[Mike Nolan]

I know, I was considering making a half-recipe.

[Mike Nolan]

We both had big salads I had some leftover rotisserie chicken on mine.

[Mike Nolan]

Are you doing a full batch (two loaves) or just one loaf?

[Mike Nolan]

Beef prices are back to nearly record price levels and feedlot inventories are at their lowest level in years, so meat is going to be in shorter supply as well.

Nevada is suspending its 'free range' egg requirements, but I don't see that moving the national price level for eggs much.

[Mike Nolan]

We had roast beef with (instant) mashed potatoes and gravy.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't remember if I tested that recipe back when I was helping to test the recipes for that book. I spent a LOT of time on the baguettes and laminated doughs. I know I tried the pain a l'ancienne several times but never got it to come out like it should. We ate a LOT of baguettes during the testing for that book!

I'm almost out of wheat berries, but I do have some white wheat berries I could grind up and use in that recipe. (I'll be ordering more wheat berries later this spring, probably from Azure Standard.)

I don't think I'll be doing any hands-on baking until next month, though.

[Mike Nolan]

I only have a baking steel because my older son gave it to me as a Christmas present a while back, but it took me about a year to start using it. It's 14x14, I would have probably bought one that was more like 16x18, but when I make pizza it's usually about a 12-13 inch pie so it fits on the steel. I want to try bagels on it some day, though.

BTW, the King Arthur pie crust bag is a GREAT way to roll out a pizza into a nice round shape and transfer it to a peel.

[Mike Nolan]

We had a small flock of chickens when I was young, they had a hen house and fenced in yard that was probably about 8 x 20 feet total. As one of the younger kids (I had 4 brothers and a sister), I often got elected to go collect eggs. Most days we'd get 2-5 eggs. (I think the most chickens we ever had was 6.)

Climbing inside the cage and digging around in the hen house was messy (chickens create a lot of smelly excrement), but for the most part they tended to lay their eggs inside where there was hay rather than outside in the muck. And when you reached for their eggs, you often got pecked at.

I was not disappointed when we got rid of the chicken coop.

We knew some farmers who just let their chickens roam around the barnyard, they sometimes found eggs in the grass or under bushes but most of the time the hens went back to their roosts to lay their eggs.

I've not visited a commercial 'free range' egg farm, but from what I've been told, the hens may have access to a yard but don't use it a lot.

[Mike Nolan]

The front matter chapters in BBA and in Jeffrey Hamelman's book "Bread" are worth reading periodically, just to refresh your memory of things. I find I tend to leave steps out over time, and it affects the bread.

[Mike Nolan]

Taking it easy, today is the first day since Saturday that my eyes aren't a constant source of pain. The runny nose is slowing down a bit, replaced by congestion and occasional sneezing/coughing.

We got about 4 inches of snow last night-this morning. Really cold predicted for tonight, 10 below. \

We had the last of the pizza for supper tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

Roasting hens are a relatively fast egg-to-processing cycle, laying hens can live a couple of years.

Personally, I suspect the 'free range' movement has probably led to an increase in bird flu.

[Mike Nolan]

I've tried a number of recipes in BBA, never found one that wasn't a good one, though there are several I've not repeated, though not because they didn't work. I like the bagel recipe in the Artisan book better, but still use the baking instructions in BBA. I've probably made the Marbled Rye bread recipe the most, with baguettes/country bread a close second. (I find both recipes work with a variety of shapes, our favorite is still the epis de bles.)

His timing may be off a little some days, but he anticipates that in the front matter, noting that minor variances in flour, moisture level/absorption and ambient temperature/humidity all have their impact on yeast activity. And Peter always says, "The dough will tell you what it needs."

[Mike Nolan]

A baking steel kept on the lowest level will be a bit hotter than the ambient air temperature in your oven, and has greater thermal capacity, so putting a cold raw pizza on top of it doesn't cool it down as much. The challenge is to keep the bottom from getting too done before the cheese has properly melted on top. King Arthur recommends 475 for the keto friendly pizza mix and that has been working well for me.

Commercial pizza ovens are usually set at temperatures above what home ovens can do, IMHO the baking steel comes about as close as you can get to commercial baking results. I think the Modernist Pizza books came to pretty much the same conclusion, though I haven't read them.

A couple seasons ago I tried doing some pizzas on my outdoor gas grill, which can get to temperatures of 750 or higher. I haven't tried putting my baking steel in the gas grill yet, though. King Arthur's series on pizzas on the grill recommended pre-cooking the dough, flipping it over, putting the ingredients on the now-baked side and then putting it back on the grill to finish. That was kind of a messy operation, getting a round pizza was challenging.

Jeffrey Steingarten wrote a series of articles on home pizza attempts (for the NY Times, I think) that were quite funny, he literally came close to burning his house down rigging his home oven to try to cook a pizza on the 'self-cleaning' cycle.

[Mike Nolan]

You never find the old egg laying hens in the grocery store, so I wonder what happens to them. Maybe they're used for canned soup and pet food.

Considering how little chicken meat there is in a bowl of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, that chicken must be going into animal feeds. I know Alpo has a big plant in Crete NE that gets daily deliveries from beef and poultry operations.

[Mike Nolan]

I felt good enough this evening that I had leftover pizza for supper rather than chicken noodle soup. I'm not sure if this covid case has affected my taste buds.

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