[Mike Nolan]

Keep in mind that when you refrigerate the crust, the flour finishes hydrating and that draws some of the water from the butter, which also reverts to its 'cold' state. Shocking the butter by hitting it several times gets it back to a plastic state.

This is one of those areas where an engineering education is helpful in the kitchen. Civil engineers study how solids can turn into flowing plastics after a seismic event. That's how a seemingly solid clay hillside can all of a sudden collapse looking like it is a liquid. Snow avalanches can result from the same type of shift from a solid to a plastic state. (They often use loud noises to encourage unstable snow masses to collapse before they would trigger major avalances.)

Kenji Lopez-Alt has an interesting take on pie crust, he turns the butter and about 3/4 of the flour into a paste in a blender, then adds in the rest of the flour before adding the water.

I've tried it, I prefer having small visible pieces of butter in the crust, but it does produce a consistently flaky crust, similar to the 'mealy' crust recipe that SFBI had us use for a bottom crust most of the time, with the 'flaky' recipe for the top crust, it has a bit more butter in it. I don't know if many production bakers tend to keep two types of pie crust on hand, though, one for a bottom crust and the other for a top crust. I generally make just the mealy crust recipe.

I will say his method appears to require a little less water, which helps prevent excessive gluten formation.

I do, however, follow his suggestion and hold back about a quarter of the flour until after the butter has been cut in. I think that also helps limit gluten formation.

[Mike Nolan]

Yes, hitting the pie dough with the rolling pin several times helps to plasticize the butter, which makes it roll out easier. Butter is a fascinating thing, it has five different states: hard, semi-soft (plasticized), soft, liquid and congealed (ghee). Each of them has different properties when cooking and baking. (The butterfat in cream has several states of its own.)

Most fats have several states that often depend upon temperature.

Cocoa butter has six states that can co-exist, though they melt at different temperatures; beta-5 is the one you need when tempering it.

[Mike Nolan]

We've had a standalone induction unit for quite a while, it does take some adjustment. Ours only has about 8 settings, there are many times I'd like a setting in between two of them, keeping something at a slow simmer can be challenging, because you can't do what you can do on a gas range and use a spacer to lower the heat transferred to the pot.

[Mike Nolan]

We had BLT's plus some salad using the first pickings from my latest Aerogarden crop, some black seeded Simpson, some rouge d'hiver and some Salanova (a sweet curly lettuce developed for hydroponics), I haven't picked the buttercrunch yet, I'm saving that for Thanksgiving.

[Mike Nolan]

I haven't done any braided loaves for a while, it is a skill that benefits from regular practice.

I could always make Thomas Keller's dead dough for practice, he says it is usually good for about a week if kept in the fridge between practice sessions.

500 grams AP flour
1 gram yeast
25 grams salt
325 grams water

[Mike Nolan]

It appears to me that there are at least 5 different types of six-strand braids, and that doesn't count the one from Deli Man that has us baffled.

[Mike Nolan]

We had several left overs in the fridge, so of course we had Mac and Cheese for supper. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

Several stores have had butter on sale for $2.99 a pound here lately, so I'm stocked up for the holidays. And I have some rain checks for butter at under $2/pound at one store from last week.

[Mike Nolan]

A nearby hydroponics farm should be able to pick their tomatoes close to when they sell them, otherwise they have to pick them before they're fully ripe so they don't rot before they get to the markets. And post-picking ripening doesn't enhance flavor.

There are a half-dozen or so types of hydroponic systems, not all of them work well for tomatoes. You also need space to deal with vines that can easily get longer than 10 feet, and you need adequate lighting.

The determinate variety that Stacey grows in his lab are expensive, the seeds are $1 each!

Dinner tonight was left over pot roast.

[Mike Nolan]

I got some nice hydroponic tomatoes at the hydroponic class open house today, so we had BLT's. Don't have the space and lighting to do something like that at home, though, some of those vines are 20 feet long.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making honey wheat, it had been so long since I made it I actually had to look at the recipe.

[Mike Nolan]

I may make honey wheat bread this week, haven't made it in a while and none in freezer.

[Mike Nolan]

Greek yogurt is a bit too sour for our tastes, fortunately we can get cultured buttermilk readily at the stores.

I have tried the buttermilk plant method of regenerating buttermilk, and it seems to work well, but I don't use enough buttermilk for that to be worth the effort, because you really need to clean out the container each time you regenerate it, or it can go bad.

Cultured buttermilk from the store is something that lasts well beyond the 'use by' date on the package.

[Mike Nolan]

We had some fresh warm bread and I had a couple slices of cheese.

[Mike Nolan]

Making semolina bread here today. (Hamelman's recipe, with a minor tweak in the ratio of bread flour to semolina flour.)

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