Mike Nolan
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Today I'm making the 2nd test set of baguettes. I'm going to give this one a slightly longer bulk rise, its a few degrees colder in the kitchen today.
We've got frost warnings the next 3 nights. In years past we often had our tomatoes in the ground around Mother's Day, but in the past few years we've had several cold snaps after the 15th of May, so I'm waiting a while. The seeds we started inside aren't big enough to be transplanted yet, anyway.
We had leftover lasagna.
Interesting articles. The whole wheat honey challah is one I may try, I found it interesting that it used the egg yolk instead of the egg white for the wash.
Aaron, can we find a time to test your zoom account?
Not sure what happened, the topic was in the 'pending' queue, but I released it.
Baguettes are not the easiest bread to make, quite a few bread sites have post after post from people seeking the key.
We wound up having peanut butter on baguettes for supper.
Hooch is largely the alcohol produced by the yeast, which could stunt or kill the yeast if there was enough of it.
If a starter is left idle for a long time (lost at the back of the fridge), it can reach a point where the yeast and the alcohol reach an equilibrium.
I give today's test bake a B-, the dough got a bit of a skin on it during the final rise and that made it hard to slash cleanly. I'll have to work on that. The crumb wasn't quite as open as I had hoped, either, I think it deflated a bit as I was transferring it from the couche to the baking sheet. I don't have a flip board, maybe I'll try to make one. Or I may try to do the final rise on the baking sheet rather than in a couche.
But it still tastes pretty good and making what Chad Robertson calls a young leaven or immature starter by adding a very small amount of my rye starter (around 5%) to flour and water at 100% hydration and letting it double overnight at room temperature, then using that plus a small amount of instant dry yeast produced a bread that rose fairly well, but with just a hint of an acid taste.
There's always a question of how long to bake a baguette. As bakers, we tend to like the ones that have a lot of browning on them, but bakeries often report that one that are just mildly browned sell faster.
I'm planning to do at least one more test bake before I break into the T65 flour.
Oh, I could THINK of doing it, but I'd fail miserably in execution, because I'm just not 'artistic'.
I've got 3 baguettes in final proof in my couche, turning them out onto the baking pan will be next, then I'll slash two of them and cut the third for epis de bles. I'm doing things a bit differently, so it's like going back to school on baguettes. This is my (first) practice batch using KAF bread flour, the recipe is a bit higher hydration than I'm used to.
I hear you on that, if I'm cooking or baking for guests, I'm focused on the kitchen, not them. But pizza for 2 means just one pie (unless I do a dessert pizza too), so not as much effort, the real challenge may be scaling recipes down so I don't wind up with 2/3 of the dough in the freezer, a lot of extra sauce, etc. I think I'm out of whole-milk mozzarella, which means a trip across town, assuming they still have it.
I was sort of figuring I'd plan to have the pizza ready to cut at the start of the party. Anyone making multiple pizzas is going to have to figure out the timing.
I'm currently taking a short course on HTML5/CSS and WordPress, this change wasn't exactly deliberate, it was a side-effect of something else I was doing.
I tend to use the Firefox 'dark mode' add-on a lot lately, it reverses the colors so the text is white on dark. I find it a lot easier to read, and I tend to increase the font size for readability, too, though that messes up a lot of web pages and apps. Hopefully my eye doctor appointment, which was originally scheduled for March but has been postponed twice due to covid19, will take place in June and I can get new glasses.
I will need cataract surgery in the next few years, but probably not this year.
You may see some flip-flopping between the old and new layouts, I'm still trying to figure out exactly what got changed and why.
Tomatoes aren't in all the recipes, I've made it without tomatoes. I like big strips of onions and peppers in mine. The sausage is always the big challenge for us, most Italian sausages have garlic in them.
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