Search Results for '("C'

[Mike Nolan]

The last two years the most productive tomatoes in the garden were the 4th of July ones, they're not big (somewhere between ping pong ball and tennis ball for size) but they're productive. I think I got my first 4th of July tomato on about the 6th of July last year, there have been years when I got them ahead of the 4th. And they were still setting fruit when the frost hit in October.

First Lady was replaced by First Lady II a few years ago and now it seems First Ladies has replaced First Lady II. I had both First Lady II and First Ladies last year, neither performed as well as I was expecting, but I think that was true of quite a few tomatoes, and not just in my garden, even the growers at the Farmers Market reported issues.

Italian Heirloom has been a great sauce/juice tomato here, they're about the size of a medium apple.

My Celebrity didn't do well last year, but I think that's because we had a cold snap down into the upper 30's 3 days after I transplanted everything and it affected many of the tomato plants.

I plant Rutgers because my wife likes them.

Porter is a new one for me, it's supposed to be a good hot weather tomato, developed in Texas.

I've given up for now on Mortgage Lifter and Brandywine, too much cracking in the shoulders and not very productive the last few years.

I've still got one row in the seedling tray unplanted (not counting the one I've got reserved for a white eggplant like Burpee White Knight if I can find the seeds), but I'm not sure what I'll put there. The varieties of tomato seeds available in local stores seems more limited this year, even the garden supply store didn't have a wide selection.

[BakerAunt]

My husband is on a restricted diet for a couple of days, so for Monday dinner, I made, for me, my Spaghetti Squash and Parmesan Cheese Quiche, a healthier version of the recipe in Ken Haedrich's The Harvest Baker. Usually, I try to use a 2 lb. spaghetti squash, but my last one from fall (kept extremely well!) was a little over 3 lbs. Given how full my 11-inch diameter quiche dish was, I think that is the weight limit. This time, I used the oven's convection setting, both to partially pre-bake the crust, then to bake the quiche. The recipe said 375F, but I baked it at 375F convection. The quiche turned out nicely, only needing to bake for 38 minutes.

[Mike Nolan]

Dinner plans?

We got about an inch of snow overnight (after an evening of rain) but it is likely going to be gone by evening.

[Mike Nolan]

Part-skim mozzarella works OK on pizza, I just prefer the whole milk kind, I think it melts better. But whole milk mozzarella is difficult to find these days, I don't think any of the regular grocery stores here even carry it, just a half-dozen different brands of part-skim.

Our Sams hasn't had the whole milk mozzarella cheese lately just the part-skim, I don't know if the one on the other side of town (which is a bit larger) has it or not. But Sams had dropped the Black Diamond cheddar cheese spread several years ago, and it is back again, and so is the large jar of artichoke hearts, so there's hope yet. (Costco has artichoke hearts but they're marinated in oil and spices--bleh!)

[BakerAunt]

Oats make everything healthier, Chocomouse!

Aaron--I use KABC white whole wheat flour. I preferred the BRM Ivory flour, but they stopped carrying it four or five years ago. I have the KABC membership where I get free shipping on orders over $25 and earn points that add up to coupons in increments of $5 off. I order enough other items from KABC (pumpernickel and medium rye flour, baking powder, special dry milk, cheese powder, espresso powder, cocoas) that it is worth my while.

I dislike Restaurant pancakes because they are so lightweight. My husband is not a big pancake eater, but he likes mine because they are substantial. I'll post a couple of my recipes in the next couple of days.

I don't think it hurts to move the dough out of the mixing bowl, so I usually ignore that direction unless it is a sponge, in which case I leave it in the mixing bowl. For raising dough, I like my dough buckets with snap on lids.

[chocomouse]

The lemon oatmeal sugar cookies recipe is from Taste of Home and available on line; google it. I used a 2 teaspoon (?) scooper and got about 4 dozen cookies. I think about 10 minutes is the best baking time in my Breville oven. I love lemon and like a very strong lemon flavoring; my favorite is the KAF lemon juice powder but I'm trying to use up some older ingredients so I used Boyajian lemon oil and lemon zest. I also threw in the remainder of a bag of lemon bits, a handful or two, maybe a 1/4 cup. I'll make these again, and am thinking about using lime flavoring. They are pretty rich, but I'm convinced the oatmeal makes them healthy!

[aaronatthedoublef]

Back in the old days (20 years ago when we live in SoCal) produce in grocery stores was picked before it was ripe, bulk shipped to Texas, the processed and packaged and shipped around the country, including back to CA. So all the stuff in the grocery stores was sub-par and we always shopped at farmers markets.

At least according to the farmers. I don't know if that was true then and if it is true today. All I know is local produce at stores was terrible compared to farmers markets back then.

If someone can check an Ald's in CA it will have a label that lists all the ingredients and probably a Prop 65 warning too.

