What’s your 2016 Thanksgiving Menu?

[Italiancook]

I've now learned a new word -- hysteresis. I have no way of knowing how the oven handles hysteresis. I'm concentrating on the preheat temperature. But I'm glad you educated me. Maybe I'll stop fine-tuning the lower oven and see what happens when I bake in it.

At 400 degrees setting, it now registers 390 degrees. With a 350 degree setting, the oven thermometer says it's at 345 degrees. After preheating, in both cases. I don't understand why the preheat is 10 degrees lower at 400 deg. and only 5 degrees lower at 350 degrees. But maybe I'll quit playing with the lower oven and tackle the upper oven to see what I learn.

I now realize I should have checked the temperature of the oven when it was working, before it broke. I have no frame of reference, because I didn't do that. Live and learn.

[Mike Nolan]

I have a Maverick oven thermometer that is designed to measure average oven temperatures, not food temperatures. It hangs below the shelf rather than being stuck in a roast. (I wish it had a setting to switch between average and in-the-moment temperature.)

I've also used a Polder digital meat thermometer which measures current temperature rather than average temperature.

Anyway, what your oven measures is the temperature at the sensor, not in the middle of the oven. There are a number of factors that can contribute to non-linear readings.

There are ovens that have more than one temperature sensor. I'm reminded of the old saying that a man who has a watch knows what time it is, but a man with two watches is never sure.

I find when I check my oven dial for accuracy, generally using two digital oven thermometers plus an infrared gun, that it if it is pretty much dead on accurate at 350, it'll be off at both 300 and 400, and not necessarily in the same direction.

[Mike Nolan]

Something else you may want to do is test your oven for hot spots.

The way I do this is to go buy an inexpensive loaf of sliced bread, bring the oven up to temperature and then open it and quickly lay out slices of bread all across one of the racks, front to back and side to side, leaving about an inch between slices. Close the door and let the oven run until you can start to see obvious browning through the door. Then open the door and see which slices are more brown than others, that will map where your oven's hot spots are.

If you do this at multiple rack positions (my oven has just 3 positions) you may find that the hot spots aren't in the same place at different rack positions.

[Italiancook]

Mike, you've given me (and others) some good information. I appreciate your time. I'm surprised that your oven can be spot-on at 350, but not at 400 or 300. Makes me think I should fine-tune to 350, not 400. I would never have thought of using the bread, but it's such a good idea that I'm going to do it. The last roast chicken I made make me think the oven had hot spots. Before that, I had never thought about it. Thanks for your input. If all goes as planned, tomorrow I'm going to make a loaf of sweet bread to see how the time compares to the recipe time, which I know has been right in the past.

[Mike Nolan]

The problem is that heating elements aren't linear--if you increase the power to the heating element by 25% you don't necessarily get 25% more heat. The same thing can be true with the thermocouples used as temperature sensors.

Fully digital devices (like infrared thermometers) can be calibrated to adjust to non-linear scales, my stove (made in 1996) probably cannot. Whether a stove with digital controls has that sophisticated a calibration mechanism may vary from maker to maker. I'd guess most don't spend the money on it, since the hysteresis cycle is going to have a peak-to-valley range of 20-50 degrees anyway.

A professional convection oven has a peak-to-valley range of more like 10 degrees, but you pay for that kind of precision. I suspect home convection ovens have a peak-to-valley range of 20-25 degrees, but that's not something the manufacturers advertise.

Besides, you can lose 40-50 degrees just opening the oven door.

There are kitchen devices, like a circulation heater (for sous vide cooking) that can be adjusted to very precise temperatures, staying within a degree or two, I'm told. Laboratory equipment is even more precise.

[Mike Nolan]

We made a pumpkin custard last night (think pumpkin pie, but without a pie crust.)

My wife was originally looking at a recipe she found online that included maple syrup, but we decided it was going to be too sweet, so we went looking for a good base recipe to start with. Wound up using the one in Michel Suas's book, Advanced Bread and Pastry, as a starting point, then substituting maple syrup for brown sugar and adjusting the spices. (No clove, more cinnamon!!) The test batch was a little too sweet but showed promise, so we tinkered with the main batch a bit (more pumpkin and egg, plus a little more allspice and cinnamon.)

