[Mike Nolan]

I made a small batch of ossi de morti (bones of the dead) almond cookies tonight, just to see how well the recipe works. I baked them at a lower temperature than normal (around 280) so that they'd dry out more, and am pleased they didn't lose their shape.

For a low-carb cookie (made with almond meal, Carbalose and Splenda) the taste is pretty good. I think I might increase the amount of almond extract but that's a tricky ingredient, too much overwhelms the rest of the cookie.

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[Mike Nolan]

We had tuna salad tonight, I made a big batch of hard boiled eggs so Diane can make deviled eggs to take to the Halloween pot luck at her office on Thursday. I'm also going to experiment with a batch of ossi de morti cookies (rather than pan de muerto), modified to make it more keto-friendly.

[Mike Nolan]

My experience has been that a rye dough/starter will develop a sour flavor in 2-3 days, it takes more like 6-8 days for me to start to notice it in a wheat product.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm looking to make some pan de muerto today or tomorrow, making some keto-friendly changes to the recipe.

[Mike Nolan]

I had the last of Saturday's pizza for supper, Diane had a take-out burrito.

[Mike Nolan]

Looks great, Joan. I like the look of a lattice crust on a cherry pie but my wife prefers a regular top crust.

These days I'm tending to minimize the crust around the outside, sometimes there's a half-inch thick section that's just pie dough without any filling to make it worth eating. I was always terrible at fluting, anyway.

The next time I make the keto apple pie I'm going to make about 25% less pie dough, I figure that will save 2-3 carbs/serving.

[Mike Nolan]

Left over pizza, plus a salad (for me) and a small slice of apple pie.

[Mike Nolan]

If you have space, time and other resources for it, you might consider trying to make a new starter while reviving your old one and see if you can tell them apart after a few months.

[Mike Nolan]

We had pizza again tonight. We had tickets to see The Capital Steps last night, they were funny--as usual, so we postponed pizza night until Saturday.

Biggest difference was I baked this one directly on my 14" pizza steel, so the crust is a lot crisper on the bottom. (I couldn't figure out how to get a good photo of that.)

Worked fairly well, I'll do that again.

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[Mike Nolan]

I figure my lasagna is well over a dozen layers, (3-4 layers of pasta, plus layers of sauce, multiple types of cheeses including a ricotta/spinach blend, meats, and mushrooms.)

I tried counting the layers of pasta in that picture and came up with around 30, which means something like pasta-sauce-cheese-pasta repeated around 30 times.

As Len says, mostly for show, sort of like the 12 pattie 'special' at In-N-Out. People can order it, and even eat it, but is it a gustatory experience worth repeating?

[Mike Nolan]

There's not a lot of research on how a frozen starter that is re-established compares to the original, though being able to rebuild a lost starter is the point of the Puratos Sourdough Library, where they keep sourdough samples frozen (including a portion in liquid nitrogen, I think.)

Prof. Michael Ganzle's writings, though, seem to support the concept that a starter is largely a product of its feeding and handling, ie, how often you feed it, what you feed it with and how it is stored in between feedings. His research suggests that regardless of where a starter is (US, Europe, Africa, Asia) starters that are maintained using similar processes are remarkably similar in terms of their microbiological makeup, ie, what strains of yeast and bacteria wind up dominating the culture. (Refrigerating vs room temperature seems to be one of the key differences, and IMHO is the primary difference between a commercial bakery's sourdough starter and most home sourdough starters.)

If that is true, then whether you re-establish a frozen or dried starter, or one that got lost in the back of the fridge, get some starter from another baker or start from scratch, you're likely to end up in a similar place in 6 months to a year. And that's not a bad thing if you have a sourdough starter you're used to maintaining and using.

[Mike Nolan]

We had potato leek soup again, but based on a reddit topic I've been following on artichokes which led me to an artichoke-potato-leek soup recipe I chopped up a couple of baby artichokes and added that to the soup. It was great, and we'll definitely do that again!

[Mike Nolan]

Hmm, that probably means you need somewhere between 3 and 4 pounds of bread dough, depending on how much it rises. I'd probably aim for 3 to 3 1/4 pounds myself.

[Mike Nolan]

If all else fails, try getting an estimate of the volume of each half of the mold using something like rice or beans, or possibly even just water. Then, depending on the recipe, make enough dough to fill the mold about 3/4 full.

Estimating the volume of an irregular object is challenging. There should be some apps that can do this if your phone has a LIDAR-capable camera, but I haven't found one I could use for bread yet.

I have a long term ambition to create an 'encyclopedia of bread shapes', giving things like surface area, volume and maximum depth for bread shapes, as part of my long-held opinion that shape is a relatively unexplored aspect of bread taste and texture. I started by making up a list of all the bread shapes I could think of, I had at least 100 shapes, and I was just getting started listing things like braided shapes.

[Mike Nolan]

My wife's grandmother had a 'Christmas Coffee Cake' recipe that we tried to make several times and it never came out right (or at least matching my wife's recollection of what it tasted and looked like.)

It called for 'sour cream', and I've always suspected that given the age of the recipe it was really using heavy cream that had gone sour rather than the cultured stuff you get at the grocery store these days.

I've wondered about using creme fraiche to make it, as I think it is a lot closer to traditional 'sour cream'. These days I tend to keep heavy cream on hand for keto cooking and baking, I could also try letting a cup of it sit on the counter to go sour.

I'll see if I can find the recipe (it's in the Nebraska Centennial Cookbook, which my wife's mother edited) and post it.

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