Mike Nolan
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I used a combination of butter and Crisco. Looking at Susan Purdy's recipe, I see she uses butter and margarine, so I'm not sure if it was her recipe I was using. (It's been a couple of years since I've made it.)
I just posted the 300th quiz question I've written, it'll be available on Thursday.
For those of you who are new, you can access back quizzes all the way back to last March.
Maple syrup isn't as sweet as sugar, and depending on how thick it is, there's more water and less sugar per cup, so I would expect it to take a bit more. The challenge is that the maple flavor can become overpowering, although I find that to be more of a problem with artificial maple flavoring.
Without water, there probably wasn't much gluten development or starch conversion. You probably don't need a lot of water for a pot pie crust, but I think you need some.
Since the butter is melted for choux paste, any water suspended with the fat is released. I've always assumed that for both choux paste and popovers the egg forms a structure that the evaporating water pushes out. I've made choux paste with gluten-free flours so I know a gluten matrix isn't playing much of a role.
I've used Susan Purdy's hot water crust for large pot pies, it would probably work for smaller ones as well. The last few times I made pot pies I didn't bother with a bottom crust and I used a circle of laminated dough as the top. I froze them after baking them in muffin tins, they reheat nicely in the microwave.
It sort of depends on which website you trust. Of the natural sugar types, fructose has the highest sweetness index, various sources give it a sweetness index between 1.1 and 1.7. Sucrose, which is a disaccharide of glucose and fructose, is assigned an index of 1. Glucose is around 0.75.
Honey has more fructose than glucose in it, so it is slightly sweeter than sucrose. Ordinary corn syrup has a lot of glucose in it, so it is slightly less sweet than sucrose. HFCS is sweeter because it has a higher amount of fructose in it.
Some years ago we were at a pancake place in Indianapolis and they add a little orange juice to their batter. It adds an interesting flavor and the acid probably helps create a bit more fluffy pancake.
When we were in Hawaii we ate at a sushi place where the plates come past you on a conveyor belt and you grab what you want, though you can also order specific dishes if you don't see them. The biggest challenge was trying to identify something as it moved past you. The color of the plate tells you how much that one costs, ranging from $1.99 to $7.99 or so. They figure the bill by counting the used plates.
The quality was excellent, and they had a lot of cooked fish dishes as well as raw fish ones, so my wife (who like several of you won't eat raw fish) found plenty to eat. Dinner for the 5 of us ran under $100.
Isn't one aspect of laminated dough having the water that makes up 15-20% of butter evaporate to produce steam in between layers? There's little or no water in browned butter, just like there's little or no water in clarified butter or ghee.
Sushi is one of those love-it or hate-it things. My granddaughter could bankrupt an all-you-can-eat sushi place!
I was working a trade show in Chicago for one of the computer trade papers some years back and one of the other journalists invited a number of us out for the evening. We wound up at a sushi place having freshly killed raw lobster. (The tentacles were still moving.) I think I prefer cooked lobster, though.
Supposedly ceviche shrimp is safer to eat, but I don't eat shrimp because it sometimes bothers me.
The potato leek soup was excellent, as usual. I made croutons from both Vienna bread and semolina bread, can't say I could tell much difference between them.
This is the sort of recipe I was looking for at Thanksgiving. I've filed it away for future testing.
It takes a bit of searching to find good mirin, especially in smaller communities, but your food is only as good as your ingredients. It can also be ordered online, though liquor laws might restrict that in some areas.
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