Search Results for '("C'

[Mike Nolan]

The last several times I made laminated dough I used Peter Reinhart's recipe (in the Artisan book), but I've also used the recipe on the Food Network site for Danish Kringle, which makes a really SOFT dough, so the first two turns are a bit challenging, though refrigerating the dough more might help. The lemon extract is pretty strong in the dough, but more subtle in the final product. The butterscotch filling is excellent. I've used a couple of other recipes, including one on the King Arthur site.

Peter says that the dough and the butter block should both be about the same consistency. How you enclose the butter block in the dough varies from author to author. Something I'd like to try making some time is a reverse laminated dough, the butter block goes on the OUTSIDE (with some flour beaten into the butter to make it less messy.) Most books that talk about reverse laminated dough say it is intended for use with a sheeter, but I have seen a website that says you can do it manually at home.

The main difference between croissant dough and puff pastry is that the croissant dough has yeast. Some dough recipes have egg in them, others do not. Personally, I prefer the ones without egg.

I may try to scale down the puff pastry recipe we used at pastry school, it used a 5 pound butter block, because it was designed to be rolled out on a sheeter and it filled 3 full-sized sheet pans. (Peter's recipe uses 3/4 of a pound.) It also had some lemon juice in it, though I'm not sure if you could tell it was there in the finished product. The acid in the lemon juice may help condition the dough. There was a blitz puff recipe in our classroom material, but we never made it and our instructor wasn't too keen on it. I think she felt if you're going to through the effort of making a laminated dough and have a sheeter, why not go all the way?

[BakerAunt]

The last of that giant loaf of Clonmel Kitchen Double Crusty Bread that I baked last week was eaten today at lunch. My husband was impressed that the bread had not gotten moldy and that it still had great taste. I decided that I would bake it again on Wednesday. This time, I added an extra tablespoon of buttermilk (substituted in 1 cup buttermilk and added a tablespoon more) and used 2 Tbs. of oil, rather than 5 tsp. (That is laziness on my part so that I only have to measure out twice instead of five times.) I substituted in a cup of regular whole wheat, mixed with white whole wheat flour (so I would not have to open another bag of whole wheat flour), and I used a cup of the Irish Whole Meal flour. As I did last time, I added 1/4 cup of flax meal, reduced the salt to 2 3/4 tsp., and deleted the vinegar, since I used the buttermilk. I used up my regular yeast (last 1 tsp. in the container) and used 2 tsp. of the gold yeast. I held back a bit of the flour, but I ended up needing it, and an additional tablespoon. (Humidity is high here today.)

The first rise was about 45 minutes. I decided to try baking the dough in my French bread pan, which accommodates two loaves, each using about 3 cups of flour. The second rise was a little less than 40 minutes, but I slashed the loaves after 30 minutes. I baked the usual 40 minutes, but I spritzed them when they went into the oven, and I spritzed them again after five minutes, then after another 5 minutes. When I checked at 40 minutes, one tested at 197F, so out they came. The loaves look and smell great. I look forward to sampling them tomorrow!

[Mike Nolan]

Here's a story on them:Eclipse Donuts

That's not quite enough to get me to Krispy Kreme, since we also have LaMar's Donuts, and it's closer.

When we were in Portland Oregon in July, we stopped at Voodoo Donuts (though the locals now prefer Blue Star), we thought LaMar's were better, though Voodoo may have them beat on 'interesting' combinations of flavors. However, when we stopped at a motel in Tacoma the next night and were bringing in our stuff, the front desk staff went crazy when they saw the Voodoo box, so we gave them a few of the ones we had left.

[Mike Nolan]

Letting the flour and water sit for a half hour (before adding salt, yeast or any enrichments like fats, milk, eggs or sugar) is often called autolysis, and was championed by Professor Raymond Calvel, who is credited for having rescued French breadmaking from mediocrity after WW2. Now there are national standards for things like French baguettes and national training centers for French bakers.

His book, Le Goût du Pain (The Taste of Bread), is hard to find even in libraries, but I learned a lot from it, even though it isn't really so much a cookbook as a textbook on bread ingredients and techniques. (It has several pages just on salt.) One of my goals in learning French is to be able to buy and read that book in French, if I can find an affordable copy. (Reviewers of the English edition of the book seem divided on whether the translator did a good job translating and updating the book.)

Another thing I've rediscovered lately is to let my dough rest for at least 15 minutes after pre-shaping before the final shaping.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

The eye-opening experience for me was watching Susan Reid of KAF make a near-perfect batch of puff pastry under what had to be about the worst possible conditions. Most of her tools and ingredients didn't make it to the site, a motel in Kansas City, so she had to improvise, she was using a motel room card as a pastry scraper! And though the books usually tell you to treat the dough gently, she'd pick it up, flop it around and stretch the corners until she got a good rectangular shape. When I went to pastry school a few years later, we spent about a day on laminated doughs, and the instructor commented that I wasn't afraid to work with my dough.

