[aaronatthedoublef]

I use Morton kosher salt. I'll weigh out a couple of tsps. when I can get back into the kitchen.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Alton Brown has changed quite a bit since his Good Eats days. He found he was getting fat and unhealthy. He has supposedly changed his cooking/eating habits quite a bit since then but I haven't seen him doing anything new other than being a host of shows where others cook.

A chef I knew years ago advocated taking all your spices and dividing them in 3rds and adding them at the beginning, middle, and end of cooking because adding spices at different times effects the flavors versus adding them all at once. I'm not sure if his recipes were too salty or not. But if you decide you want a tsp of salt or 12 mg and then divide it in thirds you wouldn't be adding extra salt. He trained at the CA Culinary Institute.

[aaronatthedoublef]

BA, could you put a pan on your stove top on the lowest flame and put your husband's pizza in it and cover it? Or if you have cast iron you could heat the cast iron while baking the pizza then turn off the heat when the pizza comes out and put it in the cast iron.

Fennel on turkey is a smart idea. It would work well on ground pork as well. Most Italian style sausages have fennel in them. So you could buy ground pork or ground turkey and add fennel, garlic (if you like that) and whatever else. When I was making Italian sausage mix (chicken or pork) we used salt, garlic powder, and fennel. Sweet sausage had demerara sugar and hot sausage had red chili flakes. I do not know exact amounts since it was pre-mixed.

I, like your husband, do not like olives. But the first two pizzas I make are cheese (my youngest will only eat cheese) and olive. I also make five pizzas and I do not do the layering BA does. I use to put vegetables on the sauce and cheese on the vegetables but my family likes it better with sauce, cheese, vegetables.

But that's the beauty of making your own pizza - you can figure out what you like best and make it! We live in a town that has one pizza shop per person (I am only slightly exaggerating) and my family still cannot find a place they like better than what I make specifically for them. And, honestly, most of the pizza in our town is mediocre. Who says competition breeds excellence?

[aaronatthedoublef]

I do not saute vegetables before I put them on. I made kalamata olives, orange peppers, red onions, and mushrooms last Sunday. It does make the pizza a little heavier and softer but everything is cut pretty fine it the crust is not soggy. I make it on a pizza stone so that may help absorb some of the water.

If I use pre-slice mushrooms I will break them up into smaller chunks.

If I am adding meat I do pre-cook the meat to 1) reduce the greasiness of the pizza and 2) make sure the meat is cooked through by the time the rest of the pizza is done.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I made turkey meatballs from an Otto Lenghi's Jerusalem cookbook. It had a sauce my wife made but she would not touch the ground turkey. Can't blame her. Ground turkey is unpleasant and I eat it. It had garlic and scallions and zucchini mixed in. My two boys loved it and one of them though it was lamb. I guess he just assumed it was because of the Otto Lenghi book. If you've never seen his they are works of art independent of what they offer in recipes and cooking techniques.

Mike - how much salt do you put in your dough? I'm down to two tsps. for four pounds of dough. If we make the sauce the sodium is low but if we use jarred it's 340 mg per serving. I may start making my own sauce now to see if I can get that reduced. The cheese is 190 per serving but since it has 16 servings per 16 oz. and the sauce is eight servings per 32 oz jar the cheese is higher.

I like your idea of tomato paste but I'm not sure how that would go over with my family. We actually use jarred marinara sauce unless company is coming and then we make our own. I've tried jarred pizza sauce and the ones I've tried are sweeter and don't taste as good.

My wife likes lots of sauce so I tend to be heavy handed there. Also if I suspect a pizza will go into the refrigerator and eaten the next day I use extra sauce because it dries out some.

Next time I make pizza dough I'll pay attention to quantities. I start with three cups of water then add two tsp. of instant yeast (I use SAF red) and add white whole wheat and cake flour in equal portions. The WWW is KAF and the cake is Bob's Red Mill and I add flour until it feels right. I also add 2/3 cup of both red flax meal and chickpea flour (both from Bob's Red Mill). I add a tsp of salt and I am adding in the flour.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I can't tell you about whether celery salt is any better for you than nitrates produced in a lab. I would imagine that there are multiple millions of grant dollars and a bunch of articles on that can be written on this topic.

[aaronatthedoublef]

There was a lengthy article in the NY Time years ago that talked about nitrate-free. It included an interview with the head of Applegate at the time. He said that "nitrate-free" is a USDA designation that the feds require them to use because they do not add chemical nitrates to their meats. They do however, use celery salt as part of the curing process and this has a chemical reaction which causes the salt to produce nitrates so he felt uncomfortable using "nitrate-free" but did so to keep the feds happy.

[aaronatthedoublef]

The turkey breasts we had didn't have any sodium injected in them according to the packaging.

I have been slicing short slices diagonally against the bias. I may try slicing it the long way to get longer strips.

[aaronatthedoublef]

There are two Whole Foods (WF) in town, one with a more skilled butchery than the other. The more skilled butchers have always had bistro steaks and they are labeled as such without the teres major designation. When I was working there I tried finding it on the internet only to find recipes for how to cook steaks like in a bistro - not very useful for helping customers. My more knowledgeable colleagues told me where the cut was located and using diagrams of cattle I figured out where it was from and what it was called.

The second Whole Foods only began carrying this cut recently and they actually have it labeled "teres major" bistro steak but they do not know what the "teres major" is. The people there are good people who try to provide customer service but very few of them go home and study after work (a few in the specialty department do).

I bought roasted turkey and roast beef for my kids lunch. Now I am buying chicken breast and bistro steaks and roasting them myself. It saves some money and I have a little more control over what I am feeding them. And they do not know the difference.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I roasted a chicken. I stuck an orange in the cavity (usually I use a lemon but I didn't have any lemons) and I rubbed butter and salt on the skin.

