[Mike Nolan]

I'm with you, though I do agree that adding coffee or espresso powder does enhance the flavor of the chocolate, I can still taste the coffee.

Our instructor in chocolate school thought that if you're going to add coffee to chocolate, add enough that you can taste it, rather than try to guess if it's there.

[Mike Nolan]

I would think coffee grounds would have to be re-ground to a powder to be usable in food.

Not being a coffee drinker, I don't know what would happen if you ground the beans to a powder before brewing.

Coffee-flavored foods aren't high on our list of things to eat, but I'd probably taste something made with coffee flour.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making Vienna bread today.

[Mike Nolan]

One of the reasons I want to make my own sauerkraut is that I think commercial ones err on the high side for salt content. You can always rinse sauerkraut off, and I'll do that when I put it on hot dogs or on a Reuben.

[Mike Nolan]

I got through the chapter on making shoyu (soy sauce, for example), it is a fairly complex task, and the text explains why most soy sauces use wheat- Soy sauce started out as a by-product in making miso called tamari, but demand for it grew so large they had to find ways to produce a lot more of it. By adding wheat and bypassing some of the steps use to make miso, they were able to increase production of soy sauce significantly.

There was a Wall Street Journal online article recently in which it talked about why someone would want to pay $50 or more for a small bottle of soy sauce. The answer is obvious, artisanal soy sauces pack a lot more flavor. I'll give the link, but it may be behind their paywall:
WSJ Soy Sauce article

[Mike Nolan]

Not being a coffee drinker, I find coffee grounds messy and smelly, and if brewing coffee only extracts 1% of the bean, I can see that as a tremendous waste of food/energy. The Noma book I'm reading also has a section on using coffee grounds to make a version of shoyu (like a soy sauce), but I don't think that fully utilizes the bean, either.

It would be interesting to work in an experimental kitchen like that, wouldn't it?

[Mike Nolan]

The easiest way is to cut one open. Keep the lid on, it takes about 15 minutes in the steam for them to cook.

[Mike Nolan]

Christmas dinner was ham, potatoes, DGBC and a relish tray.

[Mike Nolan]

We had our traditional oyster stew and chili dinner for Christmas Eve. I also made another batch of the Finnish cinnamon rolls to go with the chili.

[Mike Nolan]

I think a medium rye is unlikely to be whole grain, though dark rye probably is.

I still haven't found a local source for pumpernickel flour, I did find a few promising places online but I'll wait until after the holidays to try ordering from them.

I may just get some rye berries and mill them myself, then I can control the degree of fineness from pretty coarse to fairly fine, and it'll be whole meal.

[Mike Nolan]

When working with rye flours, there two things to consider, how finely the rye berries are ground and how much of the germ and bran are included. (And then there are rye chops, which are to rye berries what cracked wheat is to wheat berries.)

White rye flour is similar to white wheat flour in that it is mainly endosperm, with little germ or bran. As you add in more germ and bran, it becomes cream colored, then medium dark, then dark.

A dark rye flour can be finely ground.

Pumpernickel is a dark rye flour that is very coarsely ground.

Here's the whole grains council's page on types of rye flour:
Rye Flours

I've never heard of putting raw lentils as a topping on bread, either. I didn't see any obvious references to that on Google.

[Mike Nolan]

The National Pork Board guidelines say a pork loin roast should take 20-30 minutes per pound at 350 degrees, but that's to reach an internal temperature of 150, not 135.

135 sounds a bit low for pork to me. 165 was what they used to recommend, but that produced pork that was dried out and flavorless and usually tough. I remember going to a Rotary luncheon where they served pork chops that would have been better as soles for my shoes than food.

[Mike Nolan]

We're still finishing off the roast beef, so we had sandwiches and a salad. There's enough beef left to have it on a salad for lunch tomorrow.

[Mike Nolan]

The last GFS I went to was in a large shopping center in Tennessee and seemed to be catering to retail customers though it still had a lot of items for the restaurant trade.

The restaurant supply store in Lincoln closed their showroom (they still have one in Omaha, I believe), so I'm probably more dependent on Sams and Costco than before, plus online ordering. Whenever I'm in Pittsburgh visiting my son and his family I try to make a trip down to the Strip District to visit the restaurant supply stores there.

[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.

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