Thanks for posting this.
This is why I've never had any dreams of selling my breads at a farmer's market or opening a bakery. I cannot imagine baking 144 loaves of bread in a day, much less baking several times that much bread day in and day out. (Also, we already have a local artisan baker at the major farmer's markets in the city, French-trained, using French #55 flour, and people who've tasted their bread and visited Paris says they are better than most of the boulangeries in Paris.)
I don't have a smart phone so I have no experience with whether the photo resolution can be adjusted.
There are quite a few tools out there that can be used to scale down the resolution of a digital photo, crop it or convert it from one image type to another. (I use ImageMagick, a Linux-platform tool, but I've been a Linux geek for longer than I care to think about, dating back to before version 1.0.)
I seem to recall hearing that rye bread really is better if you wait a long time before cutting into it. I usually bake loaves in the evening, and do not cut into them until lunch.
I have two "hearth bread" pans from KAF that I like for my rye loaves, but I just looked, and they do not have them right now. I bought these for my Limpa bread and was pleased that I could get a bit of height. I also use it when I make the KAF sandwich rye bread.
KAF is selling connected loaf pans and roll pans (3-strap)--some are even on sale. I'm not tempted, because I rarely bake more than two loaves at once, and I have enough pans to do three on those rare occasions.
Here are some photos of my sesame-semolina bread:
The loaf size is about 10x6x3 inches. As you can see, it has a very open crumb, almost like a baguette. There are more sesame seeds in the bread (from the soaker) than on it, I forgot to refill the shaker.
Slashing can be done for both decorative and functional purposes, ie, more control over the rise and preventing blowouts. I've always suspected that some bakeries use the slashing pattern to help identify the type of bread, too.
I read a note on another baking site recently that said when making diagonal slashes across a loaf, an odd number of slashes (ie, 3 or 5) is more pleasing than an even number of slashes. Do people agree?
Rye breads also take well to decorative stencils.
Growing up grilled cheese was a slice of American cheese (usually Kraft) on a slice of white bread (usually Burny Brothers for those who know and remember them) under the broiler. And that was grilled cheese for many years until we learned to do some cooking ourselves and learned that people would make a sandwich and cook it in a pan on the stove.
So to me, that has always been a form of grilled cheese. But Mike's distinctions between grilled cheese and pizza bread and pizza seem good.
It looks like no one started this thread yet. Tonight I plan to use leftover rice, from last week's stroganoff, and leftover pork, from the Sunday dinner my husband cooked (along with the drippings I saved) to make one of my grain-meat-and vegetable combinations.
I've only made risotto a few times and haven't had it in restaurants much, either, but if you watch Hell's Kitchen, it's one of Gordon Ramsay's standard dishes for testing a cook, and he's pretty fussy about it, not too firm, not too liquid. (When I have had it in restaurants, it's generally been firmer than what it looks like on Hell's Kitchen.)
I avoid most packaged stocks because they usually have garlic in them, and most of them don't taste like anything I'd want to consume. (If you've ever been to a Zoup restaurant, they advertise that their stock is good enough to drink, and they sell their stock in jars and I've seen it in a local grocery store, too.)
I always have several containers (ranging from a few ounces to several quarts) of stock in the freezer, I currently have white chicken stock, brown chicken stock (the meat/bones are roasted first), beef stock, veal stock, duck stock and goose stock on hand. I've never made or used vegetable stock.
Thanks for that compliment, Aaron!
I have used cocoa powder to make the rye darker and I agree, that does alter the flavor. Not a bad thing but it tastes less like rye. You can use brewed coffee in place of the water to darken the loaf too. I use decaf because caffeine doesn't agree with me. If you're making the bread for other people I suggest decaf as well as you might not be aware of other people's tolerance for caffeine.
I used to use a blend of 1/2 KAF medium rye and 1/2 KAF Pumpernickel, which is the whole grain dark rye. The past couple of years I have been using just the Pumpernickel. In my opinion, the keys to making the rye light in texture is (1) making a sponge, and (2) make sure the dough is properly hydrated. Although recipes I have seen usually use only part of the rye and water to make the sponge, I use 100% of the water and rye for the sponge.
I agree with Mike about the internal temp of 200 degrees, 205 won't hurt it but I'd be careful not to go over that.
Today I baked KAF Chewy Semolina Rye bread but made it into a raisin bread. I did that by omitting the onion and adding cinnamon (a heaping tsp) and a cup of raisins. It's delicious.
I only recall making one recipe from an edition of The Joy of Cooking that my mother had (and did not use), and that was for a plum coffee cake in an effort to use up a bumper crop from our plum tree. I have my mother-in-law's copy, which I think is from the 1960s. Hm. I may have used that one for a peach pie this summer, so perhaps my total is two. My mother either went to her red and white checked Better Homes & Gardens, or a bunch of little cook booklets that were in an Encyclopedia of Cooking binder. I have some of those booklets, and I broke down and bought a binder at an estate sale. (One of my sisters has the other one.)