I also made a bistro steak. Bistro is what they call the cut and not a "bistro" recipe. It's kind of confusing. It is from the teres major which is from the shoulder and sometimes called a shoulder tender. It looks a lot like a tenderloin but is a third the price. The only place I have seen it around here is Whole Foods. It's a nice, tender piece of steak that has good flavor.

I use these for dinner and then use the leftovers for lunches.

Then I made pizza for dinner. Pizza has become our standard Sunday dinner. I usually will make a big batch of dough that will last for two to three pizza nights. I make five pizzas and save some for lunches on Monday.

My wife has a ground turkey recipe for me to make tonight. I hate the texture of raw ground turkey so shaping patties will not be pleasant.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Wonky! This is a really pretty braid and a different way to make a round challah.

The water to fruit juice ratio is too high if you're making a kosher challah but other than that it looks nice.

[aaronatthedoublef]

A couple more things... I once worked for a couple of phenomenal pastry chefs. We would all work in the back around a wooden table and one time a half cup of sugar sat in the middle of us. No one knew who it belonged to so the head chef picked it up and dumped it into one of our recipes. And everything was fine. All our product came out tasting good. I only worked there on Saturdays (this was not my paying job but more to learn and for fun) but I watched them experiment on a regular basis to create new things.

Some more tips - when it comes to clean a bowl you've mixed dough in, use cold water. I think this came from Mike and BA (if I'm leaving anyone out, apologies) but I remember a very long thread about it on the old KAF Bakers Circle. But it comes down to the fact that heat activates gluten and makes it harder. I now soak my bowls in cold water for a few hours (or overnight if I'm feeling lazy) then wipe them out with a paper towel and then wash them with soap and warm water.

I, too have started using an instant read thermometer to test for doneness. It has helped quite a bit.

I let my dough do its first rise in plastic roasting bags. I spray them with cooking spray and put them in bowls or buckets. I keep my used bags in a freezer bag with my yeast and when I make a new batch of dough I clean off the frozen bag. I will reuse a bag many times. But recently as I've started making rye with caraway I've noticed the bag taking on the smell of the seeds and the sour rye so I try not to use those bags for other breads that have a more neutral flavor. I'll also cover subsequent rises with the same bags. I started using them because once I was in a hurry and put some bread covered by plastic wrap into a hot oven. The roasting bags won't melt.

I'm looking to see if I can find a spiral dough hook for older KA mixers but it seems they are only available for the 7 qt size (I have 4.5 and 5 quart mixers) and it looks like it has a different locking attachment.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Can't speak to bread machines as I've never used one. But Mike is right about your KitchenAid. My mother's from the early 70s is still chugging along nicely. And I have two others - one I bought myself and one that was given me as a gift. I literally smoked the one I bought myself with too large a batch of very stiff bread dough. But, after shutting it down and allowing it to cool off, it still works just fine but smells like smoke when I use it.

The gifted KA works fine too. What annoyed me about it was at the time KA was putting ratings for an amount of flour on the side of their mixers. Mine was rated at nine cups. Of course if you put that much flour in it there is little room for anything else. And KA knew this and admitted it. I try to make a recipe that will give me bread for two or three weeks plus traditional challah recipes are supposed to be about five pounds or more and I make that often. If I made bread weekly my mixer would be fine. So maybe I'll do that.

There was a brief period that KA switched out some metal gears for plastic and those machines died early and often but they've gone back to metal now.

I dream of a 12 quart mixer as well but in addition to the expense they are too big to fit under the standard kitchen cabinets. But a chef friend has promised me his 30 quart when they go to a mixer geared to bread dough so I've got that going for me.

I did not put notes in my recipes for years until my mom copied a scone recipe I was using and tried it at home. Of course her scones tasted nothing like mine because they did not have all the changes I'd made. So I wrote up the entire recipe including the alterations and sent it to her. I've been writing down my recipes ever since.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Bread Baker's Apprentice" by Peter Reinhart is well worth the price even if you never use a recipe from the book. Chapter 1, "What Is It About Bread" is a great read. Mr. Reinhart's story about winning James Beard National Bread Competition and then going to bake makes this book worthwhile. I've been given it as a gift several times. Perhaps next time I will exchange it for one of his whole grain books.

Another interesting baker who has changed the way we bake is Jim Lahey. He is a commercial baker in New York and is at the front of the no-knead movement. He has some great stories of studying sculpture and going to Italy to pursue that and coming back a bread baker in his book My Bread.

Blanche, sorry if I missed it but what sort of equipment are you using? As Mike notes he outgrew his bread machine to a KitchenAid. I used to use my KitchenAid for bread but I tend to make batches that are at least four pounds of dough and my 5 quart bowl is just too small to handle it. Also I make bread a couple of times a year with some middle schoolers and I received some comments from parents whose kids wanted to buy expensive stand mixers. So I started making the dough by hand and found it easier than using my too small mixer.

Now based on comments here I may try to go back to my mixer to increase the rise of my breads. Of course that means I will need to reduce the recipe sizes.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Welcome on board. This is a great group with a wealth of knowledge.

I've only made small forays into whole grain breads. I do add whole wheat flour to pizza dough and pancakes. I also add flax meal and more recently I've started adding chickpea flour. I'm going for more fiber and more protein for my kids.

I have a list of things to try with rye bread. It has a long rise, as Mike suggests, and while my loaves are far from being door stops they are not as light as what I can buy from local bakeries. Still I have a list of things to try and I will let you know my results.

I may also start working on whole wheat because I really need to have both those breads in my repertoire. I've tried a KAF whole wheat recipe that included orange juice to tame some of the WW bitterness and that part did work well.

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