Mike, the pie bottom looks great! Never though of transferring a pie too. I may have to try a Norpro pan. My Norpro griddle has been a bit of a disappointment.
Around here (central CT) and in Portland/Camden MA where I've talked to bakers coffee is trendy to put into dark rye breads for color. I'm not sure how it affects taste. And for me to really know I would need to taste it blind.
My wife has never liked rye but after giving her some rye without caraway we discovered that the caraway is really what she objected to.
I tend to think I live in a suburban backwater but we can find lots of things in the grocery stores here even if it's more expensive than online. We also have a lot of ethnic groceries - various Asian and eastern European - and rye flours are popular in the German and Polish groceries. And I'd rather support small grocery stores than buy online.
I've made a slight change to my pizza dough. I stopped using cake flour and started using Caputo oo flour. It's pretty fine but there is very little info on the bag. It might be bleached. I'll need to research on the internet. But it's half the price of cake flour.
Chocomouse, congrats on the bagels! They're on my list for this year. Did you put baking soda in the water?
And BA thanks for the tip about boiling to long. Most recipes I've read have you boil them for several minutes per side.
Stanley Ginsberg's book The Rye Baker talks quite a bit about the differences between baking with wheat flour and with rye flour, getting into the underlying chemical changes, and why a sour rye starter is helpful when making high rye percentage (all the way up to 100%) breads. I've already read that chapter twice and I'm sure I'll read it a few more times.
If you have Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice, the marbled rye bread recipe in it isn't a really strong rye (30/70 blend of rye/white flour, though I currently do 40/60 using a coarse pumpernickel flour) but I've never had it go gummy on me.
The pies came out great, they're already loose in the Norpro pans, I'll transfer them to other pie pans for cutting (one of them is going to Omaha for a baby shower) once they've cooled a bit. Since going to pastry school I've been using the convection cycle in my oven for pies, I did these for 25 minutes at 385F convection, then dropped the temp to 340F non-convection for another 20 minutes. I'll see if I can get a shot of the bottom of one of them to show how it looks.
Waiting until tomorrow afternoon to cut into the Frisian black bread is going to be a long wait, it smells very interesting. I get strong notes of molasses, though there's no molasses in it. Just a little honey.
I made The Neely's (Food Network) Asparagus Soup. It's really an easy soup to make and tastes scrumptious. Unfortunately, it makes only 1 quart 1 cup. I usually make a double batch so I have a quart for the freezer. I just didn't think about it when I was admiring the asparagus in the market.
On Saturday afternoon, I baked a new recipe, “Buckwheat Cake with Yogurt-Espresso Frosting,” by Chris Morocco at Bon Appetit (November 2016):
https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/buckwheat-banana-cake-with-yogurt-espresso-frosting
I made three changes: I added 2 tbs. Bob’s Red Mill powdered milk, reduced the salt from 1 tsp to 1/2 tsp., and I used a 5.3 oz. carton of Chobani Greek yogurt in place of the sour cream. The 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 pan I used is a little small for this recipe. I used one of my nonstick ones, and clearly the volume is not quite the same, as the cake is in the oven and has risen above the sides of the pan. I'm hoping that it will be ok. I'll post back later with results.
I used the grease rather than a spray on the pan and did not use parchment for a sling.
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This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by
BakerAunt.
For dinner on Friday, I made stir-fry using the leftover pork and deglazed pan drippings from last night. Vegetables were carrots, celery, red bell pepper, Baby Bella mushrooms, broccoli, kale, and I threw in the leftover potatoes (not that many). The potatoes don't really go but they don't clash either. I combined it with soba noodles.
I made cupcakes from a Bobs Red Mills gluten free cake mix. The package calls for 3 eggs, I used two eggs and 2 ounces (by weight) of buttermilk to sub for the 3rd egg. They turned out pretty good. Topped them with chocolate frosting.
The recipes make a range of sizes, some just one loaf, some a larger loaf, some two loaves, and there are several recipes for things like rolls or flatbreads that make a dozen or more.
The recipe I'm working on now should work in one standard size loaf pan, one I'm thinking of doing soon makes a pretty big (2.5 pound) round loaf.
I haven't tried the Dutch oven method and that would be a major departure from the instructions. I also don't have a Dutch oven big enough for most of the rye recipes I've been making. (The first several recipes made two large loaves.)
Putting a pan in the oven as it heats and throwing water in it is a fairly common way of trying to create steam in a home oven. Another way is to spray water on the side walls of the oven. Sometimes I do both. A heavy pan like a cast iron skillet works better than a lighter pan because it has more mass so it vaporizes the water faster.
