[Mike Nolan]

My pie dough is made and sitting in the fridge. 2 of them will go in the freezer for later, I'll probably blind bake the 3rd tomorrow and then make some kind of cream pie. We have strawberries, blueberries and bananas on hand.

My last blind baked pie crust shrunk a lot, seemed like more than usual. Not sure there's a way to prevent that.

[Mike Nolan]

I probably have 50 egg cartons in the garage, I give them to the egg vendors at the farmer's market, but who knows if/when it will open this year, usually around the end of April, or if they'll want 'used' egg cartons this year. The meat/egg sales at the UNL meat lab have eggs from their test flocks that you have to use your own cartons for, but the last time I was there Aldi was 25 cents cheaper. I suspect the UNL meat sales are shut down along with nearly everything else at the University right now, though. My wife would normally be off this week for spring break, but I think she'll be helping profs get ready to finish the semester online, especially those profs who haven't had much experience with distance education.

I'm down to less than 2 dozen eggs, so we'll probably pick some up on our next grocery run, assuming they're available.

With restaurant sales way down, I wonder if Sysco has flour available? I'm not sure they normally support walk-in 'retail' customers and they might not allow non-employees in the building at all right now. I may give them a call, a 50 pound bag doesn't scare me. (Before he moved, I would have just asked my neighbor, he runs the Lincoln Sysco office.)

[Mike Nolan]

On our old Le Chef food processor, we only used the plastic blade for light stuff, like cheeses and dips. The only reason we had to give up on it was the bowl cracked and we couldn't get a replacement. The motor still worked fine after around 40 years. Now I've got a Cuisinart 14 cup model that I use maybe 3-4 times a year. Most of the time I use my Bamix immersion blender. I did use it to chop up the cabbage for sauerkraut and cole slaw recently. You have to cut the cabbage into such small pieces to fit it in the 'large' hopper that it might almost be faster to use a manual kraut cutter.

[Mike Nolan]

I think early spring is the natural low point for flour availability in general, because the spring wheat that was harvested last fall is starting to be used up, and the winter wheat crop doesn't get harvested until June. I don't know how much wheat is currently in storage around the country, the last figures I can find from the USDA were from December of 2019 and said there around 1.8 billion bushels of wheat in off-farm storage, which was down around 9% from the previous December. Annual wheat production in the USA for all types of wheat is around 800 billion bushels per year. About 55% of that is exported to other countries.

It takes time to harvest wheat, transport it to mills, mill it, age it, bag it and transport it to wholesale warehouses and then to stores. Hoarding produces shortages at the tail end of the supply chain that takes time to resolve.

[Mike Nolan]

I may have to slow down how much baking I do, not so much to conserve my flour but I'm running out of freezer space! Right now I've got Challah, semolina bread, honey wheat bread, several types of rolls, including the Finnish cinnamon rolls, and a number of rye breads in the freezer.

I'm packaging up most of the 10 pound tube of ground beef for the freezer in 12 ounce bags. (A pound of ground beef is more than we normally eat at one time unless I'm making something like a meat loaf.) Some of it will be pre-shaped as 3 ounce patties.

[Mike Nolan]

There aren't that many 100% rye recipes in Ginsberg's book, the Salty Rye Rolls are 56% rye. Maybe I'll update the index on the lead page of the Rye thread to add the rye percentage for each recipe today.

I've not tried the Stella Parks 100% whole wheat recipe in the mixer, I got the impression from Stella's discussion of it that it really needs the heavy action of the food processor. Its small enough that I don't think it would tax an older food processor. It starts out on the gummy side, I'm not sure it'd do that in a mixeer. I think I've made it 4 times, and while it is tasty, I think all four times we didn't finish it before it started to go moldy. If I make it again, I need to freeze some of it.

I tried a bag of white wheat, we didn't care for any of the recipes I made with it, and I wound up throwing about half of the bag away. I do have some white wheat berries that I got at Wheat Montana's store in Three Forks MT, but I haven't ground any of them up yet.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't see why not. I've used everything from Gold Medal AP to 15% high-gluten flour in that recipe (or the one in BBA, which is similar but makes more dough), and they all came out fine. The other day I used KAF AP, because it's what I've got the most of on hand.

