[Mike Nolan]

Low gluten and soft are essentially the same thing. The higher the gluten content, the 'harder' the flour is, and vice-versa.

The ratio of glutenin to gliadin also impacts how a flour performs, but that's not information you'll find on any flour bag I've ever seen. (Glutenin give dough strength, ie, elasticity, gliadin gives it flexibility, ie, extensibility.)

The ratio really depends on the specific types and varieties of wheat used. All-purpose flour is generally a mixture of several types of flour.

[Mike Nolan]

That's a great explanation. I'd have to spend quite a bit of time with an organic chemistry or food chemistry textbook to come up with that.

Does that mean lactose has a more complicated structure than glucose?

Sucrose is a disacchaaride composed of one glucose and one fructose molecule, but unless it has been inverted to separate the two types of sugar molecules, it won't have the simpler fructose structure and lower caramelization point.

[Mike Nolan]

I make the frosting while the cake is baking and keep it on simmer. If it looks like it has dried up a bit too much, I just add another tablespoon or two of buttermilk to it.

[Mike Nolan]

Slashing the loaf might have helped, but usually that's done just before it goes into the oven, and it had already split open by then.

I'll be doing another rye bread from the Ginsberg book tomorrow, I was going to start it last night but the instructions said to do step 1 in the morning.

This morning I noticed an inconsistency. It says to do step 1 in the morning then wait 12 hours before adding more flour and water for step 2 in the afternoon, then bake 6 hours later. Somehow that just doesn't add up right, I could have started it last night after all. So I'm going to do step 1 this evening, do step 2 in the morning and bake it in the afternoon.

[Mike Nolan]

We had vegetable beef soup out of the freezer on this cold cold day.

[Mike Nolan]

I've never had much luck growing either beans or cucumbers (beetles get them both), though my mother always had both, plus radishes and leaf lettuce, along with her tomatoes. Sometimes she grew cabbages or Brussels sprouts, too.

Rhubarb and chives grew near the garage wall, and it took tearing down the garage and building a larger one with cement covering most of the garden area to kill them off.

I've done muskmelon a few times, one year we got several Athena melons that were larger than a basketball and weighed about 12 pounds.

I might try long beans some year, some of them can grow as long as 3 feet!

[Mike Nolan]

I dunno, IMHO cheesecake shouldn't be sticky-sweet.

[Mike Nolan]

I have to admit that prior to researching this, I did not know coffee's origin, either. But I've never been a coffee drinker. Like the smell (most of the time), dislike the taste (all of the time).

I've been a tea drinker since I was about 5, though. Learned it from an English couple whose farm we used to visit on weekends. At 4 PM, the farm always came to a complete halt for tea time.

[Mike Nolan]

I'll have to go back and look a their webstore again, I don't recall seeing anything close to 300 products there.

[Mike Nolan]

We made it ourselves, using Armour dried beef that comes in a small jar and some Béchamel that has beef boullion added to it for flavor. Buddig meats also has a dried beef that works well (it's what my mother always used), and I've even bought it at the deli counter, but it's kind of pricey that way.

[Mike Nolan]

Tonight we're having the creamed chipped beef on toast we've been thinking about for a couple of days.

[Mike Nolan]

I took some fluid mechanics courses in college back in the late 60's, but I don't remember the formula for the rate water can flow down a pipe due to gravity.

Fortunately you can find almost anything on the web these days. It looks like 1/8" interior diameter tubing will have a gravity flow rate of 2-3 teaspoons per seconds, depending on the friction of the tubing.

It appears that the interior diameter of the funnel is the limiting factor so far.

I've got a funnel that fits outside the tubing, as far as I can tell without leaking, it allows a faster flow rate. I think I got over 1/3 cup into the pan in under 10 seconds, which is consistent with the flow rate I computed online.

1/4" OD tubing struck me as about the largest I could use without creating a heat leak at the oven door.

In tests with a syringe instead of a funnel, I can get 60 CCs of water into the pan in under 10 seconds, but it looks like 1/2 to 2/3 of it doesn't flash to steam, though it would continue to create steam for a minute or two. A larger or heavier pan might handle more water at a time, but I'm not sure it is necessary, the bread tests may tell me more, I'm hoping to do them next week.

[Mike Nolan]

The Equipment:

This is 1/8" interior diameter (1/4" exterior diameter) food grade silicone tubing, which you can get from home brew suppliers.  It took about 27" of tubing for my oven.

The funnel is one of several we got at a kitchen supply store.  I'm using two brass nuts as weights to make sure the tubing stays in the pan, though in my initial tests I didn't use them and didn't see any problems with the tubing falling out of the pan.  One nut is a bit larger than the other, the hole in the smaller one is a tight fit for the tubing, so it shouldn't move around.

The Setup:

There's a gap between the oven and the cabinet, and I'm using an angle bracket to hold the tubing and funnel in place.  I also put in a small wedge just to keep everything from shifting around.  During production I don't want to have to deal with things other than the bread.

Here's a view of the full setup. When not in use, the tubing can hang straight down and it doesn't interfere with the cabinet door or touch the floor.

Here's a view of the tubing sitting in a 9 inch cast iron pan.  I've added about 20 CCs (4 teaspoons) of water just to show how much that is before it evaporates.  It takes 3-4 seconds for that much water to go down the tubing.

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[Mike Nolan]

There was a marijuana grow house (illegal, of course) raided a couple of blocks from us a few years ago. It was rather surprising because this is not a low-cost neighborhood, I guess they figured the neighborhood might supply some camouflage. Wrong!

The house subsequently was sold, and the new owner had to pretty much redo all the drywall, apparently the high humidity they were using ruined all the walls.

One of the Illinois recreational sales facilities is in downtown Evanston, a short walk for Northwestern students. When I went to school there, Evanston was still dry. (The WCTU national headquarters is also in downtown Evanston.)

[Mike Nolan]

About the only thing I use the convection fan for is the first 10 minutes of fruit pies.

I also posted about this on the BBGA forum, and got an email from a baker who says he thinks I'm getting plenty of steam, all you need is enough to get the crust damp.

I found the instruction manual for an oven that uses steam for both baking and cooking, it has a tank that holds 950 ML of water, and it says that'll last about 50 minutes. That's 19 ML per minute, which is pretty close to what I found I can do in a single burst with my tubing setup. Of course with bread, steam is really only useful in the first 10 minutes or so of baking.

I think I've identified about 8 different methods I want to test. My plan is make up a large batch of Peter's Pain de Campagne (I've used it for other tests, and the addition of a little whole wheat flour to a lean dough adds some nice color and flavor, so the bread won't go to waste, though it might go to waist) and retard it in the refrigerator overnight, so that each test has pretty much the same conditions, dough that has been out of the refrigerator for about 2 hours.

I'm also going to see if I can get some time-lapse photography shots of the bread baking through the window in the oven door. Not sure if there's enough light inside for that, even with the oven light on.

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