[aaronatthedoublef]

Mike,

When you make apple cider challah I'll be interested in your feedback. I started with straight cider and then switched to boiled cider. We notice a real difference with the boiled. It's a stronger and sweeter flavor. My kids love to drink it but it is too sweet for Kate and me.

There are rules about how much juice can be used instead of water in bread. Too much and it is cake and not bread. I reduce the cider by about a third and I can put more cider flavor in without exceeding the juice-to-water ratio.

I boil my own cider because I can use local stuff that I know and like and support CT farmers. It also lets me use different ciders. For example I can buy regual, mixed apple cider or all gala or all Honeycrisp. So far I have stuck with mixed. The Honeycrisp carries a price-premium that I am not sure is worth it.

I have not run the numbers to see if it actually saves me money. These days, with shipping, it actually might.

The other thing it lets me do is put other flavors into the cider if I want to. For example, I can toss in some cinnamon sticks and that changes the taste of the cider. I haven't tried it in challah yet but it is on my list.

If I just bought KAB boiled cider it would be limiting.

I need to make ciabatta and cookies this week. Henry made Osso de Morto cookies this week for a Halloween party. Pretty interesting. Mostly almond flour and powdered sugar. We were not able to taste any 🙁 because the recipe only made 16. I might have made a couple small ones but I try not to interfere unless asked. They needed to be refrigerated overnight which Hen didn't know before he started so they only had about 45 minutes. They were a little wonky but they looked good to me.

It was a very different recipe and something he hadn't seen or tried before so I was pretty proud of Hen for being adventurous.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I ran into Temple and pre-shaped the challah and then Violet and I shaped it and baked it. It was nice having full-sized sheet pans and a large, professional oven. I could bake all 14 loaves at once. Violet now wants to do challah bakes with me every week. It's funny - she loves the smell of my dough and, of course, the smell of baking bread, but she dislikes challah. Who dislikes challah (everyone asks that)? Violet does. Although she says mine is better than others she still has not desire to eat it.

Saturday Violet and I made my birthday cake. She is funny. She asked my favorite and I pulled out the recipe and told her she could see how often I'd made it by the mess on the pages. 🙂 It is Rosie's chocolate fudge cake. Rosie had wonderful bakeries in the Boston area when I lived there. I moved to Seattle and was a little homesick, saw the baking book on remainder in Barnes & Noble, and scooped it up. It is a sour cream chocolate cake with a non-cooking version of a boiled chocolate frosting. We added milk chocolate chips between the layers to add some texture and contrast to the unsweetened and semi sweet chocolate. The we added toasted and untoasted coconut to the outside.

And, this is the REALLY big news - Violet asked if she could turn the cake pans in the oven and then take them out of the oven. She has always been afraid to do this so I am really proud of her.

And we still need to work on grabbing a cake pan by the edge and not sticking one's thumb in the cake. But I still do that sometimes so...

[aaronatthedoublef]

I may need to start making BA's crackers again!

I made ciabatta. I finally let it sit long enough on my second rise and I have some of the big bubbles I am supposed to have. I'm less of a fan of open crumb than a lot of people maybe because most of what I use bread for are sandwiches. I made ciabatta rolls so the open crumb is less of an issue. I forgot to set some aside for pizza so I may make some more this weekend.

I made a batch of challah dough which is resting in the kitchen at my temple. I'll shape and bake today and then we distribute Friday. I tried to convince the temple to let me in the kitchen at off hours but they said no. I'll make 14x1lb loaves - 12 to give away and 2 for us. We're doing this once a month to see what works and the logistics of finding drivers to deliver is a little challenging. I am doing some of the delivery myself even though I wanted to avoid this because I didn't want to know who received the bread.

[aaronatthedoublef]

BA - I used to use 00 flour but it didn't feel like it added anything. I might try it again but it is so stupid expensive. I am scared to look at how much the KAB Italian flour is now. Caputo used to be $5 for 3lbs at Whole Foods. I am not sure they even carry it anymore. They have so many alternative flours it has crowded out a lot of the regular baking supplies. Plus they won't carry things like Dutch coco.

