Search Results for '("C'

[BakerAunt]

On Thursday, I baked my standard bread machine kneaded loaf, this time using 1 ½ cups bread flour, 1 cup whole wheat, ½ cup dark rye, and 1 cup mixed 5-rolled grains as the grains. This was an increase in the rye, so I’ll see how we like it when we cut into it for Friday’s lunch.

On Friday, I began the morning by baking a recipe that I recently devised: Oat Bran Apple Date Walnut Muffins. I greatly adapted a base recipe that appeared in the Los Angeles Times food section over 25 years ago, so it is now mine. I used one of our regular Winesaps (supply is getting down) and left it unpeeled. I had a warm one with coffee this morning, and it was delicious and filling. The original recipe was always good warm but not so good on subsequent days. I’m hoping that grinding the oat bran—a tip from a Washington Post baking column that has worked with other oat bran muffin recipes—will give me muffins equally delicious at room temperature on subsequent days.

[Mike Nolan]

Keep in mind that's for a 4 ounce serving. I suspect you're more likely to eat a larger portion of sweet potato than of carrots.

Years ago my wife and I attended a conference at a resort in SW Florida that included several meals. I don't know what the deal was, maybe the chef got a heckuva bargain on a carload of raw carrots, but we had candied carrots at every meal, including breakfast. We had one evening off, so we ate in one of the hotel restaurants, one that specialized in fish. (We were on the Florida Gulf Coast, after all.) Guess what vegetable came with our meal? Yup, candied carrots.

[Mike Nolan]

I wondered that as well, but didn't see anything directly answering the question when I searched.

My wife is one of those for whom cilantro tastes like soap, I am not. Our older son apparently got my genes on that, not hers.

The spice form (also not trying to give away the answer) is not one I use a lot, I don't know if my wife is willing to be a guinea pig for some testing.

[BakerAunt]

I actually got this one right. Question--without revealing the answer--do people for whom cilantro tastes like soap (genetic basis) also have difficulties with this herb?

[aaronatthedoublef]

My limited experience working in bakeries taught me you need to develop a wholesale business in addition to retail. This is a huge challenge because your baking on a much bigger scale than your bakery was setup to do. I've worked in and seen this twice and one of the bakeries was successful and one failed but that was because of the owner. The failed bakery was purchased as a second location for another bakery and is thriving because the owner is smarter and trusts her employees.

The couple of bakeries I've seen here (I'm in the process of going to see if I can work in yet another one) that make sourdough don't begin from starters. They mix the dough and let if rest in the refrigerator but the rest is usually only about 12 hours, if that. It won't really develop any fermentation in that time in a refrigerator. It doesn't even have a soft tang but the flavor is deeper than a standard one hour rise on the counter. The owner and his head bread baker insisted that there is not the market for real sourdough here but at least part of it is that they didn't want to spend three days making a loaf of bread. And I don't know how the health department would react to them leaving out huge amounts of dough for 24 hours or more but that appears to be what Jim Lahey does in NY (I've never tasted his bread but a trip to one of his shops is on my list). I've never made my own starter because my wife would be disturbed by the science project growing on the counter. But, she is behind the spent grain idea so perhaps it's time to approach this topic again.

I make pizza dough every other week. I used to let it rise in the refrigerator but I needed at least two days in there. Now I let it rise on the counter but I still need at least 18 before it starts to have the right taste and 24 is better. If I let it go longer than 24 it goes in the fridge.

[Mike Nolan]

More than a few people who've tasted my breads and pastries have suggested I open a bakery. No way! Too much work, lousy hours and not all that profitable.

A second issue is that I'd probably have to change some of my recipes to make the products affordable, I once figured my costs for my deep dish apple pie at about $6.00. If I follow the usual restaurant rule (selling price is 3-4 X the cost of the ingredients), that means charging anywhere from $18 to $24 per pie. I suspect not enough people would buy them, especially when most of the apple pies available locally are $10 or less.

[Mike Nolan]

Sourdough is a very complicated subject. The best research I've seen on it seems to indicate that the temperature at which the starter is maintained has a lot to do with how sour it gets, because some of the bacteria in the starter culture generate a lot of lactic acid and others do not. Low temperature bacteria tend to be more prone to produce higher acid concentrates, or maybe they just thrive better under high acid conditions, they're not really sure which--probably a bit of both.

Another challenge is that the bacteria present in your starter tend to adapt to your locale over time. If you buy some San Francisco starter, it will be high in a bacteria called Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. But tests on starters that have been maintained for a year or longer tend to show that the percentage of L. sanfranciscensis goes down if you're not in San Francisco, as the local indigenous bacteria tend to dominate the sourdough culture.

