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Steaming affects the outer crust, how much that affects the taste of rolls is pretty subjective. I think shape is a major influence on taste, I'm still not sure how much impact steam has on it.
The Munich Penny rye rolls were pretty good, but the crust was not very crunchy at all, firm but not crunchy. There are several other rolls recipes in the book.
I haven't tried the Dutch oven method and that would be a major departure from the instructions. I also don't have a Dutch oven big enough for most of the rye recipes I've been making. (The first several recipes made two large loaves.)
Putting a pan in the oven as it heats and throwing water in it is a fairly common way of trying to create steam in a home oven. Another way is to spray water on the side walls of the oven. Sometimes I do both. A heavy pan like a cast iron skillet works better than a lighter pan because it has more mass so it vaporizes the water faster.
The tubing should enable me to create steam after the oven door has been closed, so most of it stays in the oven as opposed to coming out the door into my face. Whether this will generate more or less steam is something I'm not sure how to measure, maybe I'll see a difference in performance. I don't have any experience baking with a commercial steam oven, so I don't have a real reference to compare it against.
I'm trying the Frisian Black Bread recipe from TRB next, but I'm tinkering with it a little, because instead of using just a small amount of rye sour to inoculate the flour and water in the sponge, I took the flour from my discards bowl in the refrigerator and added a little recently refreshed sour starter to make sure it was fully active. (Some sources say that refrigerating a starter tends to favor certain cold-loving lactic acid producing bacteria over others and might kill off some of the wild yeasts.)
I've also been experimenting with using some silicone tubing (from a home brewing supplier) to see if I can produce steam in my oven without opening the door. The tubing leads to a 9" cast iron skillet on the lower shelf. It looks like I can add about 20ml of water fairly easily and it seems to function as I expected, I still have to test it with a bread recipe, and the Frisian recipe is not one that uses steam, it is a recipe that starts out in a cold oven.
Now a true Jeopardy question would have been: Before spinach was the first commercially successful frozen vegetable, what vegetable did Clarence Birdseye first freeze?
Ken Jennings might get this one.
We had the last of the French onion soup tonight. :sigh:
I read an interesting statistic the other day that said that 25% of the pesticides used in the USA are used to grow cotton.
A close friend of ours and my brother-in-law are both allergic to olives, so we tend not to cook with it at all. I do have one small bottle of it, I don't remember the last time I used any.
I don't do deep fat frying and not much pan frying either. I prefer butter for sauteeing foods.
I switched from canola oil to corn oil last year, but corn oil isn't as neutral a flavor. Recently I bought a bottle that is a combination of canola and soybean oil, so far I like it.
I'm sort of wondering about one thing, though. When you buy 'vegetable oil', they don't really tell you what vegetables it came from. I wonder about whether some of the newer vegetable oil blends are mainly just a marketing gimmick to sell you the same oil at a higher price by making it seem more artisan.
I had an interesting talk with my doctor during my last annual physical. He was looking at my cholesterol numbers (which are good but could be a little lower) and said that cholesterol is largely a genetic issue, some people just have high cholesterol levels. And there's some evidence that that this genetic predisposition doesn't necessarily mean clogged arteries. Monitoring your LDL (the 'bad' cholesterol) is advisable, even for those with genetically high cholesterol levels.
You're correct, there is some processing, but modern canola oil is also the product of selective breeding. The seeds are heated, crushed and the oil extracted using hexane as a solvent. The yield is about 44%, the rest of the seed is used for animal feed.
Rapeseed oil is naturally high in erucic acid, which is toxic in high doses, but in the 1960's and 1970's Canadian plant researchers identified varieties of rapeseed that were much lower in erucic and eicosenoic acid and bred them to strengthen that characteristic. (BTW, this is NOT a GMO process, it involves natural selection of genes.) Eicosenoic acid is used in skincare products.
'Canola' is a constructed word, it comes from 'canada' and 'oil'.
Interestingly enough, rapeseed plants are a member of the Brassica family, like cabbages and broccoli. We drove through southern Ontario some years ago and saw large fields of plants with a pretty yellow blossom, we later determined those were rapeseed farms. See rapeseed field
I was wondering about the inclusion of canola oil, which doesn't strike me as particularly Mediterranean. In Europe canola oil is more commonly called rapeseed oil, but I guess that name evokes strong emotions and trips content filters these days.
I found it by searching for "pan grease". If you want to search for a phrase, it needs to be in double quotes.
Here's the link:Pan Grease
I've also added it to the 'Favorite Recipes' page.
Heat affects the speed of the Maillard reaction, unlike a pyrolitic reaction (like caramelization) which can only happen above a certain temperature. (Sucrose and glucose both start to caramelize at 160C/320F, for example, while fructose will caramelize at 110C/230F.)
The Maillard reaction is a chemical reaction between an amino acid (eg, a protein) and a reducing sugar. All monosaccharides (like glucose and fructose) are reducing sugars, some disaccharides like sucrose and some polysaccharides are also reducing sugars.
As noted, it can occur at lower temperatures, but it will happen much faster in meat at temperatures above about 140C/285F. At even higher temperatures, pyrolitic reactions like caramelization are likely to overwhelm the effects of the Maillard reaction.
A low pH (ie, an acid) can inhibit the Maillard reaction, as can the presence of water.
The browning of a bread crust is a combination of the Maillard reaction and other reactions, especially caramelization.
Caramelization is another fascinating process, one that has not been heavily studied. Researchers have identified over a thousand compounds that can form when sugar (sucrose) is caramelized.
I've got some but haven't ever used it. I'm told the odor dissipates 'quickly', and you're only supposed to use it in things that aren't very thick, like flatbreads and cookies, not muffins, breads or cakes.
If it isn't well-sealed, it'll evaporate out of the bottle over time.
That wasn't Nina and that person hasn't posted since then, either. But I suspect we've got several people following the quizzes who haven't signed up to post.
I often have soup in the freezer for a year or two, but this one was way at the back. I've got some minestrone from 2-3 years ago that I should get out, too, though that'll be just for me, as my wife didn't like it much, too many veggies she didn't like the taste of in it.
Tonight we had bottom round, slow roasted, with some from-scratch mashed potatoes and gravy.
I got 8 pounds of triticale berries from the UNL wheat breeder this week. I'm working on cleaning it and probably won't start doing any testing with it until next week.
I'll start a separate thread for that, which will have some pictures of what the grain looks like (and compare it with wheat and rye) before and after grinding.
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