Search Results for '("C'

[Mike Nolan]

In a two-stage bread, the starter is one column and the final dough is a second column, there's a third 'total' column as well.

If you refresh your starter like this: 500 grams of starter, 500 grams of flour, 500 grams of water, then in the starter column the flour is 100%, the water is 100% and the total yield for that stage is the amount you would add to the final dough, for example, 120 grams of starter. You'll have to weight it at least once, I guess, since a lot of recipes say to use something like a cup of starter, and the weight of that would vary based on the hydration level of the starter. 'Starter' becomes a row in the table and the amount you add is in the final recipe column.

This tells you that the starter is fed at a 100% hydration level (a common way of feeding a starter). How much starter you use when feeding it is a separate matter, it isn't clear to me exactly how that affects the starter over time. In the Tartine Bread books, Chad Robertson recommends using a very small amount of starter, like 1%, when feeding it, so he'd use 1 gram of starter to 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of water. He calls this an 'immature' starter.

I was recently reading a journal article in which the hydration level of the starter was one of the keys to the microculture the starter develops, higher hydration starters favor a different mix of yeasts and bacteria than lower hydration starters. How often you feed it, what you feed it and what temperature you keep it at are the other components, the article suggested that no matter how you get your starter going (build one, buy one, get one from a friend), those four factors (feeding frequency, hydration, flour, temperature) determine the microculture of the starter over time.

For example, one of the main LABs in sourdough is Fructilactobacillus sanfranciscensis (new nomenclature, lactobacillus was split up into several genuses, with fructilactobacillus being one of them) and in a starter kept at room temperature, fed at least daily, and at 100% or more hydration F. sanfranciscensis will become the dominant LAB, no matter where you live.

I've seen some recipes that have as many as five stages. The intermediate stages, like a starter, soaker, scald or mash, generally get added to the final dough stage, but not always, there's a really complex rye recipe where the stage 1 starter gets added to stage 2, along with other ingredients, then that stage gets added to stage 3, along with more ingredients, then that stage finally gets added to the final dough stage.

The BBGA formatting standard has a place for total % of prefermented flour, I'm not sure what that's used for, but is one of the factors you can manipulate, producing a bread with a different percentage of prefermented flour in it.

I'm playing around with a tool that would allow you to enter your ingredients and the baker's percentage of each (and total yield for each stage) and build an Excel spreadsheet for that recipe so you can adjust the total yield for the recipe and have it recompute each component. (I have plans to go well beyond just a simple spreadsheet generator, but one step at a time!)

[chocomouse]

I'd love to have a foot of snow dumped on my deck! All we have is brown grass. And it's been so warm (50s during the day) this week that it is now mud season here.

Today I made heart-shaped chocolate Linzer cookies with F.R.O.G. jam. That is an Amish jam made of figs, raspberries, orange peel and ginger. These were my belated valentine gift to my husband.

[Mike Nolan]

I did wind up doing the final kneading of the Westphalian pumpernickel dough in two parts, there was really a noticeable change in the dough's appearance and feel after 20 minutes of kneading with a paddle. (That's supposed to break up the coarse meal a bit.)

Ginsberg calls it a 'glutinous mass' and that's a pretty apt description.

It is in the oven, 40 minutes at 300 and then 24 hours at 220. Will it be a brick at that point? Some of the posts on this recipe at freshloaf are not very encouraging, but my dough seems to be consistent with his descriptions so far, though I did wind up adding extra water to the scald yesterday.

Update: It's been in the oven for about 3 1/2 hours, and I'm starting to get some interesting aromas from the kitchen, probably from the amylase activity and the Maillard reaction. I'm not sure if I would have associated the smell with rye bread if I didn't know what I was making.

[Mike Nolan]

I found a short video (18 seconds) that might be the spoof Aaron was referring to.

I'm about to go see what happens when I try to do the final dough stage of the Westphalian pumpernickel. (I've been involved in an issue for a client for most of the last 12 hours, I was up until 4 AM working on it.)

[Mike Nolan]

If anything, the third rack should be hotter than the middle one, because heat rises. I know when I made my last batch of peanut butter cookies, I had 3 that didn't fit on the big sheet pan, so I baked them on the top shelf and they were done 3-4 minutes earlier.

2 minutes with a hand mixer is probably 3-4 minutes by hand. Maybe more mixing causes more of the baking soda to produce gas before it goes in the oven, reducing the amount of rise during baking?

I've not made a lot of oil cakes, though Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake, which uses butter, probably qualifies. I generally don't fill a baking pan more than 2/3 full of cake batter. (Or I put a jelly roll pan underneath it to catch spills, it's far easier to clean a pan than to clean the bottom of the oven.)

[BakerAunt]

I made a simple chocolate glaze for my heart cake, using a recipe from Epicurious (before the paywall) that uses powdered sugar, cocoa, milk, and vanilla. I poured/spread it in the indented center, then sprinkled with Valentine's decorations of little pink and white hearts and pink and white sprinkles.

[BakerAunt]

I'm posting in the dessert baking topic because I am hoping people can help me troubleshoot what went wrong. The smell of burning chocolate is still in the air.

