[Mike Nolan]

My guess is most of it was no bigger than 10 pound bags, because it is hard to order the big ones on their website.

Costco had 12 pound bags of KAF AP earlier this year, I don't know if they've gotten any back in stock yet. Right now I suspect they don't see the need to create a custom size bag they sell at a discount, they can sell as much as they can bag up through other channels.

[Mike Nolan]

Before I try making baguettes with my small supply of French flour, I'm going to make them using other flour, probably KAF bread flour, partly for the practice and partly to give me something to compare to.

I think I"m going to take a riff from Chad Robertson's less-acid starter playbook and make some levain using a small amount of my rye starter as the inoculant, probably something like 100-125 grams of water, 100 grams of flour and 5 grams of rye starter. The recipe that came with the flour calls for a 'liquid sourdough starter' but doesn't say what hydration level. I'll probably try 100% first.

I haven't had any problems telling if my rye starter is growing, it pretty much doubles in size overnight. I keep it in 2 cup glass bowls.

[Mike Nolan]

The Callebaut chocolate baking sticks that KAF sells (but is currently out of) are 3/8 by 1/4 x 3 inches. You can get polycarbonate chocolate molds around that size, I haven't seen any silicone molds that size yet. (Amazon comes up with 400 PAGES! of molds, I've looked through 25 so far. Note--some of these molds do not appear to be made of food-grade silicone.)

Followup and size correction: Persistence may have paid off, these are 0.4 x 0.4 x 4 inches in size, which would probably work for pain au chocolat.
chocolate stick molds

I'm not sure how well aluminum foil would work, but I think I could use metal rulers or pastry rolling wands to approximate that size then cut them to the right length. (I'd probably tape them in place on a baking sheet so it would be easy to use a scraper to get the tops flat and even.)

[Mike Nolan]

Not that I've seen. More than one person making his recipes has commented that the baking times and temperatures both seem high.

He was putting together two tour groups to Europe for this fall, I suspect that's off now.

[Mike Nolan]

This article says that 'korn' is an archaic term for grain, usually referring to rye. (Rye was the grain of choice for peasants, because it was cheap.)

The bread pictured looks a lot lighter than the loaf I produced on Sunday, I'll bet it wasn't baked for an hour, too.

See corn rye

[Mike Nolan]

I wonder what the prices are like at mills that are mostly tourist attractions?

We normally try to either go to Pittsburgh in the summer to visit our son and granddaughter or they come out here.

Right now I don't think either is likely to happen, but we keep in touch online. My son sent me some pictures of some baguettes he made yesterday, his shaping technique still needs work. He's using the updated Artisan Breads in 5 minutes a day book.

[Mike Nolan]

It isn't really a corn based bread, there's a little corn meal dusted on the baking sheet and a cornstarch glaze, but otherwise it's made with rye and wheat flours. The book doesn't really explain the name.

The taste isn't all that interesting, it has a good rye flavor, not bitter but a bit of a soourdough tang to it, a bit chewy in the center and rather firm at the outer edges, especially the bottom, probably due to the long baking time though it did not appear to be burned.

If the cornstarch glaze is what was supposed to set this bread apart from others in the book, either I didn't do it right or it didn't succeed.

Would I make it again? Maybe, but there are others I'd probably make first.

[Mike Nolan]

The loaf is huge, over 2 1/2 pounds. I cut it into 4 quarters.

[Mike Nolan]

I made the salty rye rolls a few weeks back, I think they may be the best recipe I've done from the Ginsberg book yet, and an easy one to boot. Slashing the rolls does take two hands, though.

[Mike Nolan]

Report on New York Corn Rye (Ginsberg pps 87-89)

I've never understood the value of a cornstarch glaze, and I guess I still don't. It always seems to produce a white crust, which just seems wrong for rye bread:

The recipe went together easily enough, in fact I expected more problems getting it to firm up into a tight ball than I had. It calls for using 30 ml of water in a bowl to wet the loaf before the bulk rise, and I think that's too much. You go from the bulk rise direct into the oven after decanting the dough onto a baking pan and some gentle shaping, there is no final rise.

It bakes for over an hour, and that produces a fairly dense outer crust, though the interior is fairly soft. The loaf did soften a bit overnight, if I make it again I think I'd wait a day before cutting it, because it didn't cut very easily at first:

The taste has a mild sourdough tang to it; toasting it doesn't really improve the flavor.

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[Mike Nolan]

We did takeout pizza and lasagna tonight, that'll give us food for several more meals.

[Mike Nolan]

The seed houses got hit right after the flour and yeast supplies ran low. We managed to find enough seeds to start about 2 dozen tomatoes, plus 8 that we bought from local growers that getting to be close to a foot tall.

We used to try to get our plants in the ground around Mother's day, but recently we've been hit with some pretty cool mid-May weather and have twice lost all our tomatoes to a late frost, so we'll probably wait until around Memorial Day again this year. In the mean time, the plants are doing fairly well under the grow lights, but aside from the ones that we bought, most of the plants are too small for transplanting yet, anyway.

We're thinking we might just leave the buttercrunch lettuce under the grow lights and see how they do there, we might keep the light setup for growing salad greens and herbs year round.

Yesterday we got an assortment of 6 different types of basil, though I'm not sure I could tell you which ones are which. We've got some more plants, including some more herbs, scheduled for pickup on Friday.

[Mike Nolan]

I've got a recipe for carta di musica that's on my 'try soon' list, I'm hoping they'll be similar to the lavosh we use for making pizzas, so I can make them a little smaller, we only seem to eat 6 of 8 pieces with the big ones (about 18" in diameter.)

Maybe I'll try those for the virtual pizza party.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm also making honey wheat bread, by request, today.

[Mike Nolan]

I bought some sirloin steak and mushrooms yesterday, they'll be part of dinner plans, possibly with some broccoli.

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