[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

Does 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.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

I 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.

[Mike Nolan]

I made another batch of peanut butter cookies today, I put some mini semi-sweet chocolate chips in a few of them.

I think I left them in the oven for about 30 seconds too long, they're a little on the dark side, just this side of burnt. But Diane likes them that way.

[Mike Nolan]

I think the latest semolina dough would have benefited from some stretch-and-folds, that does seem to help the shaping.

My baguettes often looked like a snake that swallowed 3 rats, though I found with practice I got better at it, I think the pre-rolling part of the shaping is key. I watched the staff at SFBI roll out baguettes during one of the lunch breaks when I was taking my pastry course, they even let me roll out a few, and said I was doing pretty good, though they were much faster.

One of the advantages of making epis de bles is that the cuts tend to mask the uneven-ness of the baguette. (And it definitely maximizes surface area, the crusty outside is the best part of a baguette, IMHO.)

One of the things I noticed from the picture yesterday is that the sesame seeds are heavier on one side than on the other, probably has to do with the angle at which I hold the shaker. I thought this batch had enough seeds on them, my wife commented on the previous batch that there weren't many sesame seeds at all.

I think Hamelman recommends dipping the shaped loaf in a tray of sesame seeds, which is probably a lot faster in a production shop. (As I noted in a recent BBGA thread, a lot of production practices are geared towards speed and consistency.) I've always thought that might wind up with too many sesame seeds on the loaf, maybe next time I'll try it. I always wind up with a lot of them falling off the loaf and going to waste on the parchment, presumably any that don't stick would just fall back into the tray.

[Mike Nolan]

Artisan to me means meeting a high standard of quality and consistency, and the latter includes shaping, proofing and baking.

There has been an interesting thread in the BBGA forum lately, and one of the full-time bakers made a comment about a loaf (one that probably looked better than my latest semolina bread) that I think defines the standards an artisan baker tries to meet:

I wouldn't present that loaf at the end of a practical baking assessment and expect to pass.

Loaves that are by design not uniform (or at least close to it) might be called 'rustic', I suppose.

[Mike Nolan]

We had chili again tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

It'll probably take me a few more rounds to get it to the point where I'm really satisfied with it, but it was definitely an improvement over the first batch with the Azure semolina/durum flour. I haven't made pasta with it yet, that's on my list for this week.

Although I'm not selling my breads to anyone, I'm still thinking about that possibility, and a salable loaf is my standard. I'd rate this one as 80-90% of the way there.

[Mike Nolan]

Today's semolina bread came out pretty good, nice oven spring, decent crumb, though it did sort of blow out a little at one end, I think it needed a little more proofing. My shaping was a bit imperfect, too, my goal is to get the middle 2/3 of a loaf to have the same size (width and height) so that the slices are more uniform for sandwich making.

The changes I made (ratio of semolina/durum to bread flour, adding OJ, lower baking temperature) all seemed to have positive impacts, the crust isn't quite as dark or thick and the bitter taste from the bran is either gone or lowered to the point where it isn't obvious.

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[Mike Nolan]

We tried some of the Westphalian bread with the Cabot Seriously Strong cheddar cheese that we used for the fried cheese sandwiches, it was kind of an odd pairing, the bread just overwhelms the cheese.

[Mike Nolan]

I think we're going to have tomato soup and fried cheese sandwiches on honey wheat bread.

[Mike Nolan]

We cut into the Westphalian Pumpernickel, or perhaps I should say I tried to cut into it.

The outside is pretty hard, especially where it has cracks, and the interior is soft and kind of wet, and the knife stuck. I'm not sure if the center is under-done, but I would call it under-dried out.

I tried making the first slice with with my everyday bread knife, you can see how it got gummed up.

The Japanese bread knife my son gave me a year ago seems to do a better job slicing it. I normally keep that knife in the box because it is really sharp and I've cut myself on it more than once already.

You can also see where a chunk of it broke off as I was trying to slice it, I suspect that's due to the cracks and harder exterior.

The taste is interesting but it is different than what I was expecting, and quite different from the bread I had in Germany. The odor is very much that of molasses.

I need to some research before I try making it again, and maybe cut the recipe down a bit, it makes a loaf that weighed in at well over 3 pounds.

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[Mike Nolan]

The BBGA has some Excel templates including for a multi-stage bread, but they have a lot of stuff in them that might not be relevant.

I'm starting to learn Python, it has an interesting set of tools, including ones for building Excel spreadsheets. But it is a slow process.

The pumpernickel bread probably needed to be a bit moister or packed into the pan more solidly, that's why it has all those cracks in it. We'll know this afternoon if that had much impact on the interior or the texture.

[Mike Nolan]

When we were in Germany (nearly 17 years ago) I had some really dark rye bread that I think may have been similar to a Westphalian pumpernickel.

Yes, I think it has some similarity to the wrapped rye breads. And unlike a lot of recipes, it doesn't rely on coffee, cocoa or food coloring to make it dark.

This first loaf mighty wind up being difficult to slice, but I'm hoping the flavor makes up for any slicing issues, and if there's a next time I'll probably add even more water than I did this time.

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