[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.

[Mike Nolan]

I used to make a sour cream cinnamon raisin bread, my mother-in-law was especially fond of it. (I was experimenting with various combinations of sour cream, yogurt and applesauce.)

But I sort of lost interest in it when she died.

I need to make another try at the wild yeast (from raisins) starter and raisin bread recipe that Deb Wink and Jeffrey Hamelman put together for the BBGA magazine, BreadLines. I tried it earlier this year but the raisins developed the wrong kind of mold, it was probably 'noble rot'.

[Mike Nolan]

I see a Schwan's truck in our neighborhood frequently, but I've never bought from them, they've called on us a couple of times, I wasn't excited about their prices.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm starting New York Corn Rye from Ginsberg tonight, will finish it tomorrow afternoon.

[Mike Nolan]

We had breaded onion rings and breaded mushrooms for supper, not the healthiest dinner, but tasty.

[Mike Nolan]

I made some egg salad for lunch, using Dijon mustard and some of my celery vinegar. The celery vinegar gave it an interesting acid undertone, quite different from the usual lemon juice.

[Mike Nolan]

There used to be a restaurant in Evanston IL that had caviar on their Sunday brunch buffet back in the mid 70's. There wasn't a lot of it and it was kind of at the back where it was hard to reach.

One of my college dorm-mates brought some tins of caviar that he had purchased in Switzerland over a break. (His dad was a senior pilot for Pan Am, so he pretty much flew for free.) He also brought in some fresh Brie cheese, a lot different than the aged stuff they allow through customs these days.

So I've had it a few times, but not for a long time.

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