[Mike Nolan]

As I recall, KAF shut down their 2nd version of the BC in May of 2016. Swirth and a few others were saving recipes furiously during the month or so that KAF gave us to save stuff.

Zen set up a site, too, but it didn't get a lot of traffic and it looks like it hasn't had any activity since 2017. She supposedly downloaded all the recipes that people had posted on the KAF BC but I don't think she ever posted them to her site. I've emailed her a few times asking if she'd send them to me, but I never got a response. (I'm sure I could have figured out a way to process them and load them here.)

I think there were over 6000 recipes there, we've got about 2400 of them here.

Deb Wink was one of the more active posters on the first version of the KAF BC, most of that before I joined there. (I think I discovered it in 2005.) I've had a few email discussions with her lately, on sourdough, of course. I was hoping to take her sourdough class in March, but it got cancelled due to COVID-19.

[Mike Nolan]

I cut up 4 more heads of cabbage for sauerkraut today, some I added to the four-gallon crock to top it off, since it had compressed down to below the half way point. The rest I put in the one-gallon after cleaning and sanitizing it. This gives me around 24 pounds of sauerkraut in the crocks, plus 2 pounds or so left from the last batch. We're enjoying having fresh kraut on hand and we've promised some of it to a friend.

[Mike Nolan]

We're delighted to see you here, kimbob. We really miss the BC crowd who haven't come over here. A few have probably passed on by now, I haven't heard from Grizzlybiscuits in a very long time. KidPizza is still around, though he doesn't post much, sure hope he's OK, he's in a limited care facility these days and those haven't been the best places to be with COVID-19.

[Mike Nolan]

I like Swedish meatballs, but I'd leave out the garlic, it just gets in the way IMHO.

[Mike Nolan]

Gluten-free mixes usually have something like xanthan gum in them, it thickens very quickly. You generally need to mix a cake mix long enough to get the flour mostly if not fully hydrated. With the GF mixes and recipes I've tried, that's always a bit of a challenge, I often wind up leveling it out with a spatula. When I make a GF recipe from scratch, I wait until it has mixed for a while before I add the xanthan gum, assuming it isn't already in the GF flour.

[Mike Nolan]

Sorry about that, I'm never sure with WaPo and WSJ which things are behind their paywall and which aren't. (The Times of London is easier, aside from the front page, which has maybe a paragraph of each story, everything's behind the paywall.)

Here's another link that might work:
Ikea Meatballs

[Mike Nolan]

Bagels freeze fairly well, and toasting them helps, I find they're usually good for 3-4 days, so that's why I seldom make more than 9 smaller bagels (3.5 ounces each) at a time.

[Mike Nolan]

Gluten-free cakes are challenging, though I've made Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake with KAF's GF flour and it was excellent. I could tell the difference between it and one made with wheat flour, but both were well received.

[Mike Nolan]

I think I've ordered from Honeyville once, Sara Wirth orders from them a lot, though. I'm outside of their truck route area, but I think you're in it.

I've ordered from Country Life Natural Foods several times, but their website suggests that they're having stock issues and are way behind on shipping, like nearly everyone else.

[Mike Nolan]

This place (Supermarket Italy) has Caputo 00 for about $2 per pound, and if you order $50 or more shipping is free.

Supermarket Italy

[Mike Nolan]

Honeyville has $8.99 flat rate shipping so a 50 pound bag of whole wheat flour winds up being a little over a dollar a pound. I'm thinking about possibly ordering 50 pounds of semolina from them, the landed cost would be about $1.50 per pound, and I've been paying $2.50 or more locally.

I did a search on 'bulk flour indiana' and some places came up that might be a day-trip away. As I recall, there are some Mennonite communities in Indiana and Ohio, they often repackage bulk flours into sizes more appropriate for home use.

Too bad we don't live near each other, we could put together a pretty good bulk order. But shipping from point A to point B is really expensive unless you do enough of it to get the good rates.

I generally don't worry about whole wheat flour any more, because I've got a flour mill and several types of wheat berries on hand. Finding wheat berries is sometimes even more challenging than finding whole wheat flour, though.

I'm starting to get low on semolina, and I don't know if the place I've been getting it from locally is able to sell from their bulk bins right now.

[Mike Nolan]

It'll probably depend on how you store them overnight. I store mine in a plastic bag, but I always toast them, so if they get a little soft on the outside the toaster takes care of that.

I've made bagels with everything from private-label AP bleached flour which was almost certainly at the low end of the scale for protein to very high-gluten flour that my neighbor said was only good for pizza. Once you get the dough right, everything else seems to fall in place.

[Mike Nolan]

We had fish with broccoli tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

I think the reason is because semolina isn't ground as finely. The more finely you grind a flour, the less it weighs per cup, cake flour being a good example. (Powdered sugar is another good example, it is much lighter per cup than granulated sugar.)

A cup of durum wheat berries is 192 grams, other hard wheat berries are about the same, soft wheat berries are a bit lighter, 168 grams per cup.

[Mike Nolan]

There are many good ways to create a starter, some ways, like the pineapple juice method, may succeed where others fail. I guess it's somewhat dependent on what micro-organisms are in your environment. I've created a total of 3 wheat-based starters using 2 different methods and one rye-based starter (with a second one under way), all of them worked, some much faster than others. The first rye starter was ready in about a week, for example.

I stopped maintaining the wheat-based ones because my wife was having problems with the breads I was making, too sour for her, I think. One of these days I'm going to try a variant on Chad Robertson's method, as detailed in the Tartine cookbooks, adapting the feeding schedule so it doesn't require throwing out 95% of your starter frequently. His method is supposed to produce a starter that generates less lactic acid.

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