Search Results for '("C'

[kimbob]

I subscribe to Christina Lane's dessert for two newsletter and recently made a couple 6 inch layer cakes that were really good. I made her carrot cake for Easter and the chocolate cake for mom's 88th birthday. Since there are only 3 of us here (mom moved in with us 2 yrs ago), a 6 inch cake is perfect. Has anyone else tried her recipes?

[kimbob]

Hi. Didn't you have a recipe for wacky cake? I know there was one on the baking circle and I thought you posted it. I remember making it but now can't find the recipe. I suppose I can google it but would rather have yours (at least I think it was yours). Thanks!

[Mike Nolan]

We used up the last of the hot dog buns for supper tonight, I'll have to make some more soon, they were very good for hot dogs and made great hamburger buns. (This is the Hamelman 'soft butter rolls' recipe.)

I'm getting ready to take on another of the Ginsberg rye recipes, because I think my new rye starter is about ready for use, the pH was down to 4.65 this afternoon.

[Mike Nolan]

There are several different types of pre-ferments/sponges, varying mainly on how much water they have in them. It is common for them to use 1/4 to 1/2 of the total flour in the recipe.

Almost any yeast bread recipe can be adapted to use a pre-ferment.

Let's say your recipe calls for 30 ounces of flour overall and 20 ounces of water, which would be 67% hydration. I tend to like pre-ferments that are a little looser than the final dough, say, 75% hydration. I think the additional water gives the yeast a boost.

You could do a 75% hydration biga starter with 12 ounces of flour and 9 ounces of water, plus 1/2 teaspoon of yeast. (A poolish is wetter, such as 12 ounces of flour to 12 ounces of water, again with a small amount of yeast.)

A pate fermentee (old dough) is also a type of sponge you can make up the day before if you don't have a previous day's dough to work with. It will often have some of the salt in it, as dough from a previous batch would. (Not too much, it can inhibit or kill the yeast.) In fact, you can make up a big batch of pate fermentee and it'll keep in the refrigerator for up to 4 days. (After that it starts acting a bit more like a sourdough starter, which expects periodic feedings and starts to take on a sour tang.)

Whatever you use for the pre-ferment, subtract it from the total when making the final dough. If there's sugar in the recipe, you could add some of it to the pre-ferment, that will also give the yeast something to munch on.

Let it sit overnight, it should be bubbly by morning. I often add another 1/2 teaspoon of yeast to the final dough, but that's still less than half of what a recipe that uses 30 ounces of flour would probably call for, and probably less than a third of what a recipe written in the 50's would use.

I used to keep track of how long a pound of yeast lasted me, 2-3 months wasn't unusual. These days it is more like 6-8 months, because there's just the two of us and I've been making more recipes that use a pre-ferment or my rye starter so they don't require as much commercial yeast, sometimes none at all.

[BakerAunt]

I seem to recall that we did some discussion here (cannot recall what thread) about how many older recipes call for more yeast than is necessary with modern yeast. Thus, I can usually cut back a bit on the yeast in Bernard Clayton's recipes in his bread book. It can get tricky.

I'm very glad that I bought that 2 lb. package last December.

[Italiancook]

skeptic, would you please elaborate a little more on the sponge method you use. I assume you put the 1 teaspoon yeast in water and flour, but how much water and flour, & for how long?

Thanks, swirth, for bringing this article to our attention. I guess I made a mistake when I ordered the KAF gold yeast the same day it went out of stock. The limit was 2. I ordered only 1, because I didn't want to hoard. I wanted someone else to have yeast, too. I also thought the SAF red yeast would soon be back in stock. Now, I know it won't.

On the Ciao Italia show I mentioned a few days ago (pizza), Mary Ann Esposito stressed that people use too much yeast. I have a couple of quick recipes I don't mind experimenting with, because I think they're a lot of yeast for quick results. Generally though, I'm inexperienced enough that I'd hesitate to reduce the yeast in written recipes, especially the KAF ones. Does anyone have advice on this?

[Mike Nolan]

What's likely to happen is the producers of both flour and yeast are going to ramp up to fill the shortages in the distribution channels, but at some point demand is likely to slow down a little, and then they'll have to slow down a bit as the channels get full. I could see a second cycle of shortages a few months down the road, especially if a lot of the newcomers decide they like baking their own bread.

I don't really want a small jar of yeast, and certainly not the little paper packets, which are way too expensive, I'd rather buy a one-pound package, though I've still got one unopened package in the pantry. (I'll probably need to open it next month, though.) I've never had liquid yeast to try it, you have to buy it in large buckets and it has a very short shelf life.