On Monday, I decided to bake a Chocolate Heart cake recipe that I first baked several years ago. The recipe is from Kaiser Backform for their heart pan. I had it in the oven, and I was washing up when I smelled that horrible odor of burning chocolate. The pan had overflowed, which it did not do last time. I turned the vent fan on high to prevent the smoke detector from going off. At this point, I had no choice but to let it finish baking I took it out after 30 minutes. Cooled it in the pan for 6 minutes, then pried the burnt over edge pieces off to loosen it before inverting it onto a rack. It came out beautifully, which is good, because otherwise I would have cried. (I used The Grease on the pan.) I cut away the excess on the edges and tasted it; the flavor is good. I then set about cleaning my oven.

I have made this recipe before, as written, with no problem. This time I replaced ¼ cup of AP flour with barley flour and used King Arthur AP for the rest. I added 2 tsp. BRM milk powder. I used olive oil rather than canola oil. I cut the salt in half. I also baked it on the second rack up this time, whereas I had used the third rack up last time--back when I was still figuring out the oven.

Here are the ingredients from the original recipe:

1 cup sugar
3/4 cup flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa (natural)
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt

1 egg
1/2 cup coffee0flavored liqueur (used Kahlua)
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup oil (used olive oil)
1 tsp. vanilla

I changed the mixing instructions to do what I always do with oil cakes: I combined the sugar with the oil and buttermilk, then the egg, the Kahlua, and the vanilla. I mixed by hand this time instead of with a mixer for two minutes.

Does anyone have any idea why the cake overflowed its pan this time?

[Mike Nolan]

I will need to make semolina bread soon, perhaps on Monday. I'm going to tinker with the recipe to see if I can improve upon the last batch using the whole grain durum flour I have. (Knowing more about the composition of the flour gives me useful information on how to adapt to it.)

It seems to me that the bitterness I associate with having bran in the dough goes away over time, can't say I've noticed that with other whole grain breads. Maybe I'm just getting used to it?

[Mike Nolan]

Today's rolls came out a little strange, I used osmotolerant yeast, but I think maybe it's too old, because the bulk rise wasn't as high as I usually get and the final rise was REALLY slow, normally they go in the oven at about 45 minutes, today it was more like 90-120 minutes.

Because they sat so long in final rise, some of the sugar in the filling turned into a liquid (probably exposure to the water in the dough and butter) and leaked out the bottom. I took them off the parchment quickly and put them on two platters, even then some of them were already sticking.

They still taste pretty good, though. The bottom is almost crunchy and has a butterscotch flavor, not surprising since the filling has brown sugar and butter. The stuff that was left in the pan hardened quickly and can be peeled off the parchment. It is very tasty.

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[chocomouse]

I made 2 batches of really good maple cornbread today. I baked them in the Lodge cast iron pan they call a mini-cake pan. The outside comes out crisp, but the inside stays soft and tender. The flavor, using both maple sugar and maple syrup is wonderful (of course, being a Northerner, cornbread is always sweetened! unless you add fresh corn kernels.) We ate cornbread with our beef stew, but most of it will go with the chili to the ice fishing derby tomorrow. Yes, the smart folks will not go out on the ice, which is not thick enough yet this winter to hold the weight of a truck, snowmobile, fishing shanty, or maybe even a person. There were 3 deaths in the last 2 days of people who ventured out on the ice of Lake Champlain.

[Mike Nolan]

There have been some stories on what restaurants have to go through to get on Fieri's show. Some of his demands make rock star demands look reasonable. And to be honest, I haven't seen many places he's featured that I'd be willing to eat at. I don't really need a 3 pound burger--nobody does!

A local cupcake place was on Cupcake Wars, she wouldn't talk much about it, but she got eliminated in the first round. (The store has since closed, I think the cupcake craze is over.)

I think that was the show where they gave them tobacco as an ingredient. UGH!!

[aaronatthedoublef]

I've never heard of Katherine Hepburn brownies before but from Mike's description they sound like what I make. A lot of melted chocolate and butter, a bunch of eggs, and a little flour. Lately I've started to add in a little coffee and cream some of the butter instead of melting it all. It started as a recipe from a Boston baking legend, Rosie's and then I modified it over the years.

After my mom died we were going through her recipes and mine was almost exactly the same as the one she learned from her aunt which my mom called "fudge pie". Since it came from Auntie - Mom's great aunt from Louisville, the recipe has to be close to 150 years old at this point. Classics are classics.

Alton changed somewhere between the first and second seasons of "Feasting on Asphalt". In the second season he was much more arrogant and would do things to humiliate people on his crew because he could (he said that). I don't know about the ticket price because they were a gift but watching him bake a giant pizza using an oven made with massive klieg lights was worth the price of admission.

Guy Fieri is another one. He purports to be a champion of the small mom&pop restaurants and then started opening up ghost kitchens here at the start of the pandemic. So just when local small shops really needed our business he used his big name to compete with them.

[Mike Nolan]

I've been thinking about making the Katherine Hepburn brownies, they're almost flourless. (My guess is you could make them with gluten-free flour and nobody'd notice a difference.)

[Mike Nolan]

You may notice faster response time on this site, my ISP upgraded my business internet connection from 50/50 to 500/500. (Same speed upload as download, which is a big plus for a website.)

[chocomouse]

I made a Key lime pie (my husband's request) and blueberry lemon muffins.