuity.
I've never been a fan of no-knead recipes, either, but there's an article in the latest Bread Lines (BBGA newsletter) that talks about Prof. Calvel's 'improved mix' idea versus the old French practice of "mix a little, ferment a lot". I think no-knead recipes might come close to that old practice in spirit.
I think one of the best set of baguettes I ever made was the time I was testing how many rises I could get out of the yeast, as there was a discussion underway that claimed you couldn't get more than 2 rises out of a lean dough without running out of sugars for the yeast to eat.
I'd let it rise for an hour, punch it down, let it rise another hour, etc. After 6 hours of bulk-rise, it was still rising just fine, and at that point I shaped, proofed and baked them.
I went to stopnshop this morning since I haven't shopped in a month (and I don't want to go for another month!!). Wearing that mask is suffocating and fogs up my glasses, but gotta wear it. I went in and over to the lunch meat display and a woman there asked if she was in my way. I said no, no, you're fine, thanks. Then she said 'I know you. How are you!?'. I said 'great. How r u?!'. I have no idea who she was. We all look like bandits. Lol. I worked 6 yrs at our town library so I see a lot of patrons in town and know who most of them are even with the mask on. But this nice lady, no idea. It's a strange new world.
When I take a pic with my iphone, I email it to myself, open it on my laptop and save the pic in my picture library. Then I can edit it (if I didn't already do so on the phone) and post it here. Once you do it a couple of times you will have the hang of it, it's really not hard to do.
We've got 2 iPhones, an iPad and a Macbook computer in the house (plus numerous PCs running Windows or Linux) and we can't figure out an easy way to get pictures off the iPhones, either, which is why I email them to my gmail account. When you email photos you get to pick from several resolution choices.
We are having a rainy Wednesday, which is good for those trees we had planted last Friday. I decided to make Barley Crispbread again, as the recipe has proved very popular with my husband as well as with me. At least they are large, so they are not scarfed down as fast as the cheese crackers. I have been refining that recipe from the Swedish baking book, which means figuring out what flours to use, reducing the salt, and ignoring directions that do not work in a home kitchen. I do not own a 40x40 cm baking sheet, nor would it fit in my oven. Today, I decided to replace the 100g of wheat flour, preferably stone ground and high in gluten, for which I have been using Bob’s Red Mill bread flour with 50% BRM whole wheat and 50% KAF high-gluten flour, as I want to conserve my bread flour and use up the three bags of high gluten flour that has been sitting on my shelf. Given that my mixer can’t handle this small amount of dough on low speed (and maybe not on any speed), and that trying to knead with the mixer meant 15 minutes of continuously stopping the mixer to re-adjust, which I’m worried may wear out the mechanism, not to mention my patience, I decided to do the 15 minutes of kneading by hand after I initially mixed up the flours and waters and mixed in the melted butter. What could be more low speed than that? As it is a clay-like dough, it was easy to knead. I have not kneaded by hand for a long time, and I’d forgotten how soothing it can be. The dough is now rising. If it comes out well, I may go ahead and post the recipe here at Nebraska Kitchen, since the adaptation I was forced to do, given the lack of explanation about flours and other matters really does make this recipe my own.
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This reply was modified 6 years ago by BakerAunt.
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This reply was modified 6 years ago by BakerAunt.