You may need to adjust the moisture level a bit, just make sure it meets Peter's criteria: satin appearance and not at all tacky.

[Mike Nolan]

High gluten flour makes great bagels. My next door neighbor used to say it was only good for bagels and pizza. (He carried one that was around 15% protein.)

[Mike Nolan]

Supper tonight was sirloin steak sandwiches, cooked and then sliced thin. I had mine on a Salty Rye roll, my wife had hers on Challah.

I also made a pan sauce using the butter and juices from cooking the steak, with some red wine vinegar, flour, Worchestershire and lemon juice. I used that, my wife used mustard on hers, with some Swiss cheese.

We also had some steamed broccoli and I had a bowl of cole slaw.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making some pie crust dough today, but don't plan to make anything with it until tomorrow. I'm making enough dough for 3 bottom crusts, 2 will go in the freezer.

I'm still experimenting with how to accurately measure pie dough thickness. I've been working on a lengthy article that includes a table showing how much pie dough to make based on the size of your pie pan and type of pie being made, with different amounts for a standard bottom crust and a deep dish bottom crust as well as for a standard top crust, lattice top or dome top. (I recently saw an article on making a braided top, but I'm not planning to include that type.)

This article expands on the one PJ Hamel wrote for King Arthur back in 2014 about how you shouldn't divide your pie dough into two equal parts. But the challenge in figuring out how much dough to make is having a reasonable value for thickness, since that's needed to compute volume or mass. I've been checking a lot of sources, there's no consensus answer. I may wind up with two weight recommendations based on how thick you like your pie crust.

[Mike Nolan]

The poppy seed ones weigh 2.65 to 2.7 ounces each, the ones with the cheese on them weigh more than 3 ounces because of the cheese on top.

4.5 ounces is pretty much the deli standard size, though I've seen some that were around 6 ounces, way too big! Unless you have really tiny hands, it is hard to use the 'wrap around the hand' method with a 3 ounce bagel.

[Mike Nolan]

Nebraska's governor has relaxed the state's liquor laws to allow curbside pickup of alcohol in unopened containers as part of restaurant service. That doesn't help with lost sales of mixed drinks, of course.

[Mike Nolan]

Report on Salty Rye Rolls (Ginsberg pps 141-143):

If you're looking for a fast recipe for great tasting rye rolls, this is it, under 3 hours from start to finish. It made a dozen rolls weighing about 72 grams each after baking. (They were around 80 grams each after scaling and shaping but before the caraway and salt was added.) Because of the cut on the top, they split easily into two halves. I've shown both an interior and a bottom along with a picture of an uncut roll.

Dipping the bottoms in rolled oats was a trick I haven't seen before, it keeps the bottoms from getting over-baked and adds a little oat flavor and crunch to the roll.

Mine came out a bit lighter in color than the ones in the book, that might have been due to my baking time or to the color of my rye flour. The baking time (24 minutes) might have contributed to why mine weren't overdone on the bottom.

I think they might be even better with a little caraway in the dough instead of just on top, where they don't always stay stuck on, and you need to be careful putting the salt on. The dough is only lightly salted and if the salt is uneven on the top you can get one bite that has very little salt in it and then one that's much saltier.

This is a recipe I'll definitely make again. My wife said their biggest problem was that she wanted a second one right away. (I've had 4 already.) They reminded me of some rye pretzels I've made, I think the dough might work for pretzels as well as for rolls.

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[Mike Nolan]

I'm making the Ginsberg Salty Rye Rolls recipe today, report later today or tomorrow.

[Mike Nolan]

My granddaughter learned to shape bagels in about 5 minutes, so don't sweat that part. The dough is pretty easy to make, it needs to be on the stiff side, Peter describes it as satiny and not at all tacky.

I let this batch rise for 2 hours because I was on a conference call. Didn't cause any problems.

Don't over-boil them, 30 seconds per side is plenty. I've tried different baking temperatures and times, I like the 500/450 one best. These could probably have stood another 30-60 seconds in the oven today, they usually get a little darker and chewier on the surface. But they made a great supper tonight with some corned beef.

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