[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

[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.

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