The number that we always use in school was that a KG was 2.2 pounds (Google says it is 2.20462, to be precise), so logically a pound should be a little less than half a KG.
What are you cooking this first day of Daylight Savings Time, or Not Daylight Savings Time (for states not observing it)?
We were going to have pork chops, but the package has not yet thawed, so we will have leftover soup and cornbread.
Earlier in the week, I sorted through a stack of recipe pages, discarding the ones that dietary restrictions will no longer allow me to make. Sigh. About half the stack went into the trash, but I found some promising recipes as well. On Saturday morning, I baked “Walnut-Topped Spice Cookies,” from the “Too Busy to Cook?” column of a February 1999 issue of Bon Appetit (p112). It’s a Sephardic recipe, submitted by Rebecca Levy from Los Angeles that uses vegetable oil.. I followed the recipe ingredients, although I suspect that my 1 Tbs. of natural creamy peanut butter may not be the same as her 1 Tbs. creamy peanut butter. I used a Zeroll cookie scoop (#40). Instead of topping each cookie with a walnut and brushing with egg glaze, I used a shamrock cookie stamp dipped in fine sugar. The recipe made nineteen, and they baked well in the time specified. With 9g saturated fat total in the recipe (8g from the oil and 1g from the peanut butter), they are fine for a serving of two each, and they are COOKIES! I let them cool on the baking sheet. They are delicate, so I did not stack them when I put them in a container. We each had one tonight for dessert. They have a pleasant “sandy” texture, and the combination of a little peanut butter, almond extract, cinnamon, and cloves combine beautifully while still being distinct. I will definitely bake these again.
I usually make 5-6 quart of chicken stock at a time, next time I might try all 3 methods of clarifying it (egg white, methylcellulose F50 and freezing it) and see how they compare. Just what I need---another project. 🙂
Mike--My cooking post (for Thursday) disappeared. Again. The posts seem to disappear after I edit them, but not always.
I made soup for Thursday night dinner. I had a package of Pereg Soup Mix (Pereg is a natural foods company that has been around since 1906), which I had picked up at T.J. Maxx, then forgotten about. It’s a mix of barley and various kinds of beans, with an expiration date of fourteen months ago. Oops. I’d used another expired package a while back, and I had trouble softening the beans, despite lengthy soaking. So, I grabbed my newly purchased copy of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Food Lab and read that beans should be soaked in salted water and cooked in salted water.
I used about 1 Tbs. coarse salt for the soaking, which was about 14 hours by the time I got around to them. I drained them, then used another 1 Tbs. coarse salt in the water in which I cooked them. I had beautifully done beans and barley in an hour. In a separate, larger pot, I sautéed carrots, celery, half a leftover red bell pepper, and mushrooms in olive oil. I added three cloves minced garlic, then ¼ cup Penzey’s dried onion re-constituted in 1 cup chicken broth. (That’s my workaround, since my husband seems to do ok with dried onion.) I added leftover browned ground turkey from the pizza earlier this week, and some more chicken broth. I seasoned with 1 Tbs. Penzey’s Bouquet Garni and 1 tsp. of Penzey’s Forward (salt free substitute of spices to use instead of salt). I simmered it for 15 minutes, then added the bean mixture, along with freshly minced parsley, and let it simmer for 40 minutes. It has fabulous taste, but it is a bit salty from how I cooked the beans, so perhaps I’ll use somewhat less salt next time. (The Food Lab does not specify how much salt is needed to get the good result.) We ate it with cornbread.
-
This reply was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by
BakerAunt.
That's a lot of pizza, they look great, too!
Epis are fun to make and eat, and in some ways easier than baguettes, my baguette slashes need work, I'm not sure if it is a dough issue, a tool issue or a technique issue. Maybe I'll get a chance to take a baguette class some day. (I was scheduled to take one the weekend ahead of my pastry course at SFBI but it was cancelled, probably insufficient registrations.)
With epis you need to cut about 3/4 of the way through, so they are still connected but not by a lot of dough. A challenge with epis is they have to be far enough apart on the baking sheet that the 'grains' on adjacent loaves don't touch each other.
When I took my pastry class at SFBI, the production staff invited me to come roll out some baguettes during a lunch break, I wasn't as fast as they were but I think mine looked pretty close to theirs. Their pre-shape technique was different than mine. I flatten the dough into an oval, fold the bottom up to the middle, fold the top down to the middle then fold the bottom up to the top and seal. They flatten, then fold the bottom up to the top 3 times, then seal.
Getting a baguette that is pretty uniform in diameter down the length is the real challenge, you don't want one that looks like a snake that swallowed several mice.
Welcome back, Chocomouse!
On Wednesday, I made another batch of Wholegrain Maple Granola. (My husband is snacking on it a lot.)
I also made up dough for another batch of his favorite snack foods, my lower-saturated fat Whole Wheat Sourdough Cheese Crackers. These, however, won't be baked for 4-5 days, which improves the flavor of the dough.
