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Hadn't heard of toasted powdered milk before this. I can see how caramelizing the sugar in powdered milk might have an impact on flavor.
The Washington Post has a story today on Julie Powell and how she was one of the persons who revolutionized food writing.
Nearly all food bloggers, including me, are in many ways following in her footsteps, though preferably without the f-bombs.
Although the cause of death was listed as cardiac failure, she appears to have been a long Covid casualty.
Here's a link to the story:
https://wapo.st/3zJre5HIn other words, we're all at the mercy of the seed companies to make sure their seeds are what they say they are.
But did they cross-pollinate?
I have made the Katharine Hepburn brownies a few times, they're almost flourless and really rich, you want them thin and cut into small pieces.
I suspect gluten-free flour could be used with little change in their taste or structure.
Butter has gone up in price, too, the sale price used to be $2.99/pound, now it's $3.99/pound and a limit of 1 or 2.
I wonder if the dairy farmers are seeing any of that increase? Kinda doubt it.
The WSJ has run stories talking about butter shortages, though I haven't seen signs of that here. But I don't buy restaurant/bakery quantities of butter.
Her original blog posts during the year she was cooking from the book are still up the last time I looked, they've been reorganized a little. Warning, the blog posts have a lot of F-bombs. (I think she cleaned it up a lot for the book.)
My older son's house has in-floor hot water heating in the basement, and he recently replaced his water heater/boiler with a tankless system, which is more efficient, but more expensive too. (I don't know if it is gas or electric, though.)
We seem to get 8-10 years out of a gas water heater here. Getting the right type of anode seems to have helped our last longer, but it was a 3 ring circus finding out that the anode was the wrong type based on changes in the city water supply.
I'm tempted to try making both Portugese rolls (not the sweet ones) and the Pao Frances recipe I posted last week and see if they're as similar as they seem. But that's a lot of bread!
We had McDonalds last night, but apparently we weren't the only ones with that idea, my wife was in the drive through lanes for close to an hour! I think they were short-staffed, something most fast food outlets are experiencing.
We had somewhere around 35 trick-or-treaters last night, that's on the low side for us.
My feeling on the how to get a shiny top on brownies question is that there are multiple methods that work, possibly for different reasons. And the explanation given might not be the right one. Science is full of things where everybody assumed X was the cause until someone discovered Y.
King Arthur's suggestion to use chocolate chips seems to be one of those "it works but we can't say why" things. Chocolate chips are complex things, you can't just substitute them for baking chocolate in a recipe.
I'm not sure what the value would be in toasting powdered milk. Is this something you've seen recommended somewhere?
I can't answer your question because I don't know the total amount of dough. If the preferment makes up 50% of the total dough that's a somewhat higher net hydration than if it makes up 25%.
If you want to use a biga or poolish with a formula that doesn't already have one, just subtract those ingredients (flour, water, yeast, etc.) from the total. There's no firm rule on how much of the total flour needs to be in the preferment, I've seen recipes as low as 5% and ones as high as 50%.
For example, suppose you have a poolish that is 75% hydrated. You want to add 150 grams of the poolish to your recipe.
The formula for the poolish is:
Flour: 100%
Water: 75%Total: 175%
So, your scaling factor is 150/175 or 0.857
So you've got 85.7 grams of flour and 64.3 grams of water in the poolish. Subtract those from the rest of formula.
Yeah, I'm ignoring the yeast here, but you could add it and change the total. It'll change the amount of flour and water by just a few grams. (If there's 3% yeast in the poolish the flour becomes 84.3 grams and the water becomes 63.2 grams.)
If you're dealing with a sourdough starter, the yeast percentage is essentially an unknown. Most multi-stage Guild recipes seem to just ignore the amount of yeast in the starter.
I've got an outline for a post dealing with altering the stages of multi-stage formulas separately (to vary the amount of water in the preferment, for example, or to use an existing starter with a known hydration level.)
The challenge is to come up with examples that don't make the math seem more complicated. I also try to make my examples ones that someone could actually bake.
Spreadsheets or similar tools specifically designed for bakers are really helpful and most bakeries use them. (One of the more popular ones just went out of business, though.)
I made a big pan of chicken, mushrooms and rice casserole, this will be supper tonight, lunch for most of the week and some may even go in the freezer.
If you research 'how to get a shiny top on brownies', you'll find at least two general recommendations. One has to do with thoroughly mixing the sugar and the melted butter, the other has to do with mixing the sugar and the egg (white), the theory there being that the shiny surface is essentially a thin layer of meringue.
There are other theories, as well, such as King Arthur's recommendation to use chocolate chips.
Yet another theory I've seen over the years says to let the batter sit in the pan for a few minutes before popping it into the oven, I guess this one has to do with allowing oils to rise to the surface.
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