Mike Nolan
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The KAF Whole Grains cookbook has a Scottish Shortbread recipe that uses 2 1/2 cups of oatmeal ground up in a food processor plus another 1/2 cup of wheat flour. It is very good, I've used it as a base for several apple desserts, it doesn't quite hold together well enough to be a pie crust (it sinks along the sides) but it makes a pretty good base for an apple crisp or an apple tart.
I've also made it as a bar cookie with some chopped pecans, but you have to cut it quickly as it firms up as it cools.
My brother continued to smoke after lung cancer surgery, and my wife's stepmother kept on smoking until the day she died of lung/brain cancer. Neither lived to age 70.
For many people it's nearly impossible to quit smoking, there are apparently some genetic factors that impact nicotine addiction. Vaping is apparently almost as hard to quit and might lead to some medical conditions that are worse than those caused by smoking.
What worries me most about the creeping decriminalization of marijuana is that the research is starting to show marijuana smoke has many of the same toxic substances as tobacco smoke, and that doesn't take into effect what THC does to the body and mind over time. (But the long term effects of alcohol use have been known for a long time, and alcohol has been around for millennia.)
Looking good, Aaron. I wonder if you could switch from bread flour to AP (slightly lower in protein) and leave out the cornstarch?
KidPizza (Cass) would probably recommend you use bleached flour for cookies. I keep some on hand (GM AP) for that purpose, though most of the time I use KAF unbleached AP flour.
I do keep pastry flour on hand for pie crusts, lower protein/gluten content flour has a noticeably impact on the tenderness of the pie crust.
An ounce is over 28 grams, I think you misread the recipe and it calls for 0.25 ounces of instant dry yeast, which would be around 7 grams or 2 1/4 teaspoons.
Generally, yeast companies tell you to use 25% more active dry yeast than instant dry yeast, but these days there are many baking sites that will tell you to just use the same amount, and the comments on these sites seem to indicate that a 1-1 replacement does not affect how the recipe performs.
There are also sites that will tell you that active dry yeast doesn't need to be proofed, but that advice seems dubious to me.
Peter Reinhart, among others, has often written that many recipes use far more yeast than they really need. This may be a holdover from recipes developed many years ago, both active dry yeast and instant dry yeast have improved over the years and a higher percentage of the yeast stays alive, meaning you need less yeast to get the job done.
Personally, I haven't used active dry yeast for several years, I buy 1 pound packages of Fleischmann's instant dry yeast and keep it in the freezer. It takes me anywhere from 2 to 8 months to use up that much yeast.
I do have some SAF Gold osmotolerant instant dry yeast, and I've been using it a bit more lately, and not just on sweet doughs. For example, I've seen several sites that recommend using osmotolerant yeast for laminated dough, like for croissants. I know several professional bakers who only use osmotolerant yeast these days.
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.
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