I think once it is available through candy wholesalers, it'll be a more reasonable price, but the two sources I cited above are very high, in large part because its being imported. Mostly I was pointing out the Kit-Kat one as a place where the ruby cacao bean is showing up in retail products, at least in Japan and a few other places.
The FDA isn't allowing it to be called 'chocolate' yet. That might delay its availability.
I may check our local Trader Joes to see if they have any, apparently that's one place it was available in the USA earlier this year. (I have suspected for some time that some of the TJ chocolate bars are made by Callebaut.)
When I was in high school, our science teacher had us taste a red fluid one day. Most described it as either strawberry or cherry flavored. It was milk with red food coloring in it. 🙂
I have my car back. It had a dead cell in the battery.
On Thursday morning, I used a recipe for Chocolate Olive Oil Cake with Blood Orange Glaze, from a Baking from Scratch email to bake a Bundt cake, but I made some changes in the recipe. (See discussion under baking-desserts--blood oranges.) Blood oranges are not available right now, so I used a regular orange. I used canola oil and reduced it by 1/3 cup. I used buttermilk rather than regular milk and increased it by 1/3 cup. I used 1 cup of white whole wheat flour (Bob’s Red Mill ivory flour) in place of that much AP flour, and I added 2 Tbs. Bob’s Red Mill powdered milk. I baked it in the Nordic Ware Celebration Bundt pan—the one that allows you to cut 20 equal slices—as I don’t have the pan the recipe specifies and do not intend to buy it. I found that my cake needed 45 minutes to bake at 325F. After 20 minutes on the rack, it came out perfectly. I’m not planning to glaze it. We will eat it for dessert tonight, and I’ll add a not about what we think. The entire cake still has 43g saturated fat, but that is fine when sliced into 20 pieces. Had I followed the recipe, and used 1 1/3 cup olive oil, the total would have been 58g.
In the afternoon, I baked my Buttermilk Grape Nuts Bread, with some whole wheat and barley flour substituted for some of the AP flour, and I used bread flour for the rest. I also reduced the honey to 1 Tbs. and the salt to 1 tsp.
Note: The cake has a delicate orange taste behind the chocolate. The texture is excellent.
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This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by
BakerAunt.
Ah, Len, you've waded into an area that has driven me nuts for some time now. I've scoured the internet, and there does not seem to be much agreement on olive oil vs. canola oil. One source (Livestrong) suggested that olive oil is only considered healthier because it is healthier than the butter it replaces. Supposedly canola lowers cholesterol. However, one of my sisters considers canola oil bad for you and avoids it. I don't think this question will be solved anytime soon.
So, what to do? I use both. In some breads, I like olive oil, and it's one that I reach for when sauteeing vegetables for soups, pizza, spaghetti sauce, roasting chicken or vegetables, etc.. If I'm browning meat, I use grapeseed oil, which seems to hold up better than the other two. I also prefer grapeseed oil (also 2g saturated fat per Tbs.) for brushing on my sourdough crackers before baking; canola seemed to have an aftertaste, and I did not care for olive oil on those.
Since the recipe, as I've now baked it, called for so much oil, I chose the canola. I was also uncertain about olive oil flavor in the cake. In a rye bread, however, I usually choose olive oil.
I wondered if this were the poop coffee beans but apparently it isn't. I love coffee. I've cut way back since I was sick (I'd been off completely) but I drink a couple cups a week. I do not know if I will ever have enough money to pay $75 for a cup of coffee.
Len, if it were decaf, it would likely be MORE expensive as it requires extra labor to take out the caffeine!
Sams Club has a bottle of scotch for $1200, which works out to $48-$75 a shot (depending on whether you pour a one ounce shot or a 1.5 ounce shot.)
But I'm neither a coffee drinker nor a scotch drinker, so the subtleties of either would be totally lost on me. I can appreciate a good cup of tea but I wouldn't pay the crazy prices that the high end teas get, either.
