Mike Nolan
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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.
Thanks, Rottiedogs, nice to see you posting again.
Everyone here should feel free to adapt this spreadsheet and let us know what you use it for. And let me know, either online or off-line, if you need help tweaking the spreadsheet. Excel has a lot of powerful features, I'm sure there are many features I've never used at all or to their full extent.
Several BBGA members have Excel spreadsheets that handle multi-stage formulas (ones with a starter or soaker) and that more closely resemble the BBGA formula standard.
I keep thinking there should be a way to do the BBGA formula standard as a webpage, but I don't think there's an easy way to do it in WordPress. I've looked at using Drupal, their built-in form tool isn't quite robust enough to do it, either.
In computer technical terms, it is a bill of materials system, and a multi-stage one if it handles starters and soakers. A really complex one, that handles multiple independent products, can be used to drive the daily production planning of a bakery.
I saw it, thanks.
Over-mixing when adding the flour for almost any cake will result in it being dense.
Supper tonight was creamed tuna on biscuits. Back to the playoffs!
Here's my laminated dough spreadsheet, you can see how I use the yield row at the top of each set to adjust the ingredients based on the percentage column.
I've been using spreadsheets since before Visicalc, in fact I taught a course at the University of Nebraska Business College on using spreadsheets for financial modeling in around 1980.
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