When I do a 'turn' I want to roll the pastry out to about 3X its current size, since I do letter-fold turns. If you do book-fold turns, you want to roll it out to 4X its current size.

Most puff pastry is rolled out to 1/4 inch at the end, or possibly a bit thinner, depending on what you plan to make. Keep in mind the dough will shrink a bit after it has been rolled out and as it is cut.

1/4 inch is about the height of 4 pennies. I have my suspicion that most of us are poor judges of how thick pastry dough is and wind up with something that's 3/8" thick or thicker. Even in pastry school, where we were using a sheet roller, most of the students had to be told to keep rolling it thinner at the end.

When I was testing Peter Reinhart's laminated dough recipe (in the Artisan book), I used a laser leveler to check how thick and even the dough was, I even took pictures! Peter got a kick out of them.

[Mike Nolan]

There are several things that can cause brown spots on tomatoes, while some are fungal infections, most are related to having soil issues, watering issues or heat stress. (A hailstorm can also bruise tomatoes.) If it's widespread in the area, the weather-related issues are the most likely cause.

Your county extension service can help diagnose the problem and recommend solutions.

We've had problems here with blossom end rot, which is a calcium deficiency. It's actually possible to have too much nitrogen in the soil for tomatoes. I let my tomato garden go fallow again this year, it's got mostly alfalfa in it this year. Last year it had a mix of alfalfa and buckwheat. (Boy, do bees LOVE buckwheat flowers!)

I think I may let it sit idle for another season, or possibly plant something that's not in the nightshade family, which includes tomatoes, peppers, potatoes and eggplant. (Unfortunately, tomatoes, peppers and eggplants are what I have the most experience growing.)

I've been getting a pound or two of tomatoes at the farmers market about once a week, that's been enough for the two of us. But I do miss those sun-warmed tomatoes picked and eaten moments later.

[BakerAunt]

Thanks for your comments, Mike. KAF has promoted the blitz pastry as an easy alternative, but the result was anything but easy when I tried to work with it. The taste of the so-called turnovers (maybe four of the sixteen actually look like turnovers) is excellent. I've been eating the blob ones--someone has to destroy the evidence 🙂 --and the taste is also excellent. If I try this blitz pastry again, I'll only make a half recipe and leave the butter in larger chunks than I did. The recipe says, "about the size of a thumbnail," but that is a two-dimensional rather than a three-dimensional description. I also think it would be helpful if the recipe specified the thickness to which the dough is to be rolled out. I could then use my pie wands so it would be even. If I make the blitz pastry again, I would also note that figure.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by BakerAunt.

[Mike Nolan]

I processed at least 60 pounds of tomatoes today, running them through my food mill to remove the seeds and skins. I wound up with nearly 10 pounds of skins and seeds left over, which I froze in 2 pound bags, I'll use them in place of canned tomatoes in beef stock recipes this winter. (I got some nice beef shank bones at the Farmer's Market a week ago, so I'm ready for cooler weather.)

I've got a 12 quart and a 16 quart pot of tomato sauce reducing on the stove overnight. Not sure how much they'll need to reduce, hopefully I'll wind up with 12-15 quarts of sauce for the freezer.

The tomatoes came from the test gardens at the University of Nebraska, the grad students running those tests said they picked over 1000 pounds of tomatoes today. The variety is Defiant, which is in the seed catalogs. It's a determinate with good disease resistance and a long season, the vines grow to 3-4 feet and produce 8-10 ounce red fruits that are very meaty. I may have her get a second batch of them the next time they pick, on Friday. I saved a few for slicing, BLT's may be on the menu tomorrow.

I only put in 4 tomato plants this year, and they're just starting to produce, so I was glad to get the ones from UNL. (Fringe benefits of my wife working for Agronomy and Horticulture.)

She also brought home some sweet corn from the test gardens, I think it's the best sweet corn we've had this season, too bad they're just about at the end of the season.

[BakerAunt]

Today I tried a new recipe: Peach and Ginger Turnovers, from KAF's Whole Grain Baking (pp513-514). It did not go well.

The recipe uses a "blitz puff pastry" dough using whole wheat pastry flour and bread flour. This technique is somewhat new for me, so perhaps I just did not do it right. However, I think this is pastry recipe is similar to the KAF blueberry turnover recipe I tried a few years back with similar frustration. I threw the KAF recipe over for Ken Haedrich's blueberry hand-pie cruss. (Thank you to Dachshundlady for bringing Ken's recipe to our attention on the Baking Circle.) His hand-pie crust is a lot easier and gives nicer results. If I get more peaches, I'll try this filling with his pastry recipe.

