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I tend to use the same technique for strands for braiding that I do for loaves of bread. It's a bit time consuming, especially if doing several 11 strand braided loaves.
Scale the dough and roll it into balls. Let those rest for at least 5 minutes to relax the gluten. Flatten them, fold the top down 2/3 of the way then the bottom up to the top. Fold the bottom to the top again and seal with your hand. Do that again. You should now have a log that is fairly uniform in diameter and can be easily lengthened.
Aaron, is that a 3 or a 4 strand braid?
I made another batch of peanut butter cookies.
I've used several different semolinas over the years. I used to buy either Bobs Red Mill or Hodgson Mill, the latter brand seems to have vanished completely from stores here. Then I was buying it in bulk at the coop, so I don't really know whose it was.
A few years ago I bought a 50 pound bag of it (ardent mills or bay state, probably) and in the last year or so I've bought two 25 pound bags of Bobs Red Mill. All of these were typical semolina, almost granular and mostly endosperm.
I currently use 5-8 pounds of semolina a month for bread and pasta, less pasta in the summer but more bread.
The most recent purchase was from Azure Standard, and unlike the other semolinas this is much more finely ground and also includes most of the bran and germ. (The details on their website says they filter out the large bran particles, removing about 12% of the bran.)
It would probably be most accurate to call it a (nearly) whole grain durum flour rather than semolina. I've baked enough with whole grain flours that I'm familiar with the differences, and this one definitely handled and baked like a whole grain flour, and we can taste the bran. (It's not a bad taste, it just is a different taste. My wife calls it more nutty, I would call it more bitter.)
I haven't decided yet if I'm going to look for another source for 'real' semolina, I may try tinkering with the recipe first. I'm sure I can find uses for 25 pounds of whole wheat durum flour over the next year or so anyway. I'm curious to see how whole grain durum affects pasta.
I've been trying to set up an account with Sysco, but they don't like dealing with serious home bakers or home-based cottage industry bakers. (You can't even look at their price catalog unless you have an account, which makes doing a detailed business plan for a home-based bread subscription service difficult.) Restaurant Depot in Omaha also prohibits retail customers.
Webstaurant has 50 pound bags of semolina for $31.99 but the shipping to Nebraska is $36.42.
KAB AP is $8.99 for a 12 pound bag at Costco here as of a few days ago. But it was $5.99 for a 12 pound bag a year ago.
I think I've figured out why the semolina bread is different. Looking closely at the label it says it is whole grain semolina flour, so most of the bran and germ are included, not just endosperm. That would explain the slight bitterness as well as the darker interior color. It also darkened faster on the surface, and that's typical of breads made with whole grain flour.
Adjusting the ratio of durum to AP flour might lighten it a bit, and there are several things that can be done to lessen the bitterness of bran, like adding some orange juice or honey.
Tonight's semolina bread has some differences from the past, which I'm attributing to using the new semolina/durum flour.
The interior of the loaf is a bit more yellow and the taste is, well, different. I may have to fiddle with the recipe a bit. :sigh:
The last time I did tuna melts (with the last of the summer's tomatoes), I used havarti cheese, it was quite good. Costco has sliced havarti in 2 pound packages.
We're having fish and broccoli tonight.
I am making Jeffrey Hamelman's Semolina Bread today.
I was out of semolina so I ordered a 25 pound bag of semolina flour from Azure Standard. They're a service out of Oregon that delivers by truck to Lincoln once or twice a month, the truck goes to a shopping center parking lot and the customers help unload the truck. This order was originally supposed to be here yesterday, but the truck was delayed by the snows in Wyoming.
The delivery fee was very small compared to what it would cost to have a 25 pound bag of flour sent via any of the package services. I ordered about 40 pounds of stuff, including tapioca and rye berries, and the delivery charge was $4.43. I'll be ordering from them again.
It would probably be more accurate to call it durum flour than semolina, because it is finely ground, but it should still make good bread.
6 of the 7 states in the Colorado River Compact came to an agreement on reduced water usage, California was the lone holdout.
Agriculture accounts for 80% of the water usage.
It'll probably now be up to the Bureau of Reclamation to assign water quotas to each of the 7 states. The politics will be intense, I'm sure.
Feed is often the killer, unless you have a good source for locally grown feed, it can cost several dollars a week per bird.
My mother was never squeamish about killing and plucking a chicken once it had stopped laying, and that was Sunday dinner.
Eggs were $3.34/dozen at WalMart today.
The Wall Street Journal has a story today on how people fed up with the high price of eggs are buying chicks and raising them.
It often turns out to be a lot more expensive than buying eggs at the store, and a lot messier and smellier, too. (We had a small chicken coop and 4-5 chickens when I was young, so I know the downsides!)
Looks like the best option for a program to build Excel spreadsheets based on webform data is Python with an add-on package that can create Excel files. I've dabbled a little in Python, looks like I may need to get serious about learning it.
We had a beef and pea pod stir fry tonight. Not sure how many more pea pods I'm going to get from the Aerogarden, but I'll probably replant them when I redo that garden, probably in a month or two.
I've been thinking of a two-phase process, first a Q&A form that asks what you're making, ingredients, percentages (or quantities), number of stages, etc, then takes all that information and builds an Excel spreadsheet.
Not sure how it would handle things like a frosting or glaze that isn't directly tied to the yield, but the BBGA format doesn't seem to deal with that, either.
Most people who maintain a sourdough starter would need to just measure out the amount of starter the recipe calls for, so they may not need to know the weight of the individual components in the starter. It is still useful to know things like the hydration level of the starter to compute the hydration of the overall recipe, though.
There are probably some tools like ansible or terraform that could be used to do this. Don't know if Google Forms has the ability to do that or what other Google/Microsoft products might have that capability.
When I start using a new recipe, my wife often enters it into a program that computes carbs per serving, myfitnesspal. But the ingredients database it uses is user-maintained and sometimes it is tough to find an entry that works for the recipe, and there are entries that are just plain wrong. (And the program has a nasty habit of losing the recipe mid-way through it if you hit the wrong key.)
One of the interesting things about building a formula using baker's percentages and then computing individual ingredient quantities needed to produce the desired yield is that you don't need to worry about how many grams or ounces are in a cup, etc., since everything is by weight, or even whether the yield is in grams, ounces, kilograms or pounds.
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