I don't see why the Brod & Taylor sheeter wouldn't work for crackers, but they're not something I've made in a long time (and wasn't very successful with back then), so I don't have a go-to recipe I'm familiar with to test it on.
I've got a pretzel recipe I'm familiar with, I might try that and make pretzel crackers.
Just got this from Brod & Taylor, it takes the sous vide concept in a different direction, it can hold something at a steady temperature from 41 degrees (F) to 122.
They're positioning it for sourdough but I think it might have potential for other things, as long as you don't need to process more than a quart. At $99 the price point is interesting, too. I wonder what mechanism it uses for cooling.
See https://brodandtaylor.com/collections/all/products/sourdough-home
My husband ordered the newly introduced Girl Scout cookies: toffee -tactic ( gluten free) and raspberry something. The raspberry cookies never arrived. The toffee cookies were $6 for a 6.7 oz box and the raspberry cookies were only going to be $5. Maybe the raspberry cookies aren't gluten free - not that we care. We haven't tried the toffee cookies made with rice flour and 70 calories each! Has anyone tried these?
Add croissants to this list. Here in southern NE (I'm including Boston) bakers can't just leave a croissant alone. They load them up with all sorts of stuff. The most extreme I've seen was a baker who makes beautiful, wonderful, croissants fill them with pastry cream with fruity Pebbles in them for Pride Month. There is something to be said for simplicity and purity and a plain croissant is just wonderful and a cup of good coffee.
The sad part is his plain croissants are great.
Most of the bakeries I know have crappy cookies. The same baker who made the fruity pebble croissants said it is because he has to make cookies and doesn't really care about them. But they are the worst item he sells.
If you load up a cookie with peanut butter cups and buttercream and all this stuff then
you can hide a lot of mediocrity.
Good cookies just don't need all this junk.
At work we sell giant cookies from the in-house bakery - choc chip is the best seller. The other cookies we get from them are red velvet, peanut butter with Reese's Cup, oatmeal raisin, sugar and mudslide (sort of a brownie in cookie form with chopped pecans) and usually 1 or 2 COW (cookie of the week). They are good sometimes, not so good others, but the guests don't seem to mind - they rave about them. Mine are better
On the Kids' Baking Championship on they had "Over the Top Cookies". First they wrecked cupcakes, then doughnuts, then cookies.
There is something to be said for a simple, well made, chocolate chip cookie. Or oatmeal cookie. Or, what seems to have become our family cookie, molasses (even though Mom called them ginger snaps).
As Choco says, if they're made with good ingredients they will taste good. Who needs all this junk on top of them.
The Crumbl will be on the other side of town, by Whole Foods, and the fact that several of their varieties of cookies seem a bit weird (like caramel corn or cornbread) doesn't make me excited to go there.
Crumbl appears to have just opened a location in South Bend, but I don't see other obvious chains there.
On Saturday, I baked a recipe from Stanley Ginsberg's rye blog, "Anise-Fennel Loaves/Ragkakor (Sweden)," which I have wanted to try for some time. I made a few swaps by using buttermilk rather than whole milk, using the special gold yeast (and thereby reducing the instant yeast by half), and replacing the 50 g of butter (about 4 Tbs.) with 3 Tbs. avocado oil. I altered the mixing by proofing the yeast in the warmed buttermilk and light corn syrup before mixing in the medium rye flour with the salt and seeds. While the paddle was running, I drizzled in the avocado oil. I was unable to knead this dough in my 7-qt. Cuisinart, which is a problem that comes up for me repeatedly with some of these heavy rye breads. The spiral just makes a hole in the center, and no amount of repositioning the dough solves that problem. So, I removed the dough from the machine and kneaded it for 10 minutes. After the first rise, shaping, and second rise, I used a bamboo skewer (he says a chopstick or fork) to poke holes over the surface of each of the four small loaves. I used a 1 ¼ inch biscuit cutter to cut the center out of each one. I baked them for 20 minutes, taking the small baked centers out at 15 minutes, then baked another 90 seconds, as they were not quite to temperature. The shape is reminiscent of a large, flattened on the bottom bagel. I'm planning on having one either for breakfast tomorrow or for lunch.
