[Mike Nolan]

Do you have either the Bread Baker's Apprentice or Artisan Breads Every Day? I use the bagel recipes in them. (The one in BBA makes more dough, so I probably use the ABED recipe more often these days, though they're very similar.)

Bagel dough should be satiny, and not at all tacky. If you don't want them brown, don't use either brown sugar or barley malt, if you have it, use non-diastatic malt powder, it adds the sweetness of barley malt but not the coloring.

What flour are you using, I generally use KAF bread flour for them. I've seen some ultra-high protein flours labeled as 'for bagels and pizza'. I tried a batch with first clear flour once, wasn't dissatisfied with them but haven't done another one. As I recall the dough wasn't quite as smooth.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making tuna salad tonight (and plan to have it on rye bread), though I'm not sure if it is just for me or for both of us, since I made some hard boiled eggs to go in it, and she just had two of them, still warm.

[Mike Nolan]

I've added an index in the lead post in this thread to the 78 recipes in the Ginsberg book, as I make them I'll turn them into links to the review for that recipe.

6 and counting. There are several chapters in the book I haven't done any recipes from yet, I need to work on that so I'm not making too many similar recipes back to back.

[Mike Nolan]

The cornstarch glaze is supposed to add shine, I must not be cooking it long enough, all it ever does is add a dull white finish. (But I don't understand why people like the Dutch crunch coating on breads, either.) Next time I make the old school deli bread I'm going to do one loaf with cornstarch and one without.

I did see in a thread on the BBGA forum (from 2005) in which someone said that if you toast the cornstarch before cooking it, you get even better results.

I've found an egg white glaze produces an excellent shine on rye bread, but then it's not vegan, for those who do that.

These were the first loaves I've baked with my steam tube, I thought it worked pretty well, I put in about 50 CCs of water, half right after the loaves went into the oven and the other half 2-3 minutes later, I could have put in even more, the pan was totally dry at the 10 minute mark.

I think I'll be doing the steamed loaves test on either Tuesday or Wednesday. That'll be an all-day task, with another loaf going in to the oven about every hour.

[Mike Nolan]

My wife is making oatmeal spice cookies with raisins and dates today. The dates came from a friend who bought them at a Farmer's Market in Palm Springs earlier this week, so they're fresh and really sweet. I don't know what kind of date they are, but they're very good.

[Mike Nolan]

It made great corned-beef-on-rye sandwiches for lunch. With a pickle slice, of course.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't think Kimball buys his meats at the grocery store, he may have a butcher on staff. And he's out east, isn't he, where they still have real butcher shops.

One of the local stores does a bulk meat sale twice a year, selling sub-primals in a bag, usually anywhere from 5 to 20+ pounds, like an entire chuck roll. I don't think I've ever seen short plate, though. I'll have to look for it next time. Usually it is boneless, so that may be why they don't do short plate. I don't own a meat saw and aside from some people who do butchering of deer, I don't know anyone who has one in their home, either.

If I wanted to make sure I was getting the inner skirt, I'd probably go to Fareway Meat and see if they had it. Most of the stores in town don't do a lot of meat-cutting on premises any more, though they may grind their own ground beef. Much of the meat sold in sealed packages come to the store that way. And the labeling might not be very precise. 'Beef for fajitas'. What cut is it? Doesn't say!

BTW, meat sold in sealed tubs packaged off-site may have been done in a facility that allows them to fill the package with nitrogen while they're sealing it, or even with with carbon monoxide, which makes meat stay red longer.

One of the things that has always fascinated me is that low-and-slow is one way to cook tough meats to soften them, and a very hot grill or broiler is the other. (You'll find more recipe for flank that use a broiler or are intended for grilling.) That doesn't seem like it should make sense, but it does.

[Mike Nolan]

My wife thinks we've used the self-clean feature on our oven once in 23 years, I'm not sure we've used it at all, because you have to take some brackets off to use it and I'm pretty sure I've never taken them off.

The appliance repair group we use recommends against using self-cleaning features, especially on newer digital ovens, as that's prone to overheat the electronics.

I've made some dishes that require having the oven on for as long as 12 hours, but I generally won't leave the house if the oven is on, except maybe to run a quick errand.

I'm more likely to leave a burner on low overnight, I sometimes do that when making beef stock. But I usually get up once or twice during the night to see if I need to add water.

