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I made a small batch of barbecue sauce today and then boiled down my beef stock a bit, portioned it out and froze it.
For supper we had Costco cheese tortellini with tomato sauce plus some cheese toast rolls.
The issue with flax is that the hull is not digestible, so it needs to be ground. Soaking it doesn't appear to work, doing a mash (ie, heating the soaker) might be better, cracking the flax might work, too, but I've never tried that so I don't know how easy it is to do.
I know my nutrimill specifically says not to try to run flax or any other oily seed through it.
Yeah, I've got a few books that are on 'healthy' baking/cooking and they seem to assume that ANY bad stuff (fat, cholesterol, carbs, meat proteins, refined sugars, etc) is verboten, even when updated science says some of it may not really be bad at all, much less dealing with moderate amounts of them.
I've got a whole grains book that literally spends at least the first third of the book preaching the benefits of whole grains (mostly in terms of science from the 1970's). Anybody who reads beyond that point to find the first actual recipe was either already converted or is a masochist!
Cookbooks are an interesting part of the book industry. Many people think they can write one, not that many ever complete one. But there are still hundreds of cookbooks published every year, most of which wind up on the remainders table quickly.
Back in March, at the start of the Covid shutdown, I was planning to go to Dallas for a BBGA course Deb and another person were running on sourdoughs, but it got cancelled. I only hope some day they can resume in-person instruction and reschedule it. (So many of the BBGA courses are on the east or west coast, I was glad to see one in the central US.) Deb lives in Columbia MO, so a central US course may be easier on her travel schedule.
BBGA is doing a bunch of online courses, but I'm really more of a hands-on learner.
There was a blog site about a group of home bakers who were trying to bake their way through every recipe in The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I've probably made about a dozen recipes from that book, and close to that from his Artisan book.
There are about a half dozen Reinhart recipes I use regularly and these days several Hamelman recipes, too. Hamelman has written on the BBGA forum about a rye recipe that will be in his 3rd edition, it sounds enticing enough to make me interested in the book.
I haven't made many cakes from Purdy's cake book, but the ones I have made were successful. I really like her hot water crust for meat pies, but for a dessert pie I always use the butter crust recipe I learned at pastry school, I assume it is in Michael Suas's Advanced Baking book.
There are probably about a half dozen recipes from the King Arthur Baking Companion that are also part of our standard repertoire, and a few from the King Arthur Whole Grains book, notably Scottish shortbread and hot cross buns.
So far none of the Ginsberg rye breads have become regulars, but I didn't really expect many of them to.
There was a pumpernickel recipe posted in the BBGA forum that is on my list of things to try after my cataract surgeries, it features a LONG bake, 24 hours in a water bath at just barely above 212, enough to make it more of a steaming than a baking process. The original recipe uses a double-wall pan from Germany that I can't find anywhere, perhaps nobody makes it any more. I'm planning to try it in a covered Pullman pan set on a rack in a larger covered roasting pan partially filled with water. That means lots of time for the Maillard process to turn the interior of the loaf into a dark brown bread.
Bolting is the process by which they sift out larger pieces from the milled flour, usually these are bran and germ.
The term comes from the fact that they used to use cloth for this, which comes in bolts.
If you look at a picture of a Wheat Berry, you can see how a roller mill works. As the rollers get closer together, they begin to strip off most of the bran. The germ is kind of tucked into one end of the berry, so it comes off after the germ. The crease in the berry complicates matters, the reason some of the rollers have grooves in them is to help orient the berry.
In a large roller mill, bolting occurs in several places, each producing two streams, one of the finer material that passes through the bolting screen, one of coarser material that does not.
Stone ground flour can also be bolted, that's where the process originated.
The germ has most of the oil, which can develop a bitter taste. The germ also has enzymes that break down the starch into simple sugars, mostly maltose, which a newly sprouted germ uses as food. These enzymes also affect the gluten matrix. I used to add germ to several breads, but it always seemed to affect how much the dough rose, so I stopped doing it.
I have a couple of Rose Levy Beranbaum books, I seldom look at them. I find her instructions too fussy, sort of like ATK recipes but without the 'you must do it THIS way' attitude, and I've had more out and out fails from her recipes than any other author.
Clayton's books could stand some updating, most of them were written in the 70's (he died in 2011), but he was pretty meticulous and his recipes tend to come out decently, though I think he assumes 5 (or more) ounces of flour per cup.
I generally don't buy multiple editions of a cookbook (The Joy of Cooking is an exception, I collect editions published before 1960), but I may have to buy the 3rd edition of Hamelman's book when it comes out.
I may stop buying Peter Reinhart's books, though, his last pizza book was a major disappointment, too few recipes and too many pictures. I suspect his editors are leading him astray, though.
As a lot of new bakers found out during Lockdown I, beginning sourdough is kind of like beginning motocross, expect a lot of crash and burn.
I'm guessing that would be article(s) by Deb Wink, though Emily Buehler's book "Bread Science" is pretty good, too, but neither are light reading material.
I have not seen the book "Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast" but I've seen some positive reviews about it.
Here's a list someone posted of the 5 best books on sourdough. I've got the Tartine book and the first edition of Hamelman (3rd edition is due out next year), neither are beginner books.
I would worry about the glue used to hold the bristles in on a paint brush, and possibly about the metal clasp. Neither may be food-safe, but maybe they don't touch the food enough to be a problem. They sure are a whole lot cheaper than pastry brushes, though.
I wound up buying a small chest freezer at a Sams Club (in Omaha, the Lincoln stores didn't have it in stock) when our SubZero upright freezer needed servicing last spring, at this point I still have some of the things that were in the upright in the chest freezer, I've been using things up and the chest freezer will eventually be dedicated mostly to baking needs.
I may need to order a 25 or 50 pound bag of medium rye flour at some point when I resume rye baking, most of it will also go in the freezer. (I've found that the 62 ounce candy jars for things like M&M's make great flour storage containers for freezing, they stack well.)
I've got cataract surgery scheduled for late January and mid-February, I'm limiting my kitchen experiments for now because reading a new recipe is really hard.
The one at King Arthur does not appear to have beads at the tip of each strand, which IMHO get in the way. I'll put it on my watch list for the next time I order from them, probably next year. (They usually have a $3.14 shipping offer for an order or $31.41 or more around Pi day.)
I'm wondering if I put my too-stiff boar bristle brushes in some boiling water if they'd loosen up. Worst that happens is they come apart and I have to throw them away, but I'm close to doing that anyway.
I see Zyliss basting brushes on Amazon, not sure if they're what you have, these seem geared towards barbecue. Next time I'm near a Le Creuset store, I plan to see if they still have that small brush (It was in a display by the register.)
My wife is making another batch of black bean soup, she soaked the beans with a little baking soda this time, then rinsed them off several times.
They're breaking up MUCH faster. In addition to some chopped celery and carrot, I put in some frozen celery pulp and carrot pulp from my vinegar batches.
I took the rest of the pulp (about a pound of each) and added some onion pulp, some of the tomatoes that I picked in October before the frost that have been sitting in trays in the garage, some turnip, some left over leeks from potato-leek soup and a bunch of spices, to make a nice pot of vegetable stock.
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