[BakerAunt]

I was looking up a recipe in the first edition of Bernard Clayton, Jr.'s The Complete Book of Breads (a recipe that is not in the second edition), when I came across a quick bread recipe: "Orange Oatmeal Bread" (pp. 247-248). As I have some lovely Cara Cara oranges, I decided to bake the recipe on Monday. I made a few changes in that I used half barley flour and replaced the 2 Tbs. melted butter with avocado oil. I added 2 Tbs. BRM milk powder. I reduced the baking powder from 4 ½ tsp. to 4 tsp., as I use the baking powder that King Arthur sells, and I find that it tends to be a bit stronger than what I used to buy at the store. I chose the option of baking it in three small loaf pans rather than a 9x5. The loaves were done in 40 minutes and possibly could have baked a few minutes less. They are flat on top, which is probably due to the combination of my using half barley flour and reducing the baking powder.

I'll slice one for tea time tomorrow and report on taste and texture.

[BakerAunt]

On Saturday evening, I made dough for a vegan Cinnamon Roll recipe, shaped the rolls, then refrigerated them overnight and baked them Sunday Morning. The base recipe comes from a blog, Love & Lemons:

https://www.loveandlemons.com/cinnamon-rolls/

My problem with most vegan recipes trying to imitate non-vegan recipes, and this one is no exception, is that the nutritional content is usually low. I tried to fix that by using a bit more than half whole wheat flour for that much AP, reducing the cane sugar from 1/3 cup to ¼ cup, replacing the almond milk with oat milk (increasing it by ¼ cup and reducing water by that much), cutting the salt by 25%, and replacing the 1/3 cup melted coconut oil with 3 Tbs. avocado oil. For the filling, I kept the ½ cup brown sugar but reduced the cinnamon from 1 ½ Tbs. to 1 Tbs.

For the glaze, I reduced the powdered sugar from 1 ¼ cup to ¾ cup, used oat milk in place of almond milk. (I used the oat milk because I did not find a healthy almond milk in any of the stores here. The oat milk at least had a good calcium content and fewer additives. The brand I used was Oatly.) I reduced the vanilla from 1//2 to ¼ tsp.

Essentially, I re-wrote the recipe. The resulting small, dozen sweet rolls, which made an 8x11 dish, are ok but will never live up to my recipe that uses buttermilk and eggs. My thought is that the blog recipe tries to make up for a not very good bread base with a ridiculous amount of glaze and strong cinnamon. Of course, replacing that coconut oil may have contributed to the bread base being underwhelming.

I might try the recipe again with white whole wheat rather than regular whole wheat. However, I will keep searching for a better recipe. At last year's family reunion, my husband's brother, who is vegan, was disappointed that the cinnamon rolls (made from an aunt's recipe that everyone loves) were not vegan, so I would like to find a recipe that would taste great AND has nutritional value that I could bake for him, along with the regular rolls for the rest of us.

[BakerAunt]

Thanks for doing this experiment with the sheeter, Mike. The pictures are great. I'm impressed with the crackers--and thinking how many different varieties I could make if I had a sheeter to reduce the drudgery of rolling them out. The sheeter would certainly be great for that. I am baking the cheese crackers almost every two weeks, and my husband goes through them fast. In keeping him supplied, I do not get to bake some of my other cracker recipes.

I usually roll my whole wheat sourdough cheese crackers 1/16th inch thick, using my set of guides. This recipe has no yeast, just the sourdough, so rise is not an issue.

Coincidentally, on Sunday, I also baked my Whole Wheat Sourdough Cheese Crackers (aka Baker Aunt's Crackers) from dough I made last week.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's the second tray (scraps rolled out a second time) before and after baking.

These are a bit thicker than the previous batch, averaging around 7.5 mm, but they sat for 20 minutes while the first batch baked, so they had some time to rise.

I don't think the docking made much difference.

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[Mike Nolan]

The Brod and Taylor sheeter appears to do a very good job sheeting dough for crackers. I took them down to the '1' setting, which I think is 1mm. I'm hoping that's not too thick.

There's a '0' setting but it seems to be really thin, it'll hold a piece of parchment paper. If I need them a little thinner than the '1' setting, I could put them on one or more layers of parchment paper, I did that with one batch of laminated dough as a test, and it worked reasonably well.

The thickness of the dough seems pretty uniform, which is what a sheeter is supposed to do.

I tried a couple of ways of squaring off the dough, folding it over like you would a laminated dough seems to work OK, but you have to set the thickness setting back a few notches and work back down. Folding the edges over to produce a rectangle and pressing them down a little seems to work just about as well, and is faster because you don't have to back off on the thickness as far, if at all. I also tried just stretching the corners so they were more square before moving down to the next thickness setting. That seemed to work fairly well, too.

