Mike Nolan
Tue. Apr 28th, 2026
I've had some commercial pies where eating the cardboard box the pie came in might have been a taste upgrade. Fortunately, I learned how to make a delicious pie crust at SFBI.
We had a lavash pizza with the usual ingredients (tomato chunks, artichoke hearts, mushrooms) plus some Canadian bacon.
More leftovers here.
Here's a shot showing today's bread (above) and the previous bake (using a 50-50 ratio of flours).
The semolina bread came out differently than the previous blend of flours, more of a dusty color crust and it probably wasn't developed enough. Tastes good, though.
I am making semolina bread today, I changed the proportions of flour from 50-50 to 5 parts semolina and 3 parts bread flour. The recipe that I'm trying to reproduce lists these ingredients:
Water, enriched durum flour, enriched semolina flour, unbleached enriched
flour (which includes malted barley flour), less than 2 percent of each
of the following: rice flour, salt, sesame seeds, malt syrup, yeast.
So I'm figuring the durum + semolina has to be more than 50% of the total flour. I don't know what the rice flour is used for, possibly just lubrication under the bread?
While thinking of cookies there used to be a chocolate chip cookie that was around silver dollar size and crisp, not chewy, it came in a box covered by foil, mostly brown and silver as I recall. I haven't seen it in decades, I'm sure it is long gone.
And there are those who still insist that Hydrox was better, I'm one of them. I've lost count of the number of Oreo variants there are these days.
Congratulations on 40 years, we'll be at 49 in September.
We're in leftover mode for a day or two, here, cleaning out the fridge from all the meals we made or bought while my son and his family were here. So we had bagels tonight.
Tonight we had eggs Benedict. It has been a while since I made a Hollandaise (my wife doesn't like it, she had hers without the Hollandaise), and of course the sauce broke, so I had to rescue it with another egg yolk and some water.
My son and his family will be leaving tomorrow morning, so I'm planning an afternoon of baking, most of it road food: bagels, Brazilian cheese rolls and chocolate meringue cookies.
No-knead techniques were probably around long before the middle 20th century, but the NY Times article was well-written, and well-publicized. Timing and who you know is always important.
Remember, Leibniz and Newton both came up with calculus, but Newton got most of the credit.
I need to go check the east side of the house tomorrow, it is mid-June and there may be some black raspberries to pick. I don't think I've got any elderberries left, they got crowded out by bigger plants, we have several maples and at least one oak that have taken over that part of the yard. I tried planting some elderberries I ordered online last year in another part of the yard, but they didn't get delivered until mid-July when it was in the 90's every day and none of them made it to fall. I don't think I'll contact the nursery I ordered them from (direct gardening in Bloomington IL), but I'll never order from them again, the order seemed to be oddly handled right from the start.
The 11-strand braid came out fairly well, probably the best of the 4 I've done. My wife thinks I overdid the sesame seeds a bit, though. (But I love sesame seeds on bread.)
The chocolate pecan meringue cookies came out pretty good, too, I lowered the temp from 350 in the recipe to 325 and baked them for about 22 1/2 minutes, they're just a little chewy in the center and that's how we like them.