Here's the link to the recipe in case anyone is interested. Note that these are 100% medium rye"
Anise-Fennel Loaves/Rågkakor (Sweden)
In the last few years, around a half dozen cookie shops have opened in Lincoln, most of them are franchise operations like Goodly Cookies and the Warm Cookie Company. Crumbl cookies is the latest to set up shop here.
Apparently the cupcake craze has been replaced by the cookie craze.
Since prices per cookie are usually in the $3 range, sometimes higher, it is probably more profitable than bread baking. (Admittedly they aren't small cookies.)
I had bought some napa cabbage at the farmers' market--a new ingredient for me. I decided to improvise a stir-fry dinner using it on Thursday. I started with an online Martha Stewart recipe for "Stir Fried Chicken with Bok Choy." I had leftover chicken from the one I roasted on Sunday, so that cut the preparation. I sauteed chunky mushroom slices and chunky pieces of a yellow bell pepper in avocado oil. I then added the sliced napa cabbage and cooked it down before adding the leftover chicken. I adapted the sauce by replacing rice wine vinegar (which I do not have) with white wine vinegar and increasing the light brown sugar from 2 tsp. to a full tablespoon. Instead of using fresh, I mixed ¼ tsp. garlic powder and 1/8 tsp. ground ginger into the sauce. I almost forgot to add the water, since Martha Stewart recipes never list it as an ingredient but only put it in the instructions. I whisked in 4 tsp. cornstarch, since I was not doing the step of dredging uncooked chicken breast in it. My stir-fry then took on a "Fusion Cooking," vibe when I stirred in some cooked farro (1/2 cup dry before I cooked it). My husband is not an adventurous eater, but he really liked the meal, so I will be making it again.
It depends on the contour of the lid, if it is relatively flat then you've got a lot of options, but probably need something heavy, waterproof and not easily broken, in case it falls off. It would help if it had some kind of a handle to make it easy to pick up. A sad iron, maybe? (Do people still have these?)
The latest batch of peanut butter cookies also came out a bit crunchy, though not as dark as the previous batch. I took them out of the oven fully 2 minutes earlier. I wonder if my oven setting was a few degrees higher? (It's a dial, not a digital setting.)
Otherwise, I don't know what I'm doing differently from the first few batches.
Scottish Oatcakes makes about 15 oatcakes
Marliss Desens adapted this recipe a bag of Bob's Red Mill Scottish Oatmeal. These cracker/cookies have just a hint of sweetness and would work with cheese or with jam if desired, but they are wonderful on their own. For a more cookie result, doubling the cane sugar might work.
1 cup BRM Scottish Oatmeal
1/3 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 tsp. cane sugar
Slightly heaping 1/8 tsp. salt
Slightly heaping 1/8 tsp. baking powder
2 Tbs. avocado oil
1 Tbs. buttermilk
3 Tbs. water
Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper. Preheat oven to 325F with rack in middle of oven.
In small bowl, whisk together the first five ingredients. In very small bowl, whisk together avocado oil, buttermilk, and water for at least a minute until thoroughly combined. Add to oatmeal mixture and use a fork to toss together (as with a pie crust), then a bowl scraper to bring the dough together.
Roll dough to ¼ inch thickness. (Note: I usually roll and re-roll dough on the parchment on which I plan to bake the oatcakes, using a piece of saran over the dough.) Use a 2-inch biscuit cutter and cut out cakes, re-rolling dough as needed. Bake 25-27 minutes, or until golden. Allow to cool on pan.
Note: I used a small heart cutter and got 29 plus one blob oatcake. I baked these for 20 minutes.
What I changed. The original recipe was Bob's Favorite Scottish Oatcakes. The one on the Bob's Red Mill site had too much water; the bag recipe reduced it. I created this version when I had only 1 cup of the Scottish Oatmeal and adjusted the flour, salt, and baking powder. I increased the amount of cane sugar, and that little bit is all that is needed. I replaced ¼ cup of melted butter in the original recipe with a reduced amount of avocado oil and buttermilk, and I greatly reduced the water.
I've always been a bit skeptical of 'the yeast stops working or runs out of sugar' claims.
Some years ago I took a baguette recipe (probably Reinhart's pain de campagne) and I let it rise for an hour, get punched down, rise again, etc. After 6 hours, it was still rising just fine, so I shaped and baked it. It was pretty good, nice crumb.