I'm currently going through some stacks of Bon Appetit magazines and pulling out any recipes that I think that I might cook or bake some day. I stopped subscribing in the early 2000s, as there was too much in the magazine that I would never use. Now that we are packing to move at the start of July, I need to lighten the load as much as possible.
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This reply was modified 8 years, 11 months ago by
BakerAunt.
Grilled cheese sandwiches are made from pre-baked bread that is toasted on the grill long enough to melt the cheese, but the cheese never goes through the change of state that you get when you bake cheese in a really hot oven. (And there are some cheeses that don't make that transition well, getting really oily when they fully melt.)
Mind you, a good grilled cheese sandwich is an excellent cold-weather comfort food, but it isn't in the same category as pizza, IMHO.
My wife prefers to melt the cheese on a griddle and then soak it up with toasted bread (no need to butter the bread), but that's not pizza, either.
Back when I was in college (Northwestern), Gulliver's on Howard Street made the best pizza bread I've ever had, though these days I can come pretty close to what I remember it being back in the early 70's. But pizza bread (whether on a hoagie, baguette or naan) isn't pizza, either, because the bread is pre-baked.
Although many pizza fanatics say it is all about the crust, I think the real test of pizza is that thin zone where the dough, the sauce and perhaps some of the cheese and other toppings meld into the perfect gooey bite as the bread bakes through. And I think that's what makes Chicago Deep Dish Pizza so different from New York Pizza, the gooey zone is bigger.
Frozen pizza is a somewhat different issue, even the best frozen pizza (and some of them are fairly good these days) will never beat a good freshly baked pizza. Part of it is that the crust is already half-baked (or more) and the other part is that frozen pizzas are never baked in a HOT oven (eg, 500 degrees or more.) And I think ANY home pizza is going to suffer in comparison to one baked in a professional pizza oven, where the temperature could be anywhere from 650 to 1100 degrees.
Although my wife still uses the Nebraska Centennial Cookbook (her mother was the editor and her father was the publisher, nearly every recipe in it is one that her mother tested on her family), these days my wife has been using a lot of recipes out of the KAF Baker's Companion, which is probably one of the best 'recent' general books for bakers. I don't use it quite as much, though there are several recipes in the KAF Whole Grains book that I use a lot, but mostly because I've been working on recipes out of Michel Suas's textbook and am starting to work on recipes out of the copy of the 5th edition of Wayne Gisslen's textbook that Cass sent me.
But for non-baking, I often start with the '46 Joy and then see if Julia Child has a recipe in MTAOFC 1 or 2. Then if I have time, I'll check my James Beard books and maybe Graham Kerr.
What a great article. I have my mom's 1953 edition that does, indeed, describe cleaning and skinning a squirrel! This was not the one she used daily which was a bunch of pages (the covers vanished long ago) barely held together by tape.
I had a 1973 edition as well that I lost in a bad breakup.
The other cookbook my mom lived by was The Settlement Cookbook which was a staple of Midwestern Jewish ladies.
My first effort to start this thread disappeared, along with my post, when my computer suddenly lost its connection. This time I wrote it in my Baking and Cooking Log, so I will paste it here.
In honor of the Formula-1 Spanish Grand Prix which aired this morning (my husband is a huge F-1 racing fan), I tried another new recipe from the BH&G s 100 Best Pumpkin Recipes specialty magazine that I bought last fall. The recipe is "Pumpkin Waffles with Maple Walnut Cream" (p. 15). I made a half recipe, and I altered it. I substituted half whole wheat pastry flour for that much regular flour, added 1 Tbs. flax meal, and used one cup of pumpkin. I substituted buttermilk for regular milk, so I reduced the baking powder to 2 tsp. and added 1/4 tsp. baking soda. I deleted the cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. I did not make the maple cream, because real maple syrup is as good as it gets: Why gild the lily? The recipe made five two-pane Belgium waffles, so I cut the three leftover ones in half and wrapped and froze them for future quick breakfasts. The recipe only uses 2 Tbs. melted butter, so the fat content is lower than in many waffles. We liked them a lot, so they will become part of the regular waffle repertoire.
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This topic was modified 8 years, 11 months ago by BakerAunt. Reason: corrected title
I bought a bag of morels at the farmer's market last weekend, and I've been playing around with using them in some recipes. Tonight I'm doing crab stuffed morels.
$40 a pound is about average around here for morels. But one of the stores had eggs on sale (59 cents for an 18-pack), so it sort of averages out. If the weather doesn't get too hot I'll do a souffle later this week.
