Mike Nolan
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I'm making a batch of bagels today.
Looks like Camas Country is out of the RdB flour in both sizes now.
If it is a translucent container, you can take a magic marker and make some lines up the sides to help you measure how much it rises. I've used some 1 gallon ice cream buckets for rising dough (I still remember when they were 1.5 gallon buckets), but generally I just do it in the metal bowl for my 4.5 quart mixer, I've done it enough times that I can look at it and come up with a pretty good idea of how much it has increased.
The brand of ice cream we normally use (Blue Bunny) recently went to a square bucket, I think dough rising buckets need to be round.
I've tried around a dozen of the rye bread recipes in Ginsberg's book at this point. I haven't found one that really rings the bell for me, though several of them were very good rye breads. I"m about to jump back into that project, I took the summer off. I'm still searching for an authentic black bread. There was a BBGA thread on rye breads that had a rather complicated rye bread recipe, you bake/steam it for 24 hours. That's on my list of things to try this winter.
My go-to rye bread recipe for about 10 years has been and remains the Marbled Rye bread in BBA, though I do increase the ratio of rye to wheat so that the rye makes up about 40% of the flour. I've gone as high as 50%.
You can put a small amount of rye flour in almost any baked good, it starts to take over the flavor profile once you get past about 15% flour weight, though.
I like adding a small amount (around 5%, no more than 10%) to lean French dough, along the lines of Peter Reinhart's Pain de Campagne in BBA. I tried it with some triticale flour, the resulting baguettes were excellent. Triticale is a wheat/rye crossbreed.
KAF recommends you stir the flour, then gently spoon it into the measuring cup and level it off. Even then, you can see variances of as much as 1/4 ounce per cup.
KAF's recipes assume a cup of AP or bread flour weighs 4.25 ounces, the latest USDA database says it is 137 grams (4.83 ounces), though. But I've seen cookbooks or recipes that range from 4 ounces to 5 1/2 ounces for a cup of flour.
There's a Vermont Maple Oatmeal Bread on the KAF site, it is very good, even better if you throw in a handful of raisins and a little cinnamon.
We had tuna salad sandwiches. I also made some baked custards and some hard boiled eggs. (We had a couple dozen eggs that are getting on the old side.)
I also did some more molded chocolates for our granddaughter's Advent calendar today.
One of our neighbors lined their sidewalk with paper bags with treats in them, another did a scavenger hunt using day-glow tape on candies sprinkled in their front yard. (I don't know how well either of them worked yet.)
We were quite pleased with the turnout we got, in fact we might do the self-service method again next year. My wife was talking to most of them through the closed storm door. The camera covering the front door made it easy to see when someone was coming up the steps.
I'm thinking I may try AP flour mixed with a little lower protein pastry flour. I can get a one pound package of an Italian flour at a local store but it is outrageously priced, and the package doesn't really say much about what type of flour it is.
I tried unmolding my chocolate covered cherries today, 18 of 28 came out of the mold more or less intact. Not a great average but probably not bad for my first try. (Most of us had trouble unmolding our chocolates in Chocolate School, too, I think because we overfilled them and the filling stuck to the mold.) But I haven't done much chocolate work lately and those are skills that need practice, I think my chocolate was properly tempered but not quite hot enough.
Now I need to wait a week or two to see how well the centers liquefy. (I made some with invertase in the fondant and some without, the latter should have more of a creamy center rather than a liquid one.)
The maraschino cherries I have (from Sams Club) are way too big for the mold, I wound up cutting them in half and even then they didn't fit well. I need to find some smaller cherries. I may try hand dipping some, then the mold size doesn't matter.
My son just sent me an image of a model for making a rosetta stamp on his 3D printer.
Attachments:
You must be logged in to view attached files.When I made a version of them back during time of the thread on the old BC, I also thought they were pretty good. We don't make dinner rolls very often, though, so I haven't gotten back to these, since I can't find the right kind of stamp.
I sent a link to photos of both the metal and the plastic rosetta stamps to my son, maybe he can figure out how to make one on his 3D printer. (He recently made bannetons for rising dough.)
A combination of a Kaiser roll stamp and an apple corer might work, but I've never bought a Kaiser roll stamp. The metal stamp is interesting because it doesn't cut into the rolls along the outside, only in the center. That might help create an air pocket, I suppose.
As I understand it, Italian wheat varieties tend to be not as strong as North American wheat varieties.
If you want to be true to the origins of the Philly cheese steak, you should use Cheese Whiz. Personally, I prefer other cheeses.
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