[Mike Nolan]

I think well over half of reviews are 'placed', which means they aren't trustworthy. Then there are the insidious people who are posting negative reviews about product X in order to promote product Y.

And I see too many reviews that morph into promotions for something else entirely: This is a great mixer, but do you know you can improve your performance in bed by using blah blah blah.

And as my wife pointed out recently, these days the first several pages of a Google search are often useless.

[Mike Nolan]

We had some vegetable beef soup out of the freezer. It has been cold and rainy all day here, I think the high was in the mid 40's. A nice warm bowl of soup was just the thing.

[Mike Nolan]

We had chili for lunch, so for supper we went with something fairly mild, macaroni and cheese.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's the finished loaf of Altamura-style bread (100% semolina sourdough):

The oven spring was very good, the finished loaf is a little over 8 inches long, about 5 1/2 inches wide and over 3 1/2 inches high.

I wound up re-shaping it after it had risen for about an hour because it was flattening out too much, so I did a couple stretch and folds to tighten up the loaf and reshaped it back into a football shape. It still flattened out a bit with another hour of final proofing but the oven spring rounded it out very nicely.

Here's a slice:

The bread has a nice open crumb and is quite chewy, like one would expect from a sourdough bread, but it does not have much of a sour taste.

The taste is quite a bit different from the semolina bread I've been making using Hamelman's recipe.

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[Mike Nolan]

We generally only do oyster stew for Christmas eve. My wife doesn't eat the oysters, but she likes the broth. I haven't seen oysters in the store lately, so I don't know what they're priced at this year, but everything else seems to be going up, especially proteins. I saw bacon at $7.98 a pound--on sale--the other day.

[Mike Nolan]

The Altamura-style bread is out, it had nice oven spring. I'm letting it cool a bit before slicing, then I'll post some pictures and comments on the recipe I used.

[Mike Nolan]

We're scheduled to get our covid booster shots on Wednesday.

[Mike Nolan]

My guess is the really hot items, whatever they are this year, are going to be scarce by November.

Instant pots are so 2019 at this point. I was at Bed Bath and Beyond yesterday, and their shelves looked pretty full, at least in the kitchen area. I was there to buy a 3 1/2 quart induction-capable vegetable steamer, I'm looking for a way to can just one or two quarts of something without filling up my 24 quart pot. Oh, and steaming some vegetables, too.

[Mike Nolan]

I made a sponge for the Altamura bread, which I will let sit overnight. I'll mix the final dough tomorrow morning and bake it in the afternoon.

[Mike Nolan]

Tonight we had baked breaded fish (from Costco) and steamed broccoli.

[Mike Nolan]

We had takeout fried chicken.

[Mike Nolan]

The third edition of Jeffrey's book came out recently, I've got the first edition. I know he's revised some recipes (fixing some errors, including one in the semolina bread recipe) and adding some new ones. It's kind of pricey, but maybe not so much when compared to the Modernist series. Modernist Pizza just came out, and it only weighs about 30 pounds.

A new edition of Emily Buehler's Bread Science just came out, that one I may order from her (she self-publishes), she has a PhD in chemistry and does a pretty good job keeping track of the scientific literature on bread. I don't have access to all the technical journals, and I'm not sure I understand even half of the articles when I read them.

I'm still trying to get my head around the presentations on sourdough that were part of the Johnson & Wales bread symposium; much of what I thought I knew about sourdough appears to be wrong. The presentations from the symposium will be available on Youtube next year. When they're up, I'll post links to several of them.

[Mike Nolan]

I think BakerAunt was trying to help KidPizza get back to posting, but it seems that he is still reading this site from time to time, he offers comments through her (and others) about threads that interest him. He's had to give up making cheesecakes due to his health.

[Mike Nolan]

I've been making Jeffrey Hamelman's semolina bread for around a year, he uses a 50-50 blend of semolina and bread flour, I've been increasing the semolina to about 63%.

His is an interesting recipe because it uses a 'flying' sponge, a term you don't run across very often. You take the yeast, mix it with about 1/3 of the flour blend and water, then let it sit for about an hour, by which time it isn't exactly bubbly but it is clearly active, then add the other ingredients.

True Altamura bread (which has PDO status in the EU, like parmigiano reggiano) is made with 4 different strains of locally grown Italian durum wheat (some call it reground semolina), there was a demo on it as part of the J&W bread symposium using a flour mix sold by Puratos and I ran across a take on that recipe in Andrew Whitley's book, Bread Matters. The original Altamura bread is made with a semolina sourdough, Whitley's recipe uses an overnight sponge, I'm building a semolina sourdough starter so that I can experiment with this recipe and some others.

My rye starter died this summer, fallout from the refrigerator failure. Considering that I was only using a few teaspoons of it to inoculate a levain for rye breads, I may try the semolina starter on some rye recipes rather than build a new rye starter. As cooler weather hits, I'm going to try to get back into the Ginsberg Rye project, though.

[Mike Nolan]

Welcome back, Kathy.

I'm working on making a version of Altamura bread, made with 100% semolina flour and using a semolina sourdough starter that I've been building for a couple of weeks now. It's supposed to be somewhat cake-like in texture.

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