My wife won't eat the local sourdoughs, they're just too sour for her, she thinks, and they bother her stomach. (I suspect that some of the bakeries, notably Panera, add acid to their dough to increase how sour it is in an attempt to make their dough taste the same regardless of location.)

Oddly enough, when we visit our son in San Francisco, she handles the sourdough breads available there just fine.

I've been tempted to try Chad Robertsons's techniques (as documented in the Tartine Bakery cookbook series) to create and maintain a less mature sourdough starter, which he says is much milder. But it involves throwing out 95% of your starter on a frequent basis.

[BakerAunt]

Location is definitely an issue for that restaurant. It was, until about 16 years ago, a family restaurant run by locals, and Pinder's was quite popular with the locals. They retired and sold it. The next incarnation did not last, nor did the two breweries. It is off the main part of town, so it gets missed. Also, while the local private boarding high school does bring in the parents during the school year, the season is Memorial Day to Labor Day, with some people showing up at spring break or occasionally Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The market may be saturated as well. There are two coffee shops which also serve breakfast and lunch--and one does evening meals; a very expensive new Italian restaurant with an artistic chef, another regular Italian restaurant, a cheaper Pizza place, and a larger restaurant that is across the street from the town beach/park. Oh, yes, there is a Subway in the convenience store/gas station.

We rarely eat out because we like our own cooking, and we have a wonderful view, which no local place's atmosphere can match. When we eat out, it is usually because we are away from home, as on my birthday in Florida, and if we do fast food, it is Subway, as it was yesterday after a shopping trip/car recall issue (reprogramming the media system) in South Bend. We did eat at a nice restaurant in a former mansion in South Bend last fall with my husband's cousins after we toured the Studebaker museum. They were about to open a microbrewery there in the spring.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by BakerAunt.

[aaronatthedoublef]

First - thanks for the assistance of spent grain. It gives me a place to start. And I think my friend will indulge me His brew master is very interested in bread. I spent an hour one evening talking with him about sourdough and why the local variations are not very sour. He likes things VERY fermented. Go figure.

As for the bread not tasting like beer, I tried using a local amber ale to make pizza dough and I could never detect any difference so I stopped using it because water is way less expensive.

Restaurants are extremely hard. I was talking with a friend (chef and COO of a four restaurant group here) about the challenges. It is only becoming harder here as we require employers to increase compensation and benefits. For someone like my friend there is no way they can drop their number of employees down without closing some stores. And there is some price elasticity but not much. So their margins shrink. And sure, these guys are doing well but they are not rich. Restaurants are the number one business to close each year. That is partly because they are also the number one business to open. But everyone thinks it's as simple as being a good cook but there is so much more to it than that. Here is a Freakonomics podcast about Kenji Alt Lopes opening a beer hall in San Mateo and all the challenges he faces.

I'll let you all know how my beer bread turns out as I progress.

[BakerAunt]

Mike--have you tried using Farro instead of barley in soups? I tried it recently (there's a post from me with a link to Oprah's soup), and it seems easier on the digestive system than barley. I bought mine from Bob's Red Mill.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by BakerAunt. Reason: corrected spelling of Farro

[BakerAunt]

Thanks for posting the link, Mike. Given the issues, maybe JAMA needs to look at its review process for articles.

Since I started my low-saturated fat way of eating, what I've noticed is the huge amount of butter in so much baking. I subscribe to Bake from Scratch and I buy KAF's Sift. With BFS, I'm lucky if there are two recipes per issue that do not require copious amounts of butter, and these are the kind of recipes where oil substitution is unlikely to work (most cookies, scones, brioches). I can usually get a few more recipes from Sift by substituting oil into some of the bread recipes.

Cheese is also a major source of saturated fat. I'm still trying to locate a 2% cheese in my vicinity. Until then, I use Mozzarella made with part skim milk.

I bought a recent magazine issue on Heart Healthy Recipes, which includes some recipes that I plan to try. Since one of the consultants is with the Mayo Clinic, I decided that the information is likely to be reasonably accurate. In addition to discussions on food myths about avoiding eggs and all fats (healthy fats are needed), it surprised me with a discussion of Vitamin K2, which is not the same as the Vitamin K listed on my multivitamin. The discussion of Vitamin K has been split. K1 comes from plants. K2 comes through animal foods. It then listed item such as full-fat dairy, beef, egg yolks, fermented cheeses (arent' they all fermented?)--especially Gouda--goose liver (!), and miso. I looked online, but did not find a lot about K2--perhaps I was not looking in the right place--although one site mentioned dark chicken meat. There was also discussion that the milk, beef and eggs needed to come from "pasture-fed" cows and hens. K2 needs fat to be absorbed.