My third baking project on Monday was to bake Barley Crispbread for a second time, using as its basis Jan Hedh’s recipe—with my guesses as to what the flours should be. With barley and rye, topped with sunflower seeds and sesame seeds, it is very tasty and mostly wholegrain. I cut the salt back from 18 to 10g this time, as when I first baked it, my husband and I both disliked how overly salty it was. I also changed the mixing directions a bit, so it wasn't quite as bad to knead, although I was still stopping the mixer and adjusting the dough over the 15-minute period.
I also roll each dough half to 40x36 inches, as I do not have a baking sheet or an oven would accommodate a depth of 40 inches. The 40-inch length of the pan just fits.
-
This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by BakerAunt.
My wife says the triticale breads are going over very well, several people have come back for more pieces. (She did take in some butter this time.)
The professor who gave us the triticale liked it, too, and interestingly enough he'd not had anything made with triticale before.
I was happier with one of the epis than the other, and the baguette wouldn't have done well as a competition bread, the slashes were too uneven and there wasn't a clean 'ear' on any of them. The fendu came out very nice. Two of the shapes were new for me and were definitely learning experiences, but shaping bread is something I enjoy doing, and it still amazes me how much shape influences taste.
A few years ago I got into braiding breads, and I braided just about everything for several months, until my wife started complaining. (Braided breads tend to have shapes that don't make good sandwiches for things like sliced meats.)
I saw a suggestion in Marcy Goldman's book A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking to make a braided challah but put it in a loaf pan, so you get a nice square bottom but the braided top. I may try that.
A friend of ours is downsizing and brought a bunch of stuff over for my wife's annual Memorial Day garage sale. We got to talking about bread and she's never had challah, much less used it for French toast, so there will probably be challah on the schedule soon.
Pictures from today's bread shaping with triticale dough.
Here are two epis de bles and a baguette:
Here's a boule. (Not much different than the ones from two weeks ago in appearance).
Here's a fendu, I think this one came out fairly nice.
Here's the fougasse, the cuts on the sides are supposed to go all the way through like the one down the middle did. This increase the amount of crust, which I think is largely how shape impacts flavor.
And here's the auvergnat, from two angles:
Attachments:
You must be
logged in to view attached files.
Two of my shapes didn't come out as well as I would have liked, the auvergnat fell over and the fougasse was sticking to the parchment and didn't get spread out as much as it should have after making the cuts.
I've tried searching for pictures of an auvergnat loaf, the the only ones I can find also appear to have fallen over, so maybe that's not unusual. I remember having problems at first getting a two-layer celebration challah to not fall off to one side, I'll definitely have to try this shape again. My wife likes the way it came out, she thinks it looks somewhat like a lion. (She collects lions, that's her sorority's mascot.)
Next time I may try shaping the fougasse on the work table and transferring it to the pan after stretching it, or perhaps putting it directly on the sheet pan or put some corn meal on the parchment first so the dough doesn't stick down so much. Live and learn.
I'm still taking pictures, I should have them posted later tonight or in the morning.
The 20% triticale dough was very tasty, we ate one of the epis with our onion soup for supper. Most of the bread will be going in to my wife's office in the morning, this time she's going to take some butter and a knife to cut it, especially the bigger loaves.
How much does an average size banana (8 inches) weigh, not counting the peel?
[See the full post at: Daily Quiz for March 3, 2020]
I look forward to seeing those pictures, Mike.
On Monday, I baked a new recipe from the online Bon Appetit February newsletter for Earl Grey Yogurt Cake:
https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/earl-grey-yogurt-cake:
I had waited to bake it until there were some reviews, as I thought the amount of oil in the recipe excessive. There were about ten reviews, and about half of them stated that the bread was oily, and a number commented on how long it took to bake and that the center did not bake well and also fell.
I proceeded to change around the recipe. I used a Kaiser loaf pan that is 10 x 4 ½", measured at the top, and 8 ½ x 3 ½", measured at the bottom; it’s 3” deep. I used the Grease and did not do the parchment sling, of which the magazine staff is perhaps excessively fond, considering that the original recipe also called for oiling the pan.
I used half AP flour and half whole wheat pastry flour. I replaced the kosher salt (not a good idea for baking, people!) with ½ tsp. sea salt and added 2 Tbs. Bob’s Red Mill milk powder. I ground the Earl Grey with my mortar and pestle, but some larger pieces did remain. I reduced the vanilla by 25% to 1 ½ tsp. (People in test kitchens with access to expensive ingredients can go wild. The rest of us like to determine if it is necessary.) I switched to my cake whisk when incorporating the flour. I baked it on the third rack up in my Wolf oven, and it tested done after an hour. I let it rest for 15 minutes in the pan, then turned it out onto a rack to cool. The batter nicely filled the pan, and I didn’t have the center sinking that some reviewers reported. I’m not planning to sample it until tomorrow, at which time I’ll comment on taste and texture.
I'm making semolina bread this afternoon and will probably be making a large batch of pate fermentee tonight so that I can do some more triticale tests tomorrow. I think I'll run the triticale up to 20% of the total flour this time.
I want to do some playing around with shapes, I'm thinking I'll do an epis de bles, a fendu, a fougasse and an auvergnat (cap), and maybe a boule or batard. If I still have dough left over, I'll do some baguettes.
