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Yesterday I baked a batch of Vienna Bread using the Clonmel Double Crusty recipe.
We're having lavash pizza again tonight, that uses up the last of this set of 3 lavash.
Traditionally, asparagus is steamed. I don't make asparagus very often, because my wife hates the smell and doesn't like Hollandaise, either, but when I do make it I just do it in the microwave these days. Don't overcook it.
Hollandaise is surprisingly good on strawberries.
We had tuna melts for supper. The last time I made rye bread I sliced it all up to send it to a pot luck and froze what came back, that turns out to be very convenient for things like this, I'll probably do that again. Might even give me an excuse to make rye bread a little more often.
I can't get all the BRM products here, either, though we've got a dozen or so grocery stores in town.
This one was a bit tricky.
Lettuce, spinach, spring onions and asparagus are what's mostly available here. Rhubarb is starting to show up, kohlrabi and bok choy should be available soon. Haven't seen pea pods or green beans yet, probably a few more weeks for them.
I have trouble finding $59 worth of stuff I want from KAF these days.
I have the same trouble with Bob's Red Mill, where free shipping is commonplace if not standard on a $59 order, though not for orders that include 25 or 50 pound bags. The Bob's Red Mill site will let you download a $1 off coupon once a month, that may be enough to keep me going in semolina for the next few months. I've still got 2 bags of KAF pastry flour in the freezer, so I'm not in need of their pastry flour.
A local store had KAF AP on sale for $2.99 a bag lately, so I bought a few bags, but now that the sale is over I see they've raised the flour from $3.99 a bag to around $4.29 or about 85 cents/pound. WalMart and Target have the lowest prices for KAF flours locally still under $4 a pound.
Wheat prices have come down lately (see Wheat Prices Charts), they've been fluctuating around $5 a bushel for most of the last year but recently have dropped to around $4.29. I don't know that they'll drop down to the levels we saw in 2016, when wheat dropped below $4 a bushel. But since a bushel of wheat yields about 42 pounds of AP flour that means the farmer's share of the price of flour is about 10 cents/pound.
In tests, not as much of the alcohol burns off or cooks out as many people think, I seem to recall reading that only about 80% of it is burned off or cooked out. There's enough left that many people who have alcohol abuse issue prefer to avoid those recipes.
Keep us posted on what you try.
The government-required nutritional label is essentially worthless for flour, because the 'serving size' is so small that the roundoff error makes the protein content information next to useless.
KAF does better in general than most other home-use millers.
I've always thought KAF put more data on their website than on their bags, but I see that they've updated the AP bag since the last time I actually read one, and they've reorganized their website in such a way that their flours are harder to find these days, though I did eventually find them. It still shows the protein percentage, and you can see what's printed on the entire bag.
I've seen full-blown spec sheets for some commercial flours, they list a lot more information, including things like moisture and ash content, some even give things like the falling number and other lab tests that millers run. But looking at the Gold Medal commercial flours site, I don't see that information readily available, it may be behind their login. However, I don't think I've ever seen anything in which the percentage of glutenin and gliadin is given, I guess you just have to know that durum has a different ratio than ordinary wheat.
You may want to get an oven thermometer (if not more than one) that you can monitor from outside the oven to see if you can figure out what's happening. It may be as simple as your oven needs re-calibration because of the new bottom element.
I remember when we were first married we had an apartment with an oven that wasn't working properly, the bottom element worked only intermittently, and the top element would kick into pre-heat cycle to compensate, though we didn't figure that out for a while. My wife was essentially broiling things, which didn't work very well with an angel food cake she tried to make for my birthday and even worse on a turkey.
Although I've never read anything about using it for that, I wonder what would happen if you used beer to deglaze the fond? I'd be concerned that a beery flavor might overpower the rest of the sauce, or that the hops might make it bitter, but there might be some dishes where it would work.
How wheat is milled can affects its properties, and the more you know about the properties of your ingredients, the more you can control the results.
I had read about this before, but sometimes researching a possible quiz question leads in unexpected directions. The research for tomorrow's quiz will likely spur several more questions.
Durum wheat is often used for crackers, in part because it can be readily shaped into sheets and doesn't have high elasticity. (It has to do with the ratio between the two gluten proteins, glutenin, which contributes to dough elasticity, and gliadin, which contributes to dough extensibility.)
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