For Wednesday’s dinner, I roasted a chicken. I had forgotten just how much it smokes up the house when the oven door is opened and the chicken removed. (I suspect this is one reason--the other being cleaning the oven--that so many of us just buy rotisserie chickens.) I’m glad that there is a vent fan in our apartment kitchen. We had noodles made with some powdered mushrooms. I made a new vegetable dish, working off a recipe in a recent special magazine issue, Heart Smart Recipes. I put a 15x10 sheet pan into a 450F oven to heat up for about 5 minutes. I had cut asparagus into 1-inch pieces, sliced some white mushrooms, minced 4 cloves of garlic, then mixed in a package of cherry tomatoes. I tossed these with some olive oil. I pulled out the pan, put a sheet of parchment (oven safe to 450F) on the pan, put on the vegetable mixture, and roasted for 18 minutes. When I took them out, I drizzled a bit of olive oil on them, then sprinkled with Penzey’s Sunny Paris and stirred. My husband, who is not a big asparagus fan, really liked it prepared this way. Note: the original recipe did not use parchment paper, but I do my own clean-up, so I used it and lowered the temperature from 475F.
I also cooked a bag of garbanzo beans that I soaked for nearly a day. Some will be frozen, and some will be used in recipes to be noted here.
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This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by BakerAunt.
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This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by BakerAunt. Reason: Corrected magazine title
According to the web, one of the varieties of blood oranges is available through May but the other variety (which I think is the more common one) only goes through March.
Aside from tasting them in the grocery store a few times, we've never bought them. I have no idea what difference they would make in an icing aside possibly from color.
My wife is a big fan of the cara cara orange, which also has a short season.
Chopped is about the only thing I still watch on the Guy Fieri AKA Food Network these days. I watch it in part for the strange ingredients they keep coming up with (which SNL nailed!) and to see what the chefs do with things that are every day ingredients for many home cooks but which many of them wouldn't normally touch on a bet.
How many of us would know what a durian was without Chopped? (BTW, there was a story recently about a college library in Australia that was evacuated because someone left a durian in a trash bin.)
I agree with the lament that I'd like to see a bit more of the actual cooking, like how they make their sauces. (Having read several books on stocks and sauces, I think I can connect the dots a bit, though.)
I actually stayed up to watch SNL's first hour (Emma Thompson is never to be missed!). The skit is even funnier watching it the second time.
I have been looking for an oil-based Bundt cake. This one came into my email about a month ago:
Chocolate Olive Oil Cake with Blood Orange Glaze
I think that blood oranges are out of season, so I may substitute regular oranges. Has anyone had blood oranges, and what is the difference?
If I bake this recipe, I plan to replace the olive oil with canola oil. (Every tablespoon of olive oil has 2g saturated fat, while canola oil has 1g per tablespoon.) I'm also considering reducing the oil to 1 cup. I'll replace the regular milk with buttermilk, which I will increase by 1/3 cup to make up for the oil. It still has a lot of saturated fat from the eggs, but I think that those are necessary for the cake's structure, and eggs do have important nutrients.
I will omit the glaze.
Advice? Suggestions?
I like "Chopped" because it somehow inspires me to use up what I have in the cupboard and fridge (short for frigedaire) in a creative way. I just wish we could see how they put some of the sauces together from beginning to end. Funny skit.
If you're a fan of Chopped (or perhaps especially if you're not), Saturday Night Live did a satire of it on Saturday that really nailed the show:
SNL Chopped skit
To cheer us up, I made a blueberry pie using that oil crust recipe that I tweaked from the King Arthur 200th Anniversary Cookbook. I substitute in some white whole wheat flour and use buttermilk. I made the larger recipe and kept some of it out as crumbs. I used a quart of blueberry pie filling that I canned last summer. I heated it up, after adding 2 Tbs. Clearjel, and I added ¼ tsp. allspice and a dash of nutmeg. After parbaking the crust, I sprinkled the bottom with some Panko before putting the hot filling into the hot crust, then I sprinkled the leftover crumbs from the crust (about ¼) over the top. I baked the pie at 425F for 15 minutes, then 25 minutes at 375F. I certainly bubbled up around the edges. We will give it two hours to cool, and then we will have it as a late dessert.
I'll add a note about whether this blueberry pie with an oil crust came out better than my previous attempt.
Thanks, Mike & BakerAunt. I erred when I called it a glaze. I've thought about it and realize it's a syrup (lemon juice, sugar & water). It soaks into the loaf. Based on what you two have written, I'll put the syrup on when out of the oven. It's supposed to go on when the bread is warm.
As opposed to air dryers, paper towels are much healthier. (Whether they're better for the environment is another matter.)