The tubing should enable me to create steam after the oven door has been closed, so most of it stays in the oven as opposed to coming out the door into my face. Whether this will generate more or less steam is something I'm not sure how to measure, maybe I'll see a difference in performance. I don't have any experience baking with a commercial steam oven, so I don't have a real reference to compare it against.
I'm trying the Frisian Black Bread recipe from TRB next, but I'm tinkering with it a little, because instead of using just a small amount of rye sour to inoculate the flour and water in the sponge, I took the flour from my discards bowl in the refrigerator and added a little recently refreshed sour starter to make sure it was fully active. (Some sources say that refrigerating a starter tends to favor certain cold-loving lactic acid producing bacteria over others and might kill off some of the wild yeasts.)
I've also been experimenting with using some silicone tubing (from a home brewing supplier) to see if I can produce steam in my oven without opening the door. The tubing leads to a 9" cast iron skillet on the lower shelf. It looks like I can add about 20ml of water fairly easily and it seems to function as I expected, I still have to test it with a bread recipe, and the Frisian recipe is not one that uses steam, it is a recipe that starts out in a cold oven.
I don't do deep fat frying and not much pan frying either. I prefer butter for sauteeing foods.
I switched from canola oil to corn oil last year, but corn oil isn't as neutral a flavor. Recently I bought a bottle that is a combination of canola and soybean oil, so far I like it.
I'm sort of wondering about one thing, though. When you buy 'vegetable oil', they don't really tell you what vegetables it came from. I wonder about whether some of the newer vegetable oil blends are mainly just a marketing gimmick to sell you the same oil at a higher price by making it seem more artisan.
I had an interesting talk with my doctor during my last annual physical. He was looking at my cholesterol numbers (which are good but could be a little lower) and said that cholesterol is largely a genetic issue, some people just have high cholesterol levels. And there's some evidence that that this genetic predisposition doesn't necessarily mean clogged arteries. Monitoring your LDL (the 'bad' cholesterol) is advisable, even for those with genetically high cholesterol levels.
You're correct, there is some processing, but modern canola oil is also the product of selective breeding. The seeds are heated, crushed and the oil extracted using hexane as a solvent. The yield is about 44%, the rest of the seed is used for animal feed.
Rapeseed oil is naturally high in erucic acid, which is toxic in high doses, but in the 1960's and 1970's Canadian plant researchers identified varieties of rapeseed that were much lower in erucic and eicosenoic acid and bred them to strengthen that characteristic. (BTW, this is NOT a GMO process, it involves natural selection of genes.) Eicosenoic acid is used in skincare products.
'Canola' is a constructed word, it comes from 'canada' and 'oil'.
Interestingly enough, rapeseed plants are a member of the Brassica family, like cabbages and broccoli. We drove through southern Ontario some years ago and saw large fields of plants with a pretty yellow blossom, we later determined those were rapeseed farms. See rapeseed field
Heat affects the speed of the Maillard reaction, unlike a pyrolitic reaction (like caramelization) which can only happen above a certain temperature. (Sucrose and glucose both start to caramelize at 160C/320F, for example, while fructose will caramelize at 110C/230F.)
The Maillard reaction is a chemical reaction between an amino acid (eg, a protein) and a reducing sugar. All monosaccharides (like glucose and fructose) are reducing sugars, some disaccharides like sucrose and some polysaccharides are also reducing sugars.
As noted, it can occur at lower temperatures, but it will happen much faster in meat at temperatures above about 140C/285F. At even higher temperatures, pyrolitic reactions like caramelization are likely to overwhelm the effects of the Maillard reaction.
A low pH (ie, an acid) can inhibit the Maillard reaction, as can the presence of water.
The browning of a bread crust is a combination of the Maillard reaction and other reactions, especially caramelization.
Caramelization is another fascinating process, one that has not been heavily studied. Researchers have identified over a thousand compounds that can form when sugar (sucrose) is caramelized.
Thanks BA. And I get it. I faced my own battle with cholesterol a long time ago. I gave up dairy and whole eggs and exercised five or six days a week and my numbers stayed the same or went up. I was resistant to taking any drugs. When my dad died my doctor, a very smart, nice man who worried a lot about me, said "enough" and put me on statins. It's the only thing I've ever tried that has lowered numbers.
But the things I make weekly I now make with more whole grains and mix in flax seed and chickpea flour (be careful with chickpea flour as it has a strong taste) too. I've cut back on butter and cheese in my recipes as well. And interestingly my kids usually prefer what their mom or I make for them to anything we might buy, even with the whole grains and reduced dairy fat.
