Yes, my baked goods always get a lot of compliments. One of the former staff members used to be a chef, he says my Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake is just fantastic. He switched jobs last year and now works on the downtown campus, but when I sent in a Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake last fall, my wife dropped him a note and set a big chunk of it aside for him to pick up that afternoon.
The former chair of the department of Agronomy and Horticulture is a grill master (in addition to being one of the leading experts in turf grasses), and he hosted two dinners that were silent auction fund-raising items for student groups. We volunteered to send in some bread, and I made two Celebration Challahs (2 layers tall and about 22" long) that everyone really appreciated, Roch said he didn't recall the last time he ate that much bread. (I posted a picture of one of them here at the time, it came out about as perfect as I've ever had one come out. That picture isn't coming up for some reason so I've reposted it below)
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Today is steam test day.
I'm taking pictures through the oven door window every 15 seconds, I'm hoping to be able to stitch them together into a short video. They're not the clearest of pictures, because I'm shooting through the oven door window, but I think I can see changes from one shot to the next. I'm also taking a picture with the door open at the 10 minute mark (when I rotate the loaves and remove the steam pan, if any water is left) and one just before I take the bread out.
The first 3 loaves are out (no steam, water sprayed on sidewalls, and pan of hot water in oven before bread goes in.) The more interesting tests are yet to come, with my steam tube. I'm also going to do one in a dutch oven, though I won't have shots of it during baking, obviously.
I do see a few differences in the crust between the first three loaves, though the amount of oven spring doesn't seem to have been affected much. I won't be cutting in to them to get an interior photo until later on. I don't know if I'll have the pictures posted until tomorrow, the baking will be going on until at least 7PM. (I will have to take a break after the next one to recharge the camera battery.)
My wife had no trouble finding takers for some free French bread.
I made a seafood lasagna from delish.com. We liked it, and I will make it again, but with some changes. I added some chopped onion, 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, and a tablespoon of Old Bay seasoning, having read several comments that said it needed "something", and I would make those same changes next time. I would decrease the lasagna noodles, and make two layers in a 9 x 9 pan. I would use the same amount of fish (shrimp, scallops, and I used imitation crab meat) but it needs more sauce. I think simply adding more milk would work without making it too runny as it was a little dry. We now have leftovers for another night and then I will freeze the rest in meals sized containers.
I actually found some black rice in a T.J. Maxx once (on clearance), along with some red rice. I mixed it in with brown rice. Currently I buy Lundberg's Wild Rice combination, which consists of long grain brown rice, sweet brown rice, wild rice, Wehani red rice, and black rice. I usually use a half or a third in combination with brown rice, as brown rice alone can be a bit boring. I don't usually cook the blend by itself because these specialty rice can scratch the rice cooker's non-stick lining. Bob's Red Mill had a wonderful rice blend, but they discontinued it.
I'm not convinced that well-insulated big ovens heat up the kitchen that much more than the usually poorly-insulated countertop cookers.
A toaster oven is functionally so different from a microwave that I don't see that as a viable combination. There are microwaves that function as convection ovens or slow cookers, though.
The Maillard reaction may be non-pyrolitic, but it does happen faster at higher temperatures. (Compared to balsamic vinegar, years faster!) And at the usual temperature for baking bread you will get a combination of the Maillard reaction and caramelization.
Don't you wonder who it was who first thought: Let's let this vinegar sit around for a decade and see what happens?
Black rice is sometimes called forbidden rice, because it was reserved for the Emperor of China, the health benefits were recognized even back then. It is not always easy to find and it is usually a lot more expensive than white rice. (Brown rice is usually more expensive than white rice, too, which puzzles me.)
Some varieties of black rice will turn purple when cooked. I must not have found that variety yet.
I wanted to use up some Greek yogurt and lemon juice, so I looked at cakes online, found three possibilities, and decided to use the one from Ciao Florentina as my base recipe:
https://ciaoflorentina.com/lemon-greek-yogurt-cake-recipe/
I made a few changes in that I substituted in ½ cup barley flour for that much AP, and as I had no lemon zest, I added 1/8 tsp lemon oil. I have a Nordic Ware loaf pan with citrus slice design on top, so I chose that pan and used the Grease to coat it. I lowered the baking temperature to 325F and baked for 50 minutes, which was when the tester came out clean. (I baked it on the third rack up in my oven; Nordic Ware pans do better there.) I let it cool on a rack in the pan for 10 minutes while I made a glaze from another online recipe that combines 1/3 cup sugar and 1/3 cup lemon juice, which are heated together until the sugar dissolves and mixture is clear. I turned the cake onto a rack set over a tray and used a pastry brush to brush on the glaze. It was a lot of glaze. We will have it for dessert on Monday. I'll post then about taste and texture.
