We had theatre tickets so we had a simple supper of tomato soup and fried cheese sandwiches last night.
Today's batch of peanut butter cookies were baked for 12-13 minutes and are nice and chewy.
I figured out why the last two batches of peanut butter cookies came out so dark, I mis-read the baking time as 20 minutes, not 12. :sigh:
We had fish and broccoli tonight.
It depends on the contour of the lid, if it is relatively flat then you've got a lot of options, but probably need something heavy, waterproof and not easily broken, in case it falls off. It would help if it had some kind of a handle to make it easy to pick up. A sad iron, maybe? (Do people still have these?)
Happy birthday, Joan, hope you enjoyed your special day.
The latest batch of peanut butter cookies also came out a bit crunchy, though not as dark as the previous batch. I took them out of the oven fully 2 minutes earlier. I wonder if my oven setting was a few degrees higher? (It's a dial, not a digital setting.)
Otherwise, I don't know what I'm doing differently from the first few batches.
I have another batch of peanut butter cookies in. These are a good snack for both of us, because we don't eat half the batch in one sitting.
I did find this Master's thesis:
Challah and Its Performance of American Jewish Identity
from the Mid-19th to Early 21st Century
Gabrielle Adena Hersch
Brandeis University
May 2018
I would not be surprised if someone has already written a PhD thesis on challah.
I'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.
I 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.
We had theatre tickets this afternoon (Legally Blonde) and were kind of tired afterwards, so Diane had some soup and I had some leftover spaghetti.
