[Mike Nolan]

They're tasty, the filling is kind of thin so it is not overpoweringly sweet, but there's sugar in the dough and in the pearl sugar, so it's a sweet bite, we think they'll go well with leftover chili for supper. The dough was easy to work with, I spread it out to a rectangle that was about 24 inches wide and 15 inches deep.

[Mike Nolan]

Shaping them is trickier than it seems, some came out looking pretty good, others look a bit lopsided, and the ends got a bit messy. They're a little bigger than I thought they might be, I got 14 of them from a half batch so they're pretty close to the size the recipe calls for.

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making a half-batch of the korvapuusti today, though I did substitute cinnamon for cardamom in the dough.

[Mike Nolan]

Walker Brothers Original House of Pancakes in Winnetka IL serves a cinnamon roll like that, it takes a group to finish it!

[Mike Nolan]

There was an episode of Chopped a few years back where they gave the competitors a deckle of beef in the entree round. I think only one of them either knew the other name or recognized the cut. I wonder how many new foods or different names for them they've introduced to viewers over the years? I can think of a number of fruits and vegetables that I hadn't heard of before seeing them on the show, and I've probably seen about half of those in a store since learning of them, and I've tried a few of them, though none of them have made the list of things I buy regularly.

Food shows and the whole foodie community have made some cuts of beef that used to be inexpensive, like flat iron steak, as expensive as Porterhouse!

[Mike Nolan]

I've been reading Ginzberg's book, The Rye Baker, not sure I'm ready to tackle any of his recipes yet, especially since virtually all of them use a starter that'd take a week or so to build. I need to get more rye flour first, I'm running low. I'll probably wait until after the holidays to start.

[Mike Nolan]

It's now been a week since Thanksgiving. The left over cheese grissini don't taste nearly as good as they did a week ago and some of them got incredibly hard. But the regular ones still taste great, possibly better than they did a week ago. I've never thought of staleness as something that could improve flavor.

[Mike Nolan]

Some years ago we had a holiday dinner at my sister-in-law's house, and she asked us to bring a rutabaga dish.

Cutting those darned rutabagas took forever, I think a band saw would have helped. I wonder if an apple peeler would work on them, I've used it on potatoes.

[Mike Nolan]

I've tried the knot method a few times, haven't gotten ones that looked right yet.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making beef stock today, I roasted a pan of bones, onions, carrots and celery, and now I'll let it simmer for about 18 hours, then probably do a remouillage, a second wetting of the bones, for another 12 hours. I should get 3-4 quarts of stock out of all this.

I also got a container of vegetable beef soup out of the freezer for supper.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

They were time-consuming to make but the process of folding Kaiser rolls isn't hard once you master the technique, and its kind of interesting to do. I will say the stamped ones are more uniform, if that's a plus.

[Mike Nolan]

They're cut at an angle so each one is sort of a truncated triangle, then squished down in the middle with a finger so the spirals bulge out a bit.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's a kaiser roll I hand folded from a stack of two colors of dough from Peter Reinhart's marbled rye bread in BBA:

And here's what they looked like after they were cut:

You can't get this with a kaiser roll stamp!

[Mike Nolan]

I wound up doing a soup and salad from Zoup.

[Mike Nolan]

His bio says he started working in his father's bakery as a teenager, so he probably never went to cooking school, but he's worked in hotel bakeries around Europe.

I've got one of his books, his recipes tend to be pretty complicated, something I'd expect of a high end hotel baker.

I know how to hold a knife, I just can't hold it as tightly as I used to due to arthritis, so I wind up putting my finger on the top of the blade at times, too. I think it gives you slightly better control at the expense of speed.

And bakers don't use knives as much as chefs do.

[Author]

Posts