What are You Baking the Week of March 12, 2017?

[Italiancook]

BakerAunt, glad to see you arrived safely.

I baked a loaf of my grandmother's Banana Nut Bread. I used a farmer's black walnuts. Much more flavor than the grocery store brand. Still, I think the best black walnuts were the ones my dad picked up under a tree in another state, carted home to shell. That's probably a skewed memory, because the nuts in today's bread gave a wonderful moisture and flavor to the bread.

I sliced half the loaf for the freezer. I experimented with the other half and made Banana Bread Biscotti using a recipe I saw on Food Network's "The Kitchen." I think the biscotti would have been crisper in the center if I had wrapped the bread and let it sit a day or two. Next time, I'm going to let them sit in the oven for five minutes with the temperature turned off. I would like to achieve more crispiness in the center. But now, I can say I have biscotti in the freezer!

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/banana-bread-biscotti

The above link is about making biscotti with chocolate banana bread. I made a regular loaf, not chocolate, and the biscotti idea still has merit.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by Italiancook.

[Italiancook]

BakerAunt, I'm glad you folks arrived safely.

I baked my grandmother's recipe for Banana Nut Bread. I sliced and froze half of it. I experimented with the other half. I used it to make Banana Bread Biscotti. I used the recipe linked below from Food Network's "The Kitchen."

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/banana-bread-biscotti

I didn't make a chocolate one. Instead, a regular banana bread. As far as the biscotti, I think mine would have turned out better if I had wrapped the loaf and let it sit a day or two. Next time, I'm going to turn off the oven at the end of the baking time and let the bread stay in the oven an extra 5 minutes. The centers need to be crispier than they are. At least I can now say I have homemade biscotti in the freezer!

[Mike Nolan]

The classic deli rye bread recipe uses first clear flour, something that apparently only exists on the east coast. I've ordered it from King Arthur a couple of times, it's pretty pricey in a small bag.

The irony is that first clear flour was originally used in rye bread because it was cheap, it is almost yellow in color but because the rye flour is the dominant color in rye bread, first clear flour could be used.

My former next door neighbor, the head of the local Sysco office, (he moved last fall) tried to get first clear flour for me from his suppliers, his flour sales reps from both Pillsbury and Gold Medal had never even HEARD of it, though it was in the Gold Medal catalog, but wasn't available for shipment this far west unless you ordered a pallet of it. (40 bags, 50 pounds each.)

The first clear flour DOES make a difference, by the way, but it's just too expensive to order in small bags. But Aaron, if you're trying to develop a recipe for your friends to use in a deli, it might be worth looking into whether you/they can get first clear flour.

[BakerAunt]

On Wednesday, I made a double recipe of Native Grain Hotcakes from Better Homes & Gardens New Baking Book, p. 319. It uses mostly buckwheat flour and cornmeal and is sweetened with honey. It was a good breakfast for a day when we had another three inches of snow overnight. I probably could have made just 1 1/2 times the recipe, but I was unsure how much the guys would eat. I put the remainder into my large-sized muffin pan and baked at 375F for 20 minutes. These will go nicely with tomorrow's breakfast.

I am also baking another recipe of my variation of Ellen's (Moomie's) Buns as rolls to send with my younger stepson and his friend who are heading home tomorrow by way of Mammoth National Park.

[aaronatthedoublef]

BA, what a cool idea to bake off extra pancake batter as muffins. I just always make extra pancakes and freeze them.

How sweet are the hotcakes? My batter has just a tbl of sugar at this point because I know my kids will drown them with syrup.

Mike, I will look for first clear flour. I've never seen it in the grocery store but I'll check Walmart (which actually has a huge baking aisle) the next time I'm there. My chef friends will get me things too.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Amazon has it for $3/lb. Kind of expensive...

[RiversideLen]

Has anybody used pickle juice in the rye bread dough? I have an empty jar of pickles and am thinking about using the juice in the starter.

[Mike Nolan]

I doubt any grocery store carries clear flour. Some of the Mennonite stores repackage bulk flour for resale, I've only been to the one in Crossville TN and didn't see first clear flour there, but it's worth checking elsewhere.

I don't know what part of the country you live in, Aaron, but if you're in the eastern USA or possibly west coast you should be able to get it from a restaurant supply house. It was in the Gold Medal commercial/restaurant online catalog a few years ago, I didn't see it today, but their site has been reorganized and is really slow too. Your friends will need to buy other stuff from the restaurant supply houses anyway.

If you're west of that, you may be out of luck. (When I had my neighbor look into it, the Gold Medal rep, who had never heard of first clear flour, eventually found out that it isn't produced by the mills west of roughly Ohio, but can be ordered in 40 bag pallets. Oddly enough, it apparently WAS available on the West coast, just not in the central US.)

However, I just did a search on 'first clear flour bulk' with some possibly useful results. Searching on 'clear flour bulk' produces additional results.

Stover & Company in Cheswick PA (just north of Pittsburgh) has it for $15.73 for a 50 pound bag. Delivery charges to Nebraska would be $37.53 for a total of $53.26 or $1.065 a pound. That's still a lot better than either Amazon or King Arthur Flour, where a 3 pound bag is $8.50 plus shipping).

Obviously if you could pick it up at their warehouse, it'd be a lot less. I bought about 25 pounds of chocolate couverture from them over Christmas, they're easy to deal with. I'll be tempted to pick up a 50 pound bag the next time we're in PA, we usually go there about once a year.

Another possibility is to contact the smaller mills (like for me the ones down in KS, a few of whom mill flour for King Arthur) to see if any of them bag first clear flour for direct sale. As I understand it, separating out first clear flour is an early step in the process of milling flour anyway, it's just a question of whether they bag any of it for sale.

[Mike Nolan]

I've tried pickle juice in rye bread a couple of times, can't say I noticed much difference, though you probably want to cut back on the salt because pickle juice is really salty.

[RiversideLen]

I thought about the salt too. I decided to go ahead and try it, but only use 1/4 cup. Total water volume is 10.5 ounces.

[Joan Simpson]

I made the rye bread recipe from KAF site that uses mustard and pickle juice the bread was very good.I think it was called Sandwich Rye.Turned out really well.

[RiversideLen]

Joan, I looked that up, it doesn't look like they cut back on the salt. Looks like a good recipe. KAF has quite a few rye recipes, maybe I should make it my quest to try them all, lol.

[BakerAunt]

On Thursday, I baked my Buttermilk Grape Nuts Bread, only I shaped it as 12 rolls in a 10x10 inch pan, instead of a loaf in a 8 1/2x 4 1/2 pan, and I baked the rolls for 30 minutes rather than the loaf's 45 minutes. I forgot to bring malted milk powder with me, so I had to omit it. I also did not have enough honey, so I used 3 Tbs. of maple syrup. I'm getting ahead for Saturday when we begin the trek back to Texas.

[RiversideLen]

I baked the rye bread today, the one which I used some pickle juice in the dough. It made the dough smell nice. I turned it into sandwich buns (my fav kind of bread), I get 9 buns out of this recipe, 96-97 grams each, pre baked weight. I ate one of them, it was hard for me to tell if the pickle juice made any difference because I had a meatball sandwiched in it. But they came out nice. Pickle juice certainly didn't hurt it.

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[Italiancook]

RiversideLen, your sandwich buns look great!

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