I took notes, of course. Haven't tasted the full run yet, but I think it'll be pretty good, and I'm not fond of pumpkin! There's enough pumpkin puree left over for a second batch, we'll use that one to test that I got the recipe written down and then I'll post it.

[Italiancook]

No pumpkin pie as I originally wrote. I made a Lemon Crostata. Don't think rustic as frequently shown on Food Network. I used the Crostata recipe from "The Romagnolis' Table," my best Italian cookbook. Theirs has 2 crusts. The top is a lattice. It has a fancy look.

The recipe calls for Damson Plum jam or jelly. I made one of those a couple of years ago for visiting in-laws. My sister-in-law said it tastes like it came from Ferrara Bakery in Chicago, except theirs has a lemon filling. Today, I made the Crostata with lemon curd. It smelled scrumptious while baking, but we haven't cut into it yet.

The recipe calls for AP flour. I have KAF Italian-Style flour, so I used that. The recipe says to sift the flour, and I did that. Based on how the dough felt, I think that was a mistake. The Italian-style flour has a fine texture. I don't think it needs to be sifted. But there were a few small lumps of flour left in the sifter.

[Italiancook]

To report on the KAF Italian-style flour:

My husband ate a piece of the Crostata before I did. "This is the best crust ever," he said. "What did you do different?"

Immediately, I had to try it. The flour made a huge difference. This Crostata has a flakier, more tender crust, yet it maintains the firmness I want. I'm going to try substituting the Italian-style flour for all my Italian pastries . . . not that I make many of those.

[Mike Nolan]

Having the right type of flour can make a big difference. I find pie crust really needs a softer flour than AP. (And of course KAF AP flour is on the high end of AP flours.) I use KAF's white pastry flour for pie crusts, because the only pastry flours available locally are whole wheat flours, and I don't really care for the taste of pie crust made with whole wheat flour.

The apple pie I made on Wednesday was excellent (I'll post a picture when I get them downloaded from my camera), I used frozen apple pie filling that I had made a year ago using winesap apples I got at the farmer's market. That apple vendor didn't have any winesaps this fall (or at least none that I saw), but I still have enough pie filling in the freezer for another 3-4 pies. Winesap is still the best pie apple I've ever seen, but almost nobody grows it anymore.

[S_Wirth]

My mom always got several bushels of apples in the fall and stored them in our fruit room in the basement. It was cool there and apples kept very well thru the winter. She always loved to get a couple of bushels of winesaps. I never see them in our stores.

My husband got to take a bus load of preschoolers to the Pumpkin Patch 30 miles or so away back on Oct. 26. The patch was in its last days of operation for the year and they marked many things way down in price to get rid of them. All the squash were free and pumpkins were cheap. He bought a half peck of golden delicious apples for $ 4.00 and they were huge. So nice and tree ripened. Just like our own in a good year. We have many apple trees but just a very few apples this year on a grimes golden tree. I think all the rain we had last spring kept the blooms from being pollinated.

I decided last year that I would not buy apples in the stores again. They are picked so green for shipping and kept in storage so they last all winter and beyond and never ripen like home grown apples. They are not cheap and many just shrivel up instead of ripening.

[Mike Nolan]

I've used golden delicious for a number of recipes, it's a good cooking apple, but I don't think it's got as much flavor as other varieties, though I've not had any late-season tree-ripened ones.

There are sites that list something close to 1000 varieties of apples, but stores seldom have anything other than the basics and a few new varieties. SweeTango is one of the newer ones, it's a close cousin to the Honeycrisp, I believe, both developed at the University of Minnesota. Both are large cell size apples, which makes them good eating apples but not good for cooking.

I generally won't buy apples outside of the August-November period.

[BakerAunt]

I bought some organic Granny Smith apples for applesauce, and the family commented on the wonderful flavor, and also that the sauce was lighter in color than usual. I froze some, but I cannot freeze too much given that I am trying to start the process of emptying the freezer.

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