I tried a tasteofhome.com recipe. It's titled, Grandma's Honey Muffins. I reduced salt by 50%. Used the 1/2 cup sugar called for (half sugar, half white Splenda), but next time, I'll only use 1/3 cup sugar. I had a problem mixing the honey into the wet ingredients and then into the dry. I left behind too much of this precious, endangered ingredient. One reviewer said to heat honey in microwave to make it mix in better, and that's what I'll do next time. The muffins are good, and I was pleased with the oven rise.
Do you have either the Bread Baker's Apprentice or Artisan Breads Every Day? I use the bagel recipes in them. (The one in BBA makes more dough, so I probably use the ABED recipe more often these days, though they're very similar.)
Bagel dough should be satiny, and not at all tacky. If you don't want them brown, don't use either brown sugar or barley malt, if you have it, use non-diastatic malt powder, it adds the sweetness of barley malt but not the coloring.
What flour are you using, I generally use KAF bread flour for them. I've seen some ultra-high protein flours labeled as 'for bagels and pizza'. I tried a batch with first clear flour once, wasn't dissatisfied with them but haven't done another one. As I recall the dough wasn't quite as smooth.
I made bagels again today, and used the same recipe (Bagels, by KAF) that I used before. This time I put brown sugar in the dough and in the boiling water bath instead of the barley malt syrup, and I added baking soda to the water bath. I boiled the bagels for about 1 minute each side, instead of 2 minutes, flip, then 1 minute more. The finished bagels are less brown, but not much. They are still "lumpy" looking, not smooth. They have the same crispy outside but soft inside. Basically, there is no difference between these bagels and the first batch I did a couple weeks ago. We like them, they are good, but not perfection. So, next batch I will try a new recipe. I do have a theory about the lumpiness, and will work on that.
I'm making tuna salad tonight (and plan to have it on rye bread), though I'm not sure if it is just for me or for both of us, since I made some hard boiled eggs to go in it, and she just had two of them, still warm.
The cornstarch glaze is supposed to add shine, I must not be cooking it long enough, all it ever does is add a dull white finish. (But I don't understand why people like the Dutch crunch coating on breads, either.) Next time I make the old school deli bread I'm going to do one loaf with cornstarch and one without.
I did see in a thread on the BBGA forum (from 2005) in which someone said that if you toast the cornstarch before cooking it, you get even better results.
I've found an egg white glaze produces an excellent shine on rye bread, but then it's not vegan, for those who do that.
These were the first loaves I've baked with my steam tube, I thought it worked pretty well, I put in about 50 CCs of water, half right after the loaves went into the oven and the other half 2-3 minutes later, I could have put in even more, the pan was totally dry at the 10 minute mark.
I think I'll be doing the steamed loaves test on either Tuesday or Wednesday. That'll be an all-day task, with another loaf going in to the oven about every hour.
I don't think Kimball buys his meats at the grocery store, he may have a butcher on staff. And he's out east, isn't he, where they still have real butcher shops.
One of the local stores does a bulk meat sale twice a year, selling sub-primals in a bag, usually anywhere from 5 to 20+ pounds, like an entire chuck roll. I don't think I've ever seen short plate, though. I'll have to look for it next time. Usually it is boneless, so that may be why they don't do short plate. I don't own a meat saw and aside from some people who do butchering of deer, I don't know anyone who has one in their home, either.
If I wanted to make sure I was getting the inner skirt, I'd probably go to Fareway Meat and see if they had it. Most of the stores in town don't do a lot of meat-cutting on premises any more, though they may grind their own ground beef. Much of the meat sold in sealed packages come to the store that way. And the labeling might not be very precise. 'Beef for fajitas'. What cut is it? Doesn't say!
BTW, meat sold in sealed tubs packaged off-site may have been done in a facility that allows them to fill the package with nitrogen while they're sealing it, or even with with carbon monoxide, which makes meat stay red longer.
One of the things that has always fascinated me is that low-and-slow is one way to cook tough meats to soften them, and a very hot grill or broiler is the other. (You'll find more recipe for flank that use a broiler or are intended for grilling.) That doesn't seem like it should make sense, but it does.
I have never seen any low/slow recipes for flank steak. There is a point to be made about skirt steak. When Christopher Kimball (milk st.) uses it in his recipes he uses the more tender version. I have no idea where he purchases his meat because the skirt steak I have tried was as chewy as flank steak.
Back when I was making pot roast, I used a Dutch Oven, and it cooked for a long time at a low setting, so yes, that would be using the oven as a slow cooker. That is also the idea behind the pork roast recipe that I wrote about in the cooking thread. I'm now wondering if the pork roast recipe assumes an oven with a visible element, and that is why the author had no trouble getting the roast to cook, but the rest of us cannot.
I recall when my Thermador oven (left behind in Texas) developed a stuck relay while I was baking a chocolate cake. Fortunately, I was right there in the kitchen, saw the fire start, and turned off the oven.
A year or so ago, there was an oven fire in the South Bend/Mishawaka area that occurred when the husband set the oven to self-clean, then went out to run an errand. Fortunately, a neighbor saw the smoke and called in the alarm. The house was damaged but repairable.
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This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by
BakerAunt.