OK--most people will not be able to get the grass-fed beef and dairy, and for some, cost will be a factor. The only item on their list that I do eat regularly is eggs--mostly in baking and occasionally as a one-egg omelet. We also do a lot of chicken thighs, but I doubt those are chickens eating the requisite food.

The study that I found online was touting K2 as good for LOTS of issues. I take that as likely overreach, since we saw that with Vitamin D claims on heart health, cancer, etc. that have now been called into question. My latest issue of Consumer Reports On Health even claims that there is not strong evidence that the Vitamin D my doctor prescribed and I have been taking will even help with bones.

Vitamin K2, according to the magazine that sent me on this online search, is the element that helps Vitamin D do its work with calcium. I've heard that before, and one of the articles I examined made that case, but in the past it was only listed as Vitamin K. Looking at K1 and K2 as separate seems to be more recent.

I am now thoroughly confused, so I will continue keeping the saturated fat low in baked goods by using butter sparingly, and I'll eat a varied diet, as the article that Mike posted suggests.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by BakerAunt.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by BakerAunt.

[Mike Nolan]

Tonight was YOYO (You're On Your Own), so I had leftover spaghetti and meatballs and my wife had McD's on the way home from her chiropractor.

[Mike Nolan]

Although I don't have a way of tracking individuals, the wp-quiz plugin I'm using does keep track of when quizzes were taken and whether the answer was right.

Assuming I did it right (especially factoring out my formatting tests prior to when a post is published), here's how many people have taken the quizzes so far and what percentage got them right. (If someone took the quiz more than once, each attempt would be counted separately, since it doesn't track the person taking the quiz.)

If this data is right, then nobody actually took the quiz for March 19th, which was the first one on Baker's Math. I don't even see my tests in the log file, so I'm guessing that for some reason that day's quiz didn't get recorded at all. Odd. Looking at the web server logs, it looks like around 11 people took it (including me during testing, I assume), I don't know why no answers show up in the other table. :sigh: If that happens a lot, then any data I try to harvest is suspect.

+-------------------------------+----------+------+
| post_title                    |   total  | right |
+-------------------------------+----------+------+
| Daily Quiz for March 11, 2019 |       16 |   12 |
| Daily Quiz for March 12, 2019 |       13 |    8 |
| Daily Quiz for March 13, 2019 |       14 |    7 |
| Daily Quiz for March 14, 2019 |       11 |   11 |
| Daily Quiz for March 15, 2019 |       15 |    9 |
| Daily Quiz for March 16, 2019 |        7 |    4 |
| Daily Quiz for March 17, 2019 |        8 |    2 |
| Daily Quiz for March 18, 2019 |        9 |    7 |
| Daily Quiz for March 20, 2019 |        9 |    7 |
| Daily Quiz for March 21, 2019 |        9 |    4 |
| Daily Quiz for March 22, 2019 |        8 |    7 |
| Daily Quiz for March 23, 2019 |       10 |    8 |
| Daily Quiz for March 24, 2019 |        8 |    4 |
| Daily Quiz for March 25, 2019 |       11 |    6 |
| Daily Quiz for March 26, 2019 |       12 |    7 |
+-------------------------------+----------+------+

[Mike Nolan]

Peter Reinhart has a number of recipes for spent grain breads in his whole grains book. About 10 years ago I called one of the local brewpubs and got a 5 gallon bucket of spent grain from them. (They usually just give it to local farmers to feed pigs, though they do use some of it in the bread they bring to the table and in some of the sandwiches they serve.)

I tried several spent grain bread recipes, but I think the most successful recipe I made was a variant on bran muffins. I think all the barley made for a sweet muffin. See Spent Grain Muffins

I did discover that since spent grain has a lot of hulls, sometimes it gets a bit chewy with stuff stuck between your teeth, almost like eating a bread with caraway in it. I took some of the spent grain, dried it in the oven and then ran it through the food processor to chop it up a bit, that made for a softer less toothsome bread, but it would take a lot of time to do that with a large quantity of spent grain and I don't know how long it would last after being dried. You can also run it through the food processor while its still damp, but it gets kind of messy to clean up.

From discussions I've had with others who bake with spent grains, depending on what kind of grains they're using in their beers, there's quite a bit of variability in the taste and texture of the breads made with spent grains.

Interestingly enough, there was no 'beery' flavor to any of the breads I made.

Beer makers also use a lot of different types of yeast in their beers, the local home-brew supply store must have two dozen yeast varieties, and that's just a small selection of what's available online. I don't know what impact different varieties of yeast would have on making bread, that could be a subject for a lot of experimentation.

I can't help you on using bread to make beer.

[Mike Nolan]

I wish my wife liked either barley or lentil, I can't make a soup with either one in it. (Many lentil soup recipes also call for garlic, but that's something I can deal with.)