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Fortunately, food budgeting isn't currently an issue for us, either, though our food tastes aren't that expensive anyway. But even the cheaper foods like hotdogs have gone up in price by 25% in the last year.
We just got the preliminary assessment on our house for 2023 and it went up a whopping 54% after several years of nominal changes, though most of our neighbors went up more like 10-25%.
Acid helps speed up the breakdown of starch into sugars that the yeast can feed from, which is why it helps the bread rise more. It may also suppress the amylose activity, and rye bread is prone to excessive amylose activity, which is what makes the dough gummy.
I find the lower fat ground beef (85-95%) falls apart more, maybe the stuff you have that's labeled 80% is actually lower in fat. (I don't think there's any penalty for having less fat than what it is labeled at.)
Other factors that could affect it are the cuts it was made from, how finely it was ground, possibly even grass-fed vs grain-fed.
Not sure why freezing it would make that much difference, I suspect that the chubs of ground beef that I prefer to the trays have sometimes been frozen during shipping.
When making a meatloaf, chilling it for an hour or so seems to improve how well it stays together both before and after it has been baked.
We had some chili from the freezer tonight, and there's enough left for another supper plus a lunch or two.
The latest USDA egg price survey has large eggs at around $3.60/dozen in the midwest, but I also saw an article today talking about how the bird flu is still ravaging producers.
Joan, I think you make Brunswick Stew like I make chili, I often wind up with multiple 3-quart containers of it for the fridge and freezer. I use a 12 quart stock pot and it is pretty full at first, though it reduces by an inch or two in the pot as it cooks.
A lot of dill pickles have garlic in the brine. I've tried the pickle juice idea a few times, we weren't that impressed with it. I think I used the brine from homemade pickles, because the ones I can myself don't have garlic in the brine, nor mustard seed. My mother sometimes put alum in dill pickle brine.
There are some people who are pretty passionate about their sourdough starters, but I tend to agree that rye is one of those subjects where opinions tend to be stronger.
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?
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