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We had creamed tuna on biscuits tonight.
Great shot of a roasted chicken, Len!
I've made more errors rescaling recipes than I care to admit.
I find it useful to run the final numbers through a baker's math analysis tool I wrote several years ago whenever I've tinkered with a recipe. I can see if the hydration is where I expect it to be, if the fat/flour ratio looks right, salt content, leavening, etc.
Rewriting this tool to handle multi-stage recipes and possibly using the BBGA formatting structure, then making it generally available has been on my 'todo' list for a long time. (I was going to add nutritional analysis, but the USDA database isn't as useful as it used to be.)
I'm tempted to add a fat/sugar ratio for things like cookie recipes.
Butter is a fascinating substance, and the more I read about it, the less I'm sure I know about it. I recently read an article that claimed that creaming butter and sugar has no impact on a recipe, I'm not sure I believe that.
But my instructor at SFBI pastry school was absolutely convinced that freezing butter changes it in a way that impacts making laminated pastries, and I've seen several articles that appear to refute that claim. I did raise this question on the BBGA Forum, most of the professional bakers there say freezing butter has no impact on laminated pastries. It also appears to be the case that butter is often frozen by suppliers for long-term storage, so the butter you buy at the store may have been frozen long before you bought it.
When you melt butter, it separates into (at least) three components: Butterfat, water and milk solids. As far as I know, once you melt butter, there's no way to get it back to its churned state, which is a suspension of water and milk solids in butterfat.
Removing the milk solids produces clarified butter. Removing the water (and chilling it) produces ghee. I'm not sure if ghee has the milk solids in it or not, I suspect not. Ghee never gets very hard, even if chilled. I've never tried freezing it, though.
Browning butter is basically toasting the milk solids in the melted butter. I think the act of browning butter usually boils off the water.
It would be interesting to study the impact each of the over a half dozen different states of butter has on recipes, but I doubt I have the tools to do a serious scientific study along those lines, and the number of different sets of states to test is quite large. Even just testing the impact of butter that has never been liquified vs ghee would be interesting.
This is probably not that helpful to Aaron's shortbread issues, though.
I had to undo a couple of things I had added to help deal with bogus registrations. (I had to delete over 40 such registrations a week ago.) As soon as you find something to keep the hackers out, they find a way around it!
I don't see how brown butter (vs regular butter) would make much difference in how much the dough spreads, though.
I don't see evidence of egg wash pooling in the cracks of your challah, so I think you did well.
I find adding a little salt to the egg when whisking it helps break up the viscosity of the egg a bit, which I think makes it easier to keep it where you want it. I've wondered about using an ultrasonic cleaner to see if that helps create a more homogenized liquid. I seem to recall the packaged egg we used in pastry school was easier to use.
As to your shortbread, I find it usually spreads a lot, compared to something like a sugar cookie or gingerbread, but freezing it might help.
Baking it in a mold with sides might help, but that sounds like another pan that would only get occasional use, and I've already got too many of those!
We had sirloin steak and baked potatoes for supper tonight.
It must be the season for weird system issues, one of the systems I still help administer for the company I used to work for has developed some strange behavior, too.
Sunspots?
I think I've got the problem fixed, for a while I couldn't log in, either!
When I was at Sams Club yesterday they had plenty of cornstarch, they also had Black Diamond Cheese spread, which they haven't had for over a year.
In many high-end restaurants the number of staff working in the kitchen exceeds the number of customers served. Noma is about $500-$900 per person, plus wines.
Their focus on locally sourced items and is probably less of a factor in the decision to shut down than the cost of running the kitchen for a restaurant that seats less than 50.
I've only eaten in two or three restaurants that had Michelin stars, they were all great meals but not something I could do very often.
I've looked at Brunswick stew recipes a few times, but I'm not sure Diane would eat it. She won't eat corn in vegetable soup or a stir fry (unless it is the baby corn that shows up in some Chinese take-out dishes), and corn is a common ingredient in most Brunswick stew recipes.
Considering I only have 3 pea pod plants, the amount of growth I've gotten is quite satisfactory. The amount of water the pea pods use is astonishing, though, I have to put in about a half-gallon of water every other day. It looks like it is still blooming and I think I'll probably get a second picking in a couple of weeks. But it was about 10 weeks from when I first planted them until I got enough to harvest.
Our 'daily bread' changes periodically, currently it's semolina bread, but in the past it has been honey wheat bread (an adaptation of my mother-in-law's recipe that is in the favorites tab here), the Clonmel Kitchens Double Crusty Bread or the Austrian Malt bread, both are also in the favorites tab.
I picked about 4 ounces of pea pods from the Aerogarden today.
They were part of a nice stir fry dish:
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