[Mike Nolan]

Sourdough/pain au levain never really went away in France, Poilâne's sourdough culture dates back to the bakery's founding in the 1930's. When Bernard Clayton traveled around France in the 60's and 70's doing research for his Breads of France book, he found a lot of small town bakeries that had sourdough cultures that dated back even further.

But there have been several cycles between good bread and cheap bread since WW2 in France, especially in Paris. Prof. Calvel was widely credited with saving French bread from sinking below mediocrity in the 50's. Looks like it's swinging back towards good bread again.

SAF is a French company, though it has facilities in several countries.

[Mike Nolan]

I have the big box of 18" plastic wrap and aluminum foil from Sams. I've tried both the regular and the heavy duty foil, I like the heavy duty one better.

GFS has a lot of good stuff, their meats usually look very good but I've never been at one close enough to home to be able to buy stuff that needed to stay cold. (I've been to ones in Indianapolis, Madison and Tennessee, there isn't one in Nebraska.)

I wasn't impressed with their flour products, either, but I have bought several large containers of spices and herbs from them, and they sell cherry syrup that we used at the soda fountain. And they usually carry a good assortment of restaurant grade cookware and smallware.

But like Sams and Costco, you need to know prices or you wind up buying stuff that isn't much of a bargain.

I did buy a box of 2 gallon zip lock bags from them, that's a hard size to find.

[Mike Nolan]

What few dripping there were (you don't a lot from an eye of round after the fat's been trimmed off) I used for the gravy I made.

I do have some good beef stock in the freezer, I usually put some in a stir fry anyway.

[Mike Nolan]

It is possible, but not easy, to whip ultra-pasteurized cream, it has to be nearly ice cold, though, and it doesn't stabilize well. You'll find lot of horror stories from people who tried whipping it unsuccessfully.

They often add gums to make UHT cream thicker, which apparently helps how it works when it is cooked but not much in the whipping process.

I've never tried making butter from UHT cream, I don't know if that works.

You cannot make cheese from UHT milk, I"m told.

[Mike Nolan]

Repurposing leftovers usually starts to sound attractive around day 3. I may have a salad with ranch dressing and some cubes of roast beef tomorrow.

I've never tried making a stir fry with left over roast beef, I wonder how well it would work?

[Mike Nolan]

We're on our third set of meals with the eye of round I roasted several days ago. I made some (instant) mashed potatoes and had a hot roast beef sandwich.

I worked on the gravy a bit, adding more water and butter, plus some salt, pepper, nutmeg and a pinch of rosemary Then I cooked it for several minutes to get rid of most of the vermouth taste. Much improved. (Julia Child used to say that you could fix almost any sauce with butter.)

[Mike Nolan]

There's a pretty good recipe for herbed dumplings in the KAF Bakers Companion, I've used it quite a few times, though I don't always use the herb blend they give. Mix it to the point where it comes together, if there are still a few pockets of flour, that's OK.

The dough should be sticky, I use two soup spoons to shape the dumplings, so my hands don't get stuck to the dough. Dipping the spoon in the pot each time will help keep the dumplings from sticking to the spoon.

You want the liquid simmering, not a full boil. You want to mostly cover the surface with the dumplings, then put the lid on and let them cook in the steam. I usually reduce the heat slightly at this point. Overcooking them is what results in rubbery dumplings, because you've overcooked the proteins.

[Mike Nolan]

I might take exception to the statement that apple growers breed for flavor, of the 12 most popular varieties of apples, there are several that have little or no flavor, and the taste of some of the others has gone downhill over the years as growers look for varieties they can harvest more readily (which usually means faster).

[Mike Nolan]

Once or twice a year I forget I have dough rising until it is well past the point where it will bake properly. Usually I just deflate it, reshape it, let it rise again, and bake it; most of the time nobody other than me would ever notice the differences.

I think it tends to produce a finer or tighter crumb, ie, one with fewer and usually smaller holes. That's because all the holes are formed during kneading, so anything after that can only result in fewer holes. (Boyle's law is the physical principle behind this.)

[Mike Nolan]

Today was my wife's birthday, so we went out for supper.

[Mike Nolan]

I was also looking at Thrive Market, but I don't see many products there I'd order: No semolina, no rye flour. Their prices appear to be a few percent below some other sites (like ordering direct from Bob's Red Mill), but I don't know what their shipping costs are, and I don't think you can get to that without joining.

[Mike Nolan]

The best way to color white chocolate is with colored cocoa butter. It isn't cheap, though, about $20 per 8 ounce bottle. As far as using food coloring, our instructor at chocolate school recommended against using it, though I'm told the paste colors work a little better than the liquid ones, which are water based and can cause melted chocolate to seize. The trick is getting the paste color to blend in evenly, colored cocoa butter does a better job because its mostly cocoa butter.

[Mike Nolan]

You could probably have degassed and re-shaped it, but that adds time, as the new final proof will generally be nearly as long as the original one.

Back when I was testing recipes for Peter Reinhart, one of the things I did was to take dough that has been retarded in the fridge for several days and put it through multiple rises before shaping and baking it. Although many authors claim that the yeast eventually runs out of sugars it can digest, I did not see that occurring, even after five rises.

The more times I let it rise, or the longer I kept the dough in the refrigerator, the more it took on characteristics of a sourdough. Eventually the dough did start to go bad, but that took over a week in the fridge with daily degassings.

[Mike Nolan]

We used to make a curry dip that was very good with raw cauliflower, but then my wife decided curry was causing her problems, so we haven't made it in years.

My wife like a lot of lemon on steamed broccoli, I eat it plain, not even salted. But steamed cauliflower without cheese sauce seems pointless, and the cheese sauce probably cancels out the healthy benefits of cauliflower.

I'm not that fond of black beans by themselves, though I'll eat a little black bean soup when I make it for my wife. (Bean soups in general aren't my favorite soups, my mother made them frequently and cooked the beans until they were mush.)

But I did like the chili I made a few weeks back with black beans and I like the black bean meatloaf I make a lot.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 6 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

I made 2 more loaves of semolina bread. I also took 3-4 ounces of the dough to make a few breadsticks, which I rolled in sesame seeds. They've got a different taste from the bread, because they're crunchy, and they're quite tasty. They baked for about 25 minutes at 375.

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