Mike - do you put them through your sheeter on parchment? And how do you cut them? I use a square biscuit cutter but yours look perfect.

Our convection ovens at home are not consistent across the whole oven. Convection is closer but still not consistent. Even the convection ovens where I volunteer have big differences between the top couple racks and the bottom. I don't know about the commercial service but the home service people I've used don't know how to calibrate and oven and some, like mine, can only be calibrated at the factory.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Mike - thanks.

You have "package size" and its value is 1. I guess I thought it was one pound but looking at the cell now I realize it isn't.

I have my eggs at 47 grams which is a bit shy of 2oz.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Mike - I'm wondering about some of your measurements in your recipe.

You make 24oz loaves to bake down to 16. I've been making 18oz loaves to get 16.

How many oz per egg do you use?

Thanks

[aaronatthedoublef]

I had a love-hate relationship with Consumer Reports going back to my days at Microsoft in 90s.

They published a horrible review of the Isuzu Trooper citing it tendency to roll.

A bunch of us owned Troopers and some of my co-workers began digging into to Transportation Department testing and reports as well as insurance claims and Troopers had almost zero rollovers. This led to a great deal of correspondence between my friends and CR. I've always been a little skeptical since then.

[aaronatthedoublef]

BA, your pizza dough sounds interesting. I've always used lean doughs but I wonder if adding a little olive oil in the mix might make it even crisper.

I made a modified KAF crumb coffee cake. I only used 2/3s of the crumb top. I think I might start the bake and then add the topping five minutes in rather than when I start it.

[aaronatthedoublef]

There are actually a lot of good, gluten free recipes out there. If you look for Passover recipes you'll find many that use almond flour and potato starch (corn is forbidden to some). There are a bunch with matzah meal too but I just bought a new cookbook with an almond layer cake recipe that looks like a regular flour layer cake. I made cookies for Yom Kippur that are all almond flour and egg whites and confectioners sugar.

[aaronatthedoublef]

It seems like it is almost impossible to exactly match the taste of a cherished family dish. It can be for numerous reasons some of which can be remedied by matching ingredients and some of which can never be duplicated - like your mom having a batch of your favorite cookies waiting for you whenever you come for a visit.

After trying to duplicate my mom's cookies numerous times, I watched her make a batch. She had a lit cigarette in her mouth the entire time from mixing to putting them on the sheet pan to taking them from the oven to cool.

After that I realized I might come close to my mom but nothing would ever taste like her's.

Or as my brother put "nothing like a little Kent micronite filter for flavor."

[aaronatthedoublef]

I haven't made pepperoni in a long time. I make sausage pizza the Chicago way - uncooked on top of the cheese. It does make the pizza greasier.

For dough handling it helps if the dough starts out round. This sounds obvious but it wasn't to me. Lately I've changed from dough balls to disks. They are better at keeping their shape in the freezer and my first step was to flatten the balls into disks anyway.

My dough is easier to work with if it is chilled so I defrost it and leave it in the refrigerator.

These days as I am trying to approximate a Chicago thin-crust I've begun to roll out my dough 12-24 hours in advance, place on semolina on parchment, dock it, and put it in the refrigerator.

This works well for creating a thin, mostly crisp crust. It does not on the veggie pizza because there is just too much water in the vegetables. Kate does not like them pre-cooked before they go on the pizza. I may experiment with putting them on part way through.

I put the pizza on directly onto the stone in the middle of the oven then shift it onto a cooling rack on the top of the oven to finish. So I am thinking that may be the time to add the veggies.

Each pizza starts with about 180g of dough and I roll it out to about 11 inches with my rolling ruler.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Hi Len,

How thin is your pizza? What is your process?

[aaronatthedoublef]

Great pizza Len. How much dough do you use for one.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks. I have a bag of first clear from King Arthur but it is too expensive for more than the occasional loaf of bread. And BA and Choco, you're right about rye. I've made my deli rye with all bread and with bread/first clear and to come close to what I remember from my youth in Chicago I have to use first clear.

I'll keep looking for another source.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I made ciabatta rolls. Not sure what else I'll make this week,

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