I may have to try the Deb Wink/Jeffrey Hamelman raisin bread recipe again, it starts by putting some raisins in water and letting the yeasts naturally present on grapes go to town. I tried it once, but I got a grey mold, which, according to Deb's instructions, was probably Botrytis cinerea, the fungus often present on grapes that is responsible for the 'noble rot' that produces the finest dessert wines, like Sauternes. However, it won't make bread.

[Mike Nolan]

As I recall, KAF shut down their 2nd version of the BC in May of 2016. Swirth and a few others were saving recipes furiously during the month or so that KAF gave us to save stuff.

Zen set up a site, too, but it didn't get a lot of traffic and it looks like it hasn't had any activity since 2017. She supposedly downloaded all the recipes that people had posted on the KAF BC but I don't think she ever posted them to her site. I've emailed her a few times asking if she'd send them to me, but I never got a response. (I'm sure I could have figured out a way to process them and load them here.)

I think there were over 6000 recipes there, we've got about 2400 of them here.

Deb Wink was one of the more active posters on the first version of the KAF BC, most of that before I joined there. (I think I discovered it in 2005.) I've had a few email discussions with her lately, on sourdough, of course. I was hoping to take her sourdough class in March, but it got cancelled due to COVID-19.

[Mike Nolan]

Sorry about that, I'm never sure with WaPo and WSJ which things are behind their paywall and which aren't. (The Times of London is easier, aside from the front page, which has maybe a paragraph of each story, everything's behind the paywall.)

Here's another link that might work:
Ikea Meatballs

[Mike Nolan]

Bagels freeze fairly well, and toasting them helps, I find they're usually good for 3-4 days, so that's why I seldom make more than 9 smaller bagels (3.5 ounces each) at a time.

[RiversideLen]

One thing I don't like about bagels is they go stale fast. But when they are fresh, they are great. There was a bagel restaurant neat work, they had a wide variety of freshly baked bagels, 3 different kinds of cream cheese (plain, raisin and veggie). Used to love that place.

On Monday I made a batch of sandwich buns. This morning I made a cake using BRM gluten free vanilla mix. I seasoned it with a teaspoon of cake spice and topped with a ganache made from Ghirardelli semi sweet chips and milk. The taste is good but the cake came out a little tough.

[Mike Nolan]

This place (Supermarket Italy) has Caputo 00 for about $2 per pound, and if you order $50 or more shipping is free.

Supermarket Italy

[BakerAunt]

Thanks for asking, Aaron.

I have looked at two sites:

Home

https://www.bakersauthority.com/

The shipping is the expensive part, although it would actually be cheaper to buy a 50 lb. bag and pay shipping from these places than pay the Walmart price for a 50 lb. bag with free shipping. I don't know anything about these two sites or how backed up they are on shipping. I'm going to keep looking for a closer location to north-central Indiana.

A 50 lb. bag of whole wheat flour would be a storage challenge, but I could probably stuff the refrigerator with individual bags.

I wish that KAF and BRM could let us know when they might have flour back in stock to ship.

I put an order (not for flour) into KAF last Monday, so as not to lose my Bakers Bucks which was expiring, and I have yet to receive a notice that it has shipped. All items were supposedly in stock. I would have waited on the order, but KAF never managed to answer my question as to whether they would consider extending the expiration dates on Bakers Bucks, so I went ahead and ordered.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by BakerAunt.

[RiversideLen]

I made a pot roast (haven't made that in decades), barley and broccoli.

[BakerAunt]

I had a bag of cranberries in one of the two fruit and vegetable drawers in the refrigerator that should have been used long ago. I pulled it out and after sorting had about a cup of useable fruit. I have a favorite recipe for Cranberry Scones that came with my Nordic Ware scone pan. (It’s the same recipe that appears in Biscuits and Scones, by Elizabeth Alston, pp. 32-33). I recalled Skeptic making a faux scone with oil, and I decided to try adapting this recipe by substituting 1/3 cup oil for ½ cup butter. I usually make it with 1/3 whole wheat pastry flour, but this time I used 50% whole wheat pastry flour. I whisked the oil and buttermilk together for a minute until frothy, which is what I do for my pie crust, before adding the egg. I coated the scone pan with The Grease, baked for 25 minutes, then cooled in the pan for 15 minutes. That is how I came to have tea and a scone on Tuesday afternoon. Although it will never have the texture and taste of a butter scone, it is delicious in its own right, with a firmer texture than a muffin but still crumbly.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by BakerAunt.