[Mike Nolan]

Grilled onions are great on hot dogs. There used to be a hot dog place near us in Evanston that had about 18 different toppings. I talked them into selling me a dog with everything--hold the hot dog, and it wound up going on the menu.

[Mike Nolan]

The honey wheat recipe I have posted is one my mother-in-law used years ago and it was one of my wife's favorite breads growing up. I adapted it to use oil instead of lard. I've done it with butter, liked it better with the oil. Our younger son, who was on his own time schedule the last few years he lived with us, would make sandwiches with it twice a day.

It is about a 50-50 blend (I vary the proportions from batch to batch), and it has honey in it, so it is on the sweet side. I usually make it free-form but it does well in a loaf pan, too, you just have to be REALLY patient because it'll take 90 minutes or longer to rise, and some days it seems like it'll never get going. Sometimes I'll shove it in the oven with the light on to hurry it up a bit, but I can taste a difference when I do that.

[Mike Nolan]

Tonight we're having potato-leek soup using half of the chicken stock I made the other day, the plan is to make French onion soup on Monday with the rest.

I made croutons from one of the baguettes I baked the other day for tonight's soup, the other one I sliced into rounds that will go on top of the onion soup.

[Mike Nolan]

When our younger son moved to California to work for YouTube, one of the first things he bought for his apartment was a stand mixer. I wonder how much he uses it, though, because YouTube provides breakfast, lunch and dinner from Monday morning through Friday noon, so he only has to deal with cooking for himself for at most 7 meals a week, and there's a mall with a large food court a few blocks away.

While he was still living with us he got pretty good at making the KAF stuffed baguettes recipe, and he was experimenting with several cookie recipes.

[Mike Nolan]

Most of the interest in 'Just Bread' is a renewed interest in artisan bakeries, especially in less expensive but still artisan quality breads.

I agree that KAF's recipe is probably not one a new baker could attempt, because producing and maintaining a sourdough starter is a lifestyle choice.

I'm taking a sourdough class in TX next month, one of the teachers is Deb Wink. Long time KAF BC readers may remember her recommending using pineapple juice to get a starter going.

[Mike Nolan]

Not sure if I'll make the recipe, but I did order the moon cake mold! I've had mung bean cakes at Asian restaurants, not sure if I've had one that was a combination of mung bean and red bean paste, though.

[Mike Nolan]

I wonder what percentage of younger households have a mixer or a food processor? The bread machine trend is past, these days the instant pot is in, though.

No-knead recipes (which I think are somewhat mis-named, they're really 'not-much-kneading' recipes) give people who don't want to spend 10-15 minutes kneading bread a way to make something that probably tastes a bit better than the mass-market factory-produced breads.

BTW, the New York Times had an interesting article on the 'just bread' trend, which King Arthur Flour is part of. There's been an interesting discussion of that on the BBGA forum, but I think any publicity for good breads is a positive thing, whether they're made at home or bought at a local (artisan) bakery.

[Mike Nolan]

Dinner tonight was whatever we had available that sounded good. I had some bread and cheese, and some peas, and I may have some other leftovers.

[Mike Nolan]

My 40 pound box of chicken backs came in today, so I started a 12 quart pot of chicken stock with about 5 pounds of backs and bagged the rest up in 3-4 pound bags that went in the freezer for future batches. I was going to make something for supper once the stock got going, but a client had a computer problem and I wound up spending several hours on it.

[Mike Nolan]

There are some mug cake recipes that are suppose to be more upscale, but I've never been impressed with the technique either.

[Mike Nolan]

It turns out the professor we got the triticale from is on the road, so he didn't get any of the test bread. I guess I'll just have to make more when he gets back. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

Is the clay baker the one that you would soak in water then put the baker and the dough in a cold oven? I can see how that would generate a lot more steam than it appeared I got from my Dutch oven test.

I wonder if adding a little water to the Dutch oven to get things kick-started would help? Maybe spraying the top of the loaf just before putting the lid on?

I'm willing to try the Dutch oven method again now that I've come up a fairly safe way to put a loaf in a hot pan. Mine is a round Dutch oven, and boules aren't our favorite bread shape, but other than that, the method is one a lot of people like.

BTW, although King Arthur may not be carrying the oversize cookie spatula, it looks like it was made by Fox Run and is available on Amazon:
Cookie Spatula

[Mike Nolan]

Supper tonight is bread and cheese, to use up one of the test loaves from yesterday (the Dutch oven one) and the baguettes I made today (some with triticale.) I'll post more on that in another thread later this evening after I've uploaded some photos.

[Mike Nolan]

Thanks for posting, Eric, and welcome to MNK.

The Dutch oven pan was preheated at 450 for probably somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes. I didn't show the bottoms of any of the loaves, the one in the Dutch oven was the only one that was starting to show signs of scorching on the bottom, in part because the only way I can fit my Dutch oven pan in my oven is on the bottom shelf. Adding a pan to insulate it from the lower element a bit (yes, it is an electric oven) might help. I've got a couple of recipes that I have to double-pan to keep the bottoms from getting scorched before the top gets done.

All of the loaves suffered from being a little under-baked in the center, somewhat intentionally, because I pulled them all at the point where the top was showing a little dark brown. They probably needed another 5 minutes to be fully baked in the center, and that would have affected how dark they got, but it might also have made it harder to see the impact of the steam method. Lesson learned: Do some pre-tests before the production test. (My research methods prof would zing me for that, pre-testing your instrument was something he emphasized over and over.)

I will try the Dutch oven idea again, but for now my steam tube is working reasonably well. I did some baguettes with it today to test some triticale flour, I'll be doing more triticale tests over the next few weeks. (First lesson learned from triticale: It gets dark faster and can get scorched quickly.)

I did put the loaves back in the oven last night to get them a little more baked. The only complaint my wife got about the bread today was, "What, no butter?"

[Mike Nolan]

The loaves started out at 12 ounces and finished at around 11 ounces. I didn't weight them just before they went into the oven.

I did notice that the 51 ounces of pate fermentee lost about 2 ounces in the refrigerator overnight.

[Author]

Posts