Mike Nolan
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Today I am finishing the Kassel rye I started on Wednesday, the sponge wasn't responding yesterday so I had to fiddle with it and give it another day to ferment. I should have a full report in the Rye Project thread later today.
You cut the stems off, cut the tips off (they're sharp!) and peel off some of the outer leaves. Then you put them in a container with a little lemon juice and water and steam them. If you do it in a pan, it takes 20-30 minutes depending on their size. My wife does them in the microwave in about 10 minutes, you can also do them in an instant pot or pressure cooker.
When you can pull off a leaf easily, they're done.
To eat the outer leaves, you peel them off, dip them in a sauce of your choosing (I like sour cream, my wife likes bleu cheese dressing) and scrape off the inner soft part with your teeth. As you get further in, you can nibble on the edge of the leaf a bit, but if it won't easily come off, it is too fibrous to be edible. If you're fortunate enough to find fresh baby artichokes (about the size of a plum), there's a lot more of it that is edible.
When you get to the center, you scrape out the fuzzy 'choke' with a spoon to get to the heart, which is the best part.
Get a big bowl for the scraps you can't eat. I'm told you can compost them, but I've never done it.
Artichoke have an amplification effect on your taste buds, they enhance the taste of everything else you eat.
I've read that you can sometimes find yeast cakes in the freezer section, but I've not seen any there locally. They'd be so small I could have overlooked them, though.
If you're on a PC, I strongly recommend using Irfanview. It is free for non-commercial use, and it gives you a lot of tools to manipulate images but it is very easy to use.
I take most of my photos at high resolution (6000 x 4000) and use Irfanview to reduce them to 600 x 400 before uploading them. Sometimes I'll crop out stuff on the sides that isn't needed, like the edge of the pan.
It has a batch mode for processing large groups of photos, but I usually do one or two at a time, so I don't use that mode a lot. You can manipulate all the way down to the pixel level.
I have something called a ShotBox, which is a portable small photo studio / light box with several photo backgrounds (a Christmas present from my son, who was one of the kickstarter participants for it), but I also went to the craft store and bought a 20x30 sheet of foam board that I use as a background for larger things.
As I noted in the other thread, with this recipe you shouldn't use aluminum foil to cover the cake, the acid from the vinegar will eat right through it in a few hours. May not be all that good on a metal pan, either, but we usually make it in a glass 8x8 pan anyway.
I've looked at a couple of small-batch recipe sites, though not this one.
We were originally thinking of having artichokes again, but I had a video conference that ran from 6:30 to 8:30, so we just had leftovers. We'll have the artichokes tomorrow.
You understand, by 'fresh yeast' they probably mean liquid yeast in a 5 gallon bucket, not yeast cakes. The only place I know of to get the yeast cakes right now is NY Bakers, and by the time you throw in fedex delivery it gets pretty pricey.
The links in the story to their ongoing research look pretty promising, too. I forwarded the link on to Deb Wink and posted it on the BBGA forum.
I've always found it odd that home sourdough instructions nearly always recommend throwing away half of your starter at every feeding or using it for something other than bread, commercial bakeries do not do that (because they couldn't afford to!) They feed their starters a few hours before they plan to start another batch of dough, then take the half they would have thrown away and use it to inoculate a day's worth of dough, and the starter is at its most active point by then, too.
Maybe it's just because most home bakers don't bake bread every day, like a bakery does?
I think that recipe is in the recipes section here under two or three different names, I've heard it called crazy cake, cake-in-the-pan, no-egg cake, etc. The recipe supposedly was developed during world war II when eggs were in short supply.
One caution I will make on this recipe is don't top it with aluminum foil to store it, the low pH causes it to eat right through the foil. (It may not be all that great on metal pans, too, but we usually do it in a glass 8x8 pan.)
We had kraut dogs for supper tonight.
We used up the last of the hot dog buns for supper tonight, I'll have to make some more soon, they were very good for hot dogs and made great hamburger buns. (This is the Hamelman 'soft butter rolls' recipe.)
I'm getting ready to take on another of the Ginsberg rye recipes, because I think my new rye starter is about ready for use, the pH was down to 4.65 this afternoon.
There are several different types of pre-ferments/sponges, varying mainly on how much water they have in them. It is common for them to use 1/4 to 1/2 of the total flour in the recipe.
Almost any yeast bread recipe can be adapted to use a pre-ferment.
Let's say your recipe calls for 30 ounces of flour overall and 20 ounces of water, which would be 67% hydration. I tend to like pre-ferments that are a little looser than the final dough, say, 75% hydration. I think the additional water gives the yeast a boost.
You could do a 75% hydration biga starter with 12 ounces of flour and 9 ounces of water, plus 1/2 teaspoon of yeast. (A poolish is wetter, such as 12 ounces of flour to 12 ounces of water, again with a small amount of yeast.)
A pate fermentee (old dough) is also a type of sponge you can make up the day before if you don't have a previous day's dough to work with. It will often have some of the salt in it, as dough from a previous batch would. (Not too much, it can inhibit or kill the yeast.) In fact, you can make up a big batch of pate fermentee and it'll keep in the refrigerator for up to 4 days. (After that it starts acting a bit more like a sourdough starter, which expects periodic feedings and starts to take on a sour tang.)
Whatever you use for the pre-ferment, subtract it from the total when making the final dough. If there's sugar in the recipe, you could add some of it to the pre-ferment, that will also give the yeast something to munch on.
Let it sit overnight, it should be bubbly by morning. I often add another 1/2 teaspoon of yeast to the final dough, but that's still less than half of what a recipe that uses 30 ounces of flour would probably call for, and probably less than a third of what a recipe written in the 50's would use.
I used to keep track of how long a pound of yeast lasted me, 2-3 months wasn't unusual. These days it is more like 6-8 months, because there's just the two of us and I've been making more recipes that use a pre-ferment or my rye starter so they don't require as much commercial yeast, sometimes none at all.
What's likely to happen is the producers of both flour and yeast are going to ramp up to fill the shortages in the distribution channels, but at some point demand is likely to slow down a little, and then they'll have to slow down a bit as the channels get full. I could see a second cycle of shortages a few months down the road, especially if a lot of the newcomers decide they like baking their own bread.
I don't really want a small jar of yeast, and certainly not the little paper packets, which are way too expensive, I'd rather buy a one-pound package, though I've still got one unopened package in the pantry. (I'll probably need to open it next month, though.) I've never had liquid yeast to try it, you have to buy it in large buckets and it has a very short shelf life.
I may have to try the Deb Wink/Jeffrey Hamelman raisin bread recipe again, it starts by putting some raisins in water and letting the yeasts naturally present on grapes go to town. I tried it once, but I got a grey mold, which, according to Deb's instructions, was probably Botrytis cinerea, the fungus often present on grapes that is responsible for the 'noble rot' that produces the finest dessert wines, like Sauternes. However, it won't make bread.
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