The peach and ginger filling is wonderful, although I do think that the recipe should tell you to make it the day before and refrigerate it, as that improves its texture and makes it easier to enclose in the dough. As for the blitz puff pastry, if I am ever crazy enough to try it again, I would cut the dough into four pieces before refrigerating it. That way, the baker only has to roll out an 8x8-inch piece each time and cut it into four squares, then fill the turnovers and seal closed. The cookbook specifies rolling it into a 16x16-inch square, and as I was doing so, I realized that my parchment (used Reynolds) has a maximum width of 15inches. (Oh, why did I trust KAF?! Well, because usually their recipes work.) Rolling out that much dough at once also makes it more likely that it will be overworked. The directions should have taken that into consideration.

My dough stuck, in spite of flouring the parchment. I ended up cutting the parchment in half, and putting each half onto a cookie sheet (I did not have a cookie sheet wide enough to handle a 16-inch square) and putting it back in the refrigerator to let it chill again before shaping, and it was still hard to handle. I did get some triangles, but I got more blobs and a lot of spilled filling. It was so frustrating that if I'd not used such expensive ingredients, I might have just thrown it all away. I ended up baking it in two batches. At least the taste is good but very few are the nice little turnover triangles, and most are blobs of various shapes.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by BakerAunt.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by BakerAunt. Reason: corrected error

[Mike Nolan]

Just tell them you learned the trick from a baker named 3 Fingered Pete!

I'll probably try it some time, but most of the time I make smaller bagels (about 3.25 ounces of dough per bagel, most deli bagels start with around 4.5 ounces of dough) and most of them get a big heap of asiago cheese on top, so slicing them this way might be a bit more challenging.

[Mike Nolan]

You're correct that self-rising flour is more commonly used in European/British recipes than in the USA (except perhaps in the South.) I haven't dug out my Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood books to check, but my recollection is that if they want self-rising flour they'll say that.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Don't many British recipes also use self-rising flour? We have a Welsh friend who kept using all purpose flour and not having her recipes workout. I gave her bag of self-rising and it changed her life.

A pastry chef offered me a job based on three criteria:

1) I would pass the drug screen
2) I showed up to where I was supposed to be when I was supposed to be there (see item 1)
3) I can do fractions in my head

Not very demanding requirements to work for a high end chef in a fine-dining restaurant.

[Italiancook]

I baked 2 loaves of Amish Bread for the first time. Used allrecipes.com recipe. I baked this one other time and turned it into Raisin Bread. Now that I've baked it just as white sandwich bread, I have some questions. Keep in mind that this is only my first time baking sandwich bread. Normally, I make Italian or Cuban Bread. Questions:

(1) How brown is a loaf of white sandwich bread supposed to be? Or, do you go by the temperature? If so, what temperature do you seek? The loaves I made are light brown, and I didn't think to check their temperature. The recipe said to bake 30 minutes, and I did, in a preheated oven.

(2) When I bake Italian and Cuban Breads, I don't temp them. I bake them the recipe-suggested time and make sure the bread sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. When I tapped this sandwich bread, there was no hollow sound. Instead, the bottom "gave" when I tapped it. I assumed this was because it's supposed to be soft bread, not crusty like the ones I usually make. Did I err?

(3) I have hot-burning under the cabinet lights. I used them to rise bread during cold weather. Today, being hot weather, they probably worked to my detriment. Both rises took half the time than the recipe suggested, because of the heat from the lights. I was working in the kitchen during the rises, so I kept on the lights.

The finished products have cracks on the ends at the top of the bread pan area. In other words, below the dome of the bread, but only on the short ends. Do those mean the bread rose too high while resting?

The bread is cooling, so I don't know what it looks like inside. The recipe calls for 2/3 cup sugar. I used only 1/4 cup, which one reviewer said makes a fluffy loaf. At any rate, I'd never use 2/3 cup sugar for plain white bread.

Thanks for any ideas you have on this.

[chocomouse]

I made the usual 2 loaves of whole grain bread; I'll be out of town next week for 8 days and need to leave the freezer stocked for my husband. I also made blueberry scones and a berry trifle, using blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries we grow. I think I cheat a little, 'cause I use a box cake mix (lemon), instant no sugar added pudding (lemon), and Cool Whip. The kicker is the raspberry liquor my husband makes every year, and I drizzle it on the cake bites. It adds a lot of flavor without being overpowering. Yummy!

[BakerAunt]

I am not baking today, as we are eating what I baked last week. However, I found some beautiful peaches at the local farmers' market yesterday, and the Peach and Ginger Turnovers recipe in KAF's Whole Grain Baking (pp. 513-514) has caught my eye for later this week.