[Mike Nolan]

I blind baked a 9 inch pie shell and a 4 1/2 inch tart shell today. I'll fill them with a sour cream raisin pie filling from a recipe my wife found online. It is different from the others I've tried in that it has no spices, not even cinnamon, just some vanilla, and it doesn't call for topping the pie with meringue.

[Mike Nolan]

I tried a number of spray misters for oil, the Evo mister has worked well for me for several years. It comes in two sizes, I think the smaller one makes more sense. I think they're intended for use as oil and vinegar salad spray sets, but I put oil (currently a blend of canola and soybean oils) in one and water in the other, because that's what I use the most when cooking.

I use the fan spray setting, it does a good job covering the entire width of a loaf.

I also keep a spray bottle of bleach solution handy for sanitizing the sink and countertops, but those sprayers seem to wear out in a year or two.

As I gear up for trying some of the fermentation recipes in the Noma book, I've now got a spray bottle with 60% grain alcohol in it. They recommend that for sanitizing large surfaces or ones that you can't sanitize in a dishwasher, like a 5 gallon crock.

[Mike Nolan]

When we were in Hawaii my son found a chocolate company on the big island that is growing their own cacao plants. I've had a number of single-bean chocolates, this one had some interesting notes to it. It was kind of pricey, but I guess they're going for the tourist trade.

Stover (in western PA) has 11 pound bags of Callebaut dark chocolate for $43.99, plus shipping, though I usually buy the 2.5 kg bags, currently $22.37. I've not found a local suppliers (as far as Des Moines or Kansas City) whose prices come close to that.

[Mike Nolan]

If you're old enough to remember wringer washers, years ago I put some celery through one. Not much came out the other end.

[Mike Nolan]

I made some pie dough today but probably won't get any of it rolled out until tomorrow, then I'll probably blind bake one pie shell.

[Mike Nolan]

Not sure if I've ever tried Vegalene, not sure if anybody locally carries it. I don't buy a lot of things in a spray can.

[Mike Nolan]

It is definitely time-consuming to make French onion soup from scratch, several hours for the stock, plus straining and chilling overnight to get the fat out, then another 6 hours or so to caramelize the onions. But it is really good.

So, of course with leftover potato leek soup and French onion soup in the fridge, we went out to eat tonight. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

I've actually had both mice and bugs get into chocolate, so I always check it carefully.

I haven't found a local supplier for Callebaut chocolate yet, at least not at a price I'm willing to pay. So as long as we make periodic trips to Pittsburgh, I'll continue to buy my chocolate at Stover Company in western PA. I've considered having them ship it, but for at least 6 months of the year shipping chocolate 900 miles by the usual carriers is not a good idea, and it gets expensive. I'm unlikely to ever need to order enough to have it shipped by refrigerated truck.

I was never all that impressed with Ghiradelli chocolate, at least not the stuff available on the retail side, I think they also have some wholesale chocolate lines. Guittard is IMHO better than Merkens, but Callebaut and Vahlrona both make far better (though usually more expensive) products. There are a few other high-end chocolate makers. I look for couverture grade chocolate these days.

[Mike Nolan]

Lecithin is more of a solidifying agent, though it does impact mouth feel. Increasing lecithin while decreasing cocoa butter produces a similar (though IMHO less satisfying) mouth feel at a lower cost.

Similarly, other fats (such as coconut or palm kernel oil) are a lot cheaper and less temperamental than cocoa butter and are used in cheaper chocolates.

[Mike Nolan]

It's fairly easy, just time-consuming.

I cut the onions into slices (not rings) for soup, then put them in my 12 quart stock pot with a stick of butter. (You need some fat to coat the onions, this is basically a sauteeing process.) 7 pounds of sliced onions fills the pot to about 3/4 full at first, though it cooks down to just a few inches. I know from past experience I can get 10 pounds in this pot, though, and probably more if I compacted them, but that makes stirring them harder.

The oven was at 350 and there was a lid on. I stirred them every now and then, generally every 30-45 minutes. It took about 6 hours for them to caramelize. You can do it faster on the stove, but you're more likely to burn them.

Once the onions were caramelized, I added the chicken stock, which I started heating about 45 minutes earlier. A little sherry, some salt and pepper, and they're ready to go in the soup bowl, generally with some stale bread and cheese, so they go under the broiler long enough to melt the cheese and get a few brown spots.

Most restaurant make French onion soup with beef stock, but it is probably more accurate historically to make it with chicken stock, because only the gentry had much access to beef. IMHO the chicken stock does a better job of pairing with the onions without trying to dominate them. (Most restaurants put in way too much salt, too. My rule for most foods is if it tastes salty, you put in too much.)

[Mike Nolan]

Cocoa solids are just that--solid. They determine the intensity of the chocolate flavor, but it is the cocoa butter that determines the mouth feel, because cocoa butter is a fat that is solid at room temperature but liquid at mouth temperature. And while the marketers will sometimes tell you how much cocoa solid there is in your chocolate bar, you generally have to buy chocolate packaged for confectionery usage to get much information about cocoa butter content.

You wouldn't eat a teaspoon of pure cocoa solids, but you wouldn't want to eat a teaspoon of pure cocoa butter, either. (We did taste some of both at chocolate school.)

[Mike Nolan]

One of the things I did during my steam test was to take a picture through the oven door window every 20 seconds during most of the bakes.

I have a tool that should be able to stitch them together into a movie, but I don't think I'll post them because they'd probably be huge. Also, the picture quality isn't all that great because I'm shooting through the window and the oven light isn't very bright.

But I've been stepping through them manually in my photo editor and they're kind of fun to watch. First you see the oven spring then you can (more or less) see the Maillard reaction and some caramelization taking place.

[Mike Nolan]

Chocolate can be mixed with oil, the better the grade of chocolate (ie, how much cocoa butter it has) the less oil you'll need to add.

[Mike Nolan]

The problem was they had so many toppings at the time that they wouldn't all fit on the bun, so I though--why not have one with JUST the toppings? It had chili so it wasn't totally meatless. It was pretty darned good, too, but a bit sloppy to eat.

[Mike Nolan]

When we moved here in the 70's, Lincoln was a city with three major pizza chains (Valentino's and Godfather's, both companies started in Nebraska, and Pizza Hut and a small handful of local shops. Now it seems like there are more pizza places than gas stations.

The local paper recently did a 'top 25 pizza places', without mentioning any of the chains and missing at least a half dozen places. Casey's (a convenience store chain) may have more outlets in Lincoln making pizza than anybody else these days, as Godfather's is down to I think just one or two locations. (But Casey's pizza is incredibly greasy, and I don't think their small countertop ovens are hot enough.) Domino's, Papa John's and Little Caesar's have numerous outlets around the city, too. Marco's has 3 places in Omaha but none in Lincoln yet. Fox's Pizza Den opened one store near us, but it didn't survive. (That same storefront also failed as a bakery and is now, I think, a pet grooming place.)

Unfortunately, nearly all of them put garlic in the sauce if not in the crust. We have found a few that we can order pizza with no sauce but double tomato chunks. And my wife can tolerate a LITTLE garlic, so we do order Vals from time to time. Making pizza for two is just too much work.

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