[Mike Nolan]

When I was in college, I knew someone who had a job working for the Jewish Center on campus. Part of his job was to turn lights and other devices on and off during the Sabbath and other holidays.
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Apparently it is OK to hire someone to do that, just not do it yourself.

[Mike Nolan]

It may not have shown up well in the photo, but there's kind of a white tint to the crust, which is from the cornstarch wash.

The instructions said to cook the cornstarch wash until it becomes like honey in thickness, I was doing it in the microwave and it never really thickened much, whether that's because I didn't cook it enough or because I didn't boil off enough of the water is unclear. With some starches, and I think cornstarch is one of them, you can over-cook the starch and it breaks, losing thickness.

I'm fairly sure I'll be making this recipe again, with some of the others I've made so far I'm not sure I'll do that. Next time I may try doing the cornstarch wash on the stove, and possibly only putting it on one of the two loaves, to see if I can tell them apart by taste.

[Mike Nolan]

There are a lot of confusing and similar terms thrown around:

Corn flour, corn meal and corns tarch

Potato starch and potato flour (I don't think I've ever seen anything labeled as potato meal.)

To me, a 'meal' implies that it is a whole grain product, though there's no guarantee that's how a specific product defines it. But to me corn meal would include more of the outer layer and germ of the corn kernel than corn flour, although Google says the major difference is how finely it has been ground. Corn starch is more of a purified starch from the endosperm.

[Mike Nolan]

Report on Old School Deli Rye (Ginsberg pps 80-82):

The recipe appears to have some timing issues, it says to make the stage 1 sponge in the morning of the first day, then make the stage 2 sponge 12 hours later, in the afternoon, and bake about 6 hours later on day 2. I think stage 1 should be in the evening of day 1, stage 2 in the morning of day 2 and the final dough and baking in the afternoon of day 2.

It makes two loaves that I shaped as more of a batard than the football shape recommended in the text, they were 10 x 5 x 2 1/2 inches and weighed around 660 grams each (23 1/4 ounces). (My shaping method produces more slices that are similar in size, which I think is better for sandwiches.)

The dough seemed a bit softer than I expected at final shaping, though it rose reasonably well a stretch-and-fold might have tightened the dough and improved the height a little.

I think they could have been baked a little longer, the slice shows some dark areas that are areas of moisture that a little more time in the oven might have eliminated.

This recipe uses a cornstarch wash put on right after baking. I've never been a fan of cornstarch as a wash for bread, but it does not appear to have a major impact on this recipe.

The recipe uses both caraway seed and ground caraway, and they add a slight bitterness to the bread, but we like caraway in rye breads.

So far this is the best tasting loaf I've made out of the Ginsberg book, it lives up to the promise of being a New York deli-style rye. It toasts very well. I could see this bread making good Reubens, and it is likely to become part of the repertoire here.

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[Mike Nolan]

Whole meal barley flour is similar to AP flour in protein content, around 10.5% protein, though I believe the type of gluten it has isn't as strong as the gluten in wheat. Flour made from pearled barley (removing the bran) is lower in protein and I think that would make it softer.

I think barley is a bit higher in diastatic enzymes than wheat, but maybe that's only after it has been malted.

I think barley has a sweeter taste than wheat.

[Mike Nolan]

I looked at a number of recipes and none of them cook pork loin at 250F, the lowest temperature I found was 325F. I wonder if they meant 350?

At 325, the chart says 25 minutes per pound. It'd be a little faster at 350.

I've been trying to come up with a quiz question that deals with temperature/time adjustments, but the math on that is not very simple and other factors (like Maillard reaction and caramelization) can be affected by the cooking temperature.

If you sous vide something, you get almost no Maillard reaction, so a lot of the recipes for sous vide meat have you brown the outside in a hot pan for a few minutes before serving.

BTW, about 10 years ago the USDA finally accepted what chefs had known for a while and lowered the recommended target temperature for pork from 160F to 145F. Today's pork is a lot more lean than it was 40-50 years ago, so it doesn't do well when cooked to higher temperatures, it dries out and gets tough.

[Mike Nolan]

You can tell you've been married for 47 years when your idea of a good Valentine's Day dinner is beans & weiners. 🙂

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