But it might just be easier to trim off the scraps to get a rectangle and roll the scraps back out again. That's what I did for a second smaller tray of crackers.

After they were cut, I brushed them with some egg wash. Some of them I sprinkled pretzel salt on, some I left plain, and some I left plain but docked with a fork.

It might also be possible to brush the egg yolk on before cutting them, then flip it over so you get both sides coated. (I've seen that suggested as a way of brushing pretzel crackers with a baking soda solution, though the author warns that it is a bit messy.)

I separated them on the baking sheet, I'm not sure if that's really necessary. It might be enough just to cut them and leave them in place. Worth trying, I guess.

I'll post some pictures once they're out of the oven, but they smell good so far. I used the whole wheat pretzel recipe in the KAF Whole Grains book, but substituted some coarse rye meal for about 2/3 of the whole wheat flour.

I baked them for a total of about 15 minutes at 425, but the ones in the upper left corner look a little darker, I think that's the hot spot in this oven. If I like them well enough to do another batch, I may try the convection oven setting at 400.

My digital micrometer (from a beadworking store) says they're about 6mm thick after baking, but this is a yeasted dough, so I'm not surprised. The interior seems good, not dense but not really open, either. They're a bit crisper at the edges than in the middle, that may change as they cool.

They're about 1.75 inch (45mm) squares.

[Mike Nolan]

If it is well-tempered chocolate, the beta-5 cocoa butter crystals melts at 92.8 degrees (33.8C), so if you get it that warm it will melt and possibly lose temper, but it may soften a bit below that.

I've been getting 11 pound bags of Callebaut callets from Stover & Company in Cheswick PA (Pittsburgh area) when we visit our son there, but they also do mail order and their shipping prices seem reasonable. Once the weather warms up they won't ship chocolate unless you pay for cool packs. I'd like to get some ruby callets from them, that's the only place I've seen the ruby chocolate at, other than the small packages of them that Trader Joe's had. Maybe we'll go out to visit our son and granddaughter this summer.

Anova makes a rectangular box designed for their sous vide machines, in two different sizes. I don't have one, yet, mainly because I'd have to figure out where to store it, but it looks like it does a good job sealing the top, which would save energy and reduce evaporation, and it is designed to hold your food under the surface of the water so it all cooks evenly.

Although I don't need it for sourdough, the Brod & Taylor sourdough home device strikes me as interesting because it can hold something at temperatures both above and below room temperature. I'm hoping they will adapt that technology to handle other types of food. There are some complex rye breads with a multi-stage starter that had fairly specific temperature for each stage.

[Mike Nolan]

Maybe if you took a hot knife and made score lines it'd break more cleanly? How thick is the chocolate?

When I was at Chocolate School, they were playing around with a device that cuts baked goods using high pressure water. It is designed for cutting cakes, allowing clean cuts, less waste, and even doing complex shapes, but they were testing it to cut chocolate. They had programmed it to cut a big piece of chocolate into an outline of the Chicago skyline. It was fascinating to watch.

I've seen numerous videos showing how to make tempered chocolate in a double boiler or even in a microwave.

Tempering chocolate is easier if you have something that give you good control over the temperature. Of the various methods to temper chocolate that we learned in Chocolate School, I prefer to use the seeding method:

First I heat the chocolate to 40 degrees (C) to make sure all the fat crystals are melted, then I cool it down to about 32 degrees, and add 1% shaved cocoa butter silk (cocoa butter than has been tempered.) Stir for a minute to make sure the cocoa butter silk dissolves and you'll have a pot of tempered chocolate, it's amazing to watch how quickly the seeding works. In school we did it with a large steam table pan holding several pounds of chocolate, it only took 2-3 minutes for the entire pan to reach a good temper.

I made the cocoa butter silk using my sous vide cooker, putting the cocoa butter in a sealed jar, heating it above 36 (C) to make sure the fats are all melted, then holding the temperature at around 33 degrees for 24 hours. Once you have it in that state, pour it into a container, it'll stay in that state for a year or longer.

It should be possible to use the same process to make tempered chocolate using a sous vide cooker, you just have to make sure the jar is well-sealed and you don't get water into the chocolate afterwards. I may have to try that the next time I'm doing chocolate work, it would be convenient to have tempered milk chocolate and tempered dark chocolate available at the same time.

Beta-5 is the desired fat crystal state for tempered chocolate, it is stable at room temperatures. There's actually a Beta-6 state, but it is something that chocolate won't reach unless it has been stored for a long time.

[aaronatthedoublef]

My weekly challah bake. Only had enough for six loaves as I miscalculated my apple cider. 🙁

Braiding is better. I dropped off four at the temple.

Thanks Mike. I have a chocolate chopper but I've never been able to cut neat chunks.

I need something like a corona wire in a printer but those things are truly dangerous.

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