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The Frisian rye bread is out, but it needs to sit for 24 hours before cutting. The top is a bit darker,than the rest of it but it is called a black rye bread. I'll have a report on it tomorrow in the rye project thread. Probably won't get it posted until after the Super Bowl.
The pies just went in.
Based on the recipes I've made over the years, several of which have you mist the loaves just before baking them, that has a somewhat different effect than steaming them. I'm pretty sure misting them keeps the surface cooler so it extends oven spring, I'm not sure steam does that, though in both cases I think the moisture helps gelatinize the starch on the crust.
I'm getting ready to make two apple pies tomorrow, one for us and another for a baby shower. I made and scaled the pie crust this evening. The pie filling is from the freezer, I got it out to thaw in the refrigerator a couple of days ago.
The recipes make a range of sizes, some just one loaf, some a larger loaf, some two loaves, and there are several recipes for things like rolls or flatbreads that make a dozen or more.
The recipe I'm working on now should work in one standard size loaf pan, one I'm thinking of doing soon makes a pretty big (2.5 pound) round loaf.
The thing about having a full pan of water in the oven is that it doesn't boil off very fast. Putting some water in a dry hot pan gives a short burst of steam.
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.
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