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It may have been what everyone else calls SAF Red, I don't normally buy SAF yeast, so I'm not familiar with their packaging.
I recently learned that there is a SAF Purple yeast, intended for fast rise commercial uses. I doubt it shows up in stores.
I made some levain in preparation for making baguettes tomorrow, and I also made the pizza dough for tomorrow night's pizza party.
It's a Chicago thing, even more decadent than pan pizza.
Divide the dough into 2 parts, one of them using 2/3 of the dough.
Take a deep pan (a deep cast iron skillet works well), line it with the larger piece of dough all the way to the rim, put in sauce, cheese and other toppings, cover that with the smaller piece of dough, poke some vent holes, then put on more sauce, toppings and cheese.
I like to put ricotta cheese and spinach in the lower layer of sauce.
Bake until the top edges are well done. Let cool before slicing. One slice is usually plenty, even our sons had trouble getting through a full second slice as teenagers.
Chocolate, if it is stored properly, lasts a very long time, several years. Even if the outer surface develops a white powdery look (fat bloom), it is still edible and if melted, as would occur when you bake pain au chocolat, you won't know the blooming had occurred.
Like any fat, cocoa butter can go rancid, but it is not common. A bigger problem is bugs, they like chocolate. (So do mice, as I found out a few weeks ago.)
Cocoa butter has six states, alpha-1 through alpha-6; the higher the number, the higher the melting point.
The normal state of the cocoa butter in well-tempered chocolate is alpha-5, which is solid at room temperature but melts in the low 90's, so it melts on the tongue. The alpha-6 state can develop if chocolate sits for many months, it is a bit harder than alpha-5, so the chocolate can lose its ability to have a clean 'snap'.
We are having burgers on the grill.
Hy Vee had SAF Blue (IDY) in a 1 pound package today, they also had Red Star cake yeast in 2 ounce packages in the butter section. I bought one even though it was insanely overpriced ($2.99), just because I've got one or two recipes I'd like to try with cake yeast.
My wife has requested pizza bread in addition to a pizza on Saturday, so I've started a levain so I can make baguette dough in the morning.
I may do one thin crust pizza and one double crust stuffed pizza, something I haven't done in a long time but is REALLY good. I'd need to get some ricotta and some spinach for the bottom layer. And some good pepperoni if I can find it. (The brand we've been using for the past several years has changed its formula and now includes garlic, haven't found another one we liked yet, most are too strong.)
My wife wears one of those continuous glucose monitors, you get really interesting information from them about how your body deals with carbs, you can see her blood sugar spike up after a meal that is heavy on carbs. But a pasta meal made with my semolina egg pasta doesn't cause a big spike, it goes up, but over a longer time frame and not quite as high.
I believe the sourness also has to do with whether it has a microculture that is dominated by lactic aid producing bacteria or acetic acid producing bacteria. My starter is running a pH of about 3.5, which I believe is fairly sour for a starter, but it doesn't have a really sour smell to it. The wheat-base starter I kept in the fridge back when I was testing recipes for ABED had a vinegary smell to it, this one doesn't.
When I feed my rye starter, it start out with a color that is sort of a light grey with a hint of brown in it, but after it has aged a day or two it develops a color that definitely has some red in it.
Most cell phone plans no longer pay attention to whether a call is 'local' or not.
My wife uses Zoom a lot these days, if you've got bandwidth issues, just turn off the camera.
Tonight we had pizza bread made with several day old baguettes that had been sliced lengthwise and some of the pizza sauce I made today, with cheese, artichoke hearts, tomato slices and mushrooms.
Sams Club had their usual assortment of flours today (all bleached), and they also had Fleischmann's IDY in 2 pound sets, so I got one and now I've got enough yeast to get me through the rest of the year and probably beyond.
Sourdough is one of those things that can be really good or really bad, and the really bad ones seem to dominate the market around here. Sometimes I think they just throw a handful of citric acid powder or vinegar in the dough and call it sourdough.
My wife can't tolerate the local sourdoughs, though she does just fine with the breads when we've been in San Francisco, where our younger son lives. So far she hasn't had a problem with the sourdough baguettes I've been making, they're not heavily 'sour'. I need to make a batch that doesn't also use some commercial yeast and see how those come out.
There is a fair amount of research on sourdough and glycemic index, it can temporize the peak in blood sugar associated with eating carbs. (Semolina has similar tendencies.)
The best pancakes I've ever had were at a pancake chain in Indianapolis. We concluded that there was a splash of orange juice in the batter.
Starters really run the gamut of possibilities, the one Aaron was talking about on yesterday's test Zoom call with milk, sugar and flour has been around since the 50's, and while it works, sometimes I really wonder how. There are starters that use grapes, raisins, potatoes and a few other fruits and vegetables as source material for yeast and possibly other microbes.
There was an interesting question on one of my cell phone news posts recently about who has the oldest starter. I know some of the San Francisco bakeries claim to have kept their starters going since the Gold Rush days (1849), but that may not be the oldest starter still going.
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