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One of my loaves sort of uraveled a little, it'll make some interesting shaped slices.
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You must be logged in to view attached files.I'm making honey wheat bread today, not so much because we need it (though I don't think there's any in the freezer) but because it is 63 in the kitchen today.
We had more of the cock-a-leekie soup for supper, I skimmed off the fat that had solidified at the top (chicken fat isn't very flavorful), added a little butter for flavor, some more pepper and some basil. I also chopped the chicken up into smaller pieces, Diane thought some of them were too big for a spoon.
It was quite a bit better that way, so I'm adding notes on that to the recipe, as this is a recipe I'll make again. I've still got about a dozen leeks in the garden that I will be digging up over the next month or two, but I think I'll make potato leek soup with the next batch I dig up.
Finished off the leftover pizza tonight.
Doesn't look overbaked to me, but looking at the bottom crust will settle the issue, often the top crust looks great but the bottom one is still half-raw. As long as the top crust isn't DARK brown or black, I don't consider it overbaked.
There was a thread in the Bread Baker's Guild forums a while back where bakers were talking about how they like their breads to look and what sells. The nicely caramelized crusts that many bakers strive to produce sit on the shelf while the ones that are a tepid tan sell out.
In Appolonia Poilaine's book about the Poilaine bakery, there is a recipe for their punitions (sugar cookies), she says they come out all sorts of shades from off white to dark brown, and some customers prefer the light ones while others prefer the darker ones.
I made that recipe and there is a noticeable taste difference between them, the darker ones have more caramelization and that adds flavor complexity. (Biscoff cookies are a perfect example of this; they taste quite spicy, but the only spice listed is cinnamon.) Harold McGee says they have identified at least 1000 different compounds that are created when you caramelize sugar.
In one of Gordon Ramsay's shows a while back (I forget which series), the contestants were asked to bake a pie. In judging them, he cut a slice, scooped off the filling and looked at the bottom crust. If it was soggy at the top, he called it 'raw' and pushed it away without tasting it. Most of the pies failed his bottom crust test. (Some year I want to eat in one of his restaurants to see if I can order a well-done steak that isn't totally dried out, a challenge he's used several times on Hell's Kitchen, giving the contestants 3 identical steaks and asking them to deliver at the same time one rare, one medium-rare and one well-done. I know I can do the well-done one properly, I think I'd struggle to get all 3 done simultaneously.)
The soup was good, but I think I'd do it a bit differently next time, I don't think it reduced enough and as a result it needed more veggies. The star anise adds a subtle flavor to the soup that is more of an after-taste. I tried it with some bread, with oyster crackers and with saltines, all 3 worked well.
I am trying a new recipe for supper tonight: cock-a-leekie soup, using a NY Times recipe:
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1022930-cock-a-leekie-soup-scottish-chicken-and-leek-soup
The main ingredients are chicken and leeks, but there's also celery, carrots, bay leaf, thyme, parsley, star anise, rice (or barley) and prunes. (I left out the garlic, of course.) The chicken and leek greens are just starting to get to a boil, and it smells interesting already.
We're in a winter storm watch, with anywhere from an inch to 10 inches of snow forecast, depending upon the latest update. Right now it is just flurries, but it's a good day for a nice warm soup.
Pineapple in carrot cake sounds weird to me, but my wife says she's seen it. Some people put coconut in carrot cake, and she usually won't eat anything with coconut in it, though recently she's been willing to eat the frosting on a Germans sweet chocolate cake.
It was pizza night here, and I had a salad too.
The scoop number is supposed to represent the number of scoops in a quart, but how full you fill each scoop is a big factor, and it always seems to me that a larger scoop is prone to produce a rounder ball of dough than a smaller scoop.
On the basis of the size numbers alone, if a #60 scoop produces 60 cookies, a #50 scoop should logically produce 50 cookies, but I only got 38 a few days ago.
The #50 scoop produced dough balls that weighed around 1.2 ounces each, the #60 scoop produced dough balls that weighed around 0.8 ounces each.
The other thing I noticed is that the #50 size cookies seemed to have a more open interior. (These cookies tend to have big open areas inside, which is why they're so good with milk, as they have lots of space to hold the milk when you dunk them.)
Georgia made too many mistakes and Notre Dame took advantage of nearly all of them.
Interesting that all 4 of the teams that got automatic byes lost this week, wonder what that'll do to next year's playoffs. There's already talk of expanding to 14 or 16 teams.
I had leftover chili, Diane had a salad.
Did another batch of oatmeal crisps chocolate chip cookies, this time with a #60 scoop, I got 60 cookies.
Been looking at a recipe for Swabian pretzels, not sure if I've got the right stuff to make it yet.
December 30, 2024 at 10:45 pm in reply to: What are you Baking the Week of December 29, 2024? #45118I made a batch of oatmeal crisps (chocolate chip cookies) today. I've used a #70 or a #60 scoop in the past, today I used my new #50, it made the cookies about 1.2 ounces each post-baking, and they took about 5-6 minutes longer in the oven. The batch made 38 cookies.
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