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I would not be surprised if someone has already written a PhD thesis on challah.
February 26, 2023 at 12:52 pm in reply to: What are you Baking the Week of February 19, 2023? #38560I've always been a bit skeptical of 'the yeast stops working or runs out of sugar' claims.
Some years ago I took a baguette recipe (probably Reinhart's pain de campagne) and I let it rise for an hour, get punched down, rise again, etc. After 6 hours, it was still rising just fine, so I shaped and baked it. It was pretty good, nice crumb.
February 26, 2023 at 12:47 pm in reply to: What are you Baking the Week of February 19, 2023? #38559I wonder if the tradition for large batches of challah comes from the necessity for community ovens?
Some days when I go to slash my loaves they slash beautifully, other days the knife or lame just seems to stick.
Not much you can do in terms of recovery once they're overproofed, my usual sign of that is when they come out flatter than normal. A while back I got distracted by something when I had some loaves in final rise and I completely forgot about them; they went into the oven about an hour late. They started to collapse as I was moving them into the oven and they looked a lot like flatbreads by the time they came out.
There's kind of a narrow window between under-proofed and over-proofed, and unless you can control all the factors, like temperature and humidity, dough won't rise at the same rate every time, so you have to just kind of learn to anticipate when it's ready for the oven.
The finger-poke method is the usual test for final proof, and the type of dough, including hydration level, is a big factor in how it should respond. Bagels don't look or feel the same as challah, for example.
February 25, 2023 at 9:27 pm in reply to: What are you Cooking the Week of February 19, 2023? #38549We had theatre tickets this afternoon (Legally Blonde) and were kind of tired afterwards, so Diane had some soup and I had some leftover spaghetti.
February 25, 2023 at 11:44 am in reply to: What are you Baking the Week of February 19, 2023? #38545They look like they might have been over-proofed a little, but the braiding looks good.
February 24, 2023 at 5:52 pm in reply to: What are you Cooking the Week of February 19, 2023? #38536Could you put something heavy on the lid to hold it down better?
We're having creamed tuna on biscuits tonight.
February 23, 2023 at 5:27 pm in reply to: What are you Cooking the Week of February 19, 2023? #38530As I understand it, meat needs to reach a designated internal temperature to be safe, either a sufficiently high peak temperature or a lower temperature for some period of time. With something like a steak, it is usually assumed that any bacteria will be on the surface, which gets much hotter than the innermost part of the steak, which is why a rare steak is generally considered safe, though restaurants may warn about undercooked food to keep the lawyer happy.
Sous vide cooking works by keeping it at a lower temperature for a longer time. A similar process is used for pasteurized eggs, they get to some specific temperature (around 123 degrees) and have to be held there for something like an hour.
I have a mini crock pot that I use for hot fudge, which needs to be kept at about 110 degrees, or it will separate or scorch.
I found a Lutron plug-in lamp dimmer that allows me to set the crock pot to that temperature. I haven't seen any signs of it damaging the crock pot, but I assume it wouldn't work with one that uses electronics.
February 23, 2023 at 5:24 pm in reply to: What are you Cooking the Week of February 19, 2023? #38529Try this picture, it shows the cord better. I measured it at 4 feet.
February 23, 2023 at 4:40 pm in reply to: What are you Cooking the Week of February 19, 2023? #38525I'm planning to make spaghetti for supper tonight
A client I still do some work for is looking to move their forums to a new platform, Discourse, and I've been helping to evaluate that platform.
There are a lot of things I see in Discourse that are an improvement over WordPress. There are probably some things that aren't an improvement, too. I'm still looking for a way to do a better job displaying and printing recipes, not sure Discourse is an improvement there.
February 23, 2023 at 11:30 am in reply to: What are you Cooking the Week of February 19, 2023? #38522Does your new slow cooker have a temperature setting you can dial down? The early crock pots just had 'on' and 'off', some later ones had one or two intermediate settings, some had a dial.
It may be that dials or lower settings were dropped by the makers or banned by the government because they could lead to food not being cooked to a high enough temperature to be safe. The sous vide community has expressed some concerns over this.
My wife noted that while the somewhat overbaked cookies are edible, they're baked beyond the point where they're chewy. The ones with the mini chocolate chips are a bit of a disappointment.
February 22, 2023 at 6:31 pm in reply to: What are you Cooking the Week of February 19, 2023? #38518I recently bought a Thermoworks ChefAlarm to replace my CDN candy thermometer. Like many digital thermometers, it has a clip that allows the probe to hang on the side of your pan without touching the bottom. (And it came in purple.)
I've used it a few times for cooked sugar candies.
It comes in a nice pouch that makes it easy to store in a drawer without the cord getting all tangled up.
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