Mike Nolan

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  • in reply to: What are you Cooking the week of March 24, 2019? #15339
    Mike Nolan
    Keymaster

      We had lavash pizza for supper, I was looking for something simple to make because I spent 4 hours taking a confection-making class this afternoon and was too tired to do anything complicated. I'll post something about the class in a day or two.

      in reply to: Daily Quiz for March 29, 2019 #15331
      Mike Nolan
      Keymaster

        I've never actually tried the raw giblets liason, it is supposed to add a lot of flavor but can turn the gravy a bit 'muddy'. The giblets cook as you cook the gravy, of course, so you're not serving raw poultry.

        in reply to: What are you Cooking the week of March 24, 2019? #15326
        Mike Nolan
        Keymaster

          Tomato soup and fried cheese sandwiches, a nice warm dish on a cold and rainy day.

          in reply to: Daily Quiz for March 27, 2019 #15318
          Mike Nolan
          Keymaster

            Keep in mind that's for a 4 ounce serving. I suspect you're more likely to eat a larger portion of sweet potato than of carrots.

            Years ago my wife and I attended a conference at a resort in SW Florida that included several meals. I don't know what the deal was, maybe the chef got a heckuva bargain on a carload of raw carrots, but we had candied carrots at every meal, including breakfast. We had one evening off, so we ate in one of the hotel restaurants, one that specialized in fish. (We were on the Florida Gulf Coast, after all.) Guess what vegetable came with our meal? Yup, candied carrots.

            in reply to: Daily Quiz for March 28, 2019 #15314
            Mike Nolan
            Keymaster

              BTW, while researching this question, one source said that there are 3 plants that produce both an herb and a spice. The other two might show up in a quiz question some day. πŸ™‚

              in reply to: Daily Quiz for March 28, 2019 #15313
              Mike Nolan
              Keymaster

                I wondered that as well, but didn't see anything directly answering the question when I searched.

                My wife is one of those for whom cilantro tastes like soap, I am not. Our older son apparently got my genes on that, not hers.

                The spice form (also not trying to give away the answer) is not one I use a lot, I don't know if my wife is willing to be a guinea pig for some testing.

                in reply to: What are you Cooking the week of March 24, 2019? #15303
                Mike Nolan
                Keymaster

                  It's not a digestive issue, she just doesn't like the taste of either barley or lentils. I can get away with barley syrup in bagels, because that's mostly just a sweetener.

                  in reply to: Bread from Spent Grain #15300
                  Mike Nolan
                  Keymaster

                    As long as it is properly covered so it isn't exposed, I think the health department is OK with sourdough starters at room temperature, or at least they are in Nebraska.

                    I get the impression from Anthony Bourdain's books, especially his first one, that NYC rules are similar.

                    in reply to: Bread from Spent Grain #15298
                    Mike Nolan
                    Keymaster

                      More than a few people who've tasted my breads and pastries have suggested I open a bakery. No way! Too much work, lousy hours and not all that profitable.

                      A second issue is that I'd probably have to change some of my recipes to make the products affordable, I once figured my costs for my deep dish apple pie at about $6.00. If I follow the usual restaurant rule (selling price is 3-4 X the cost of the ingredients), that means charging anywhere from $18 to $24 per pie. I suspect not enough people would buy them, especially when most of the apple pies available locally are $10 or less.

                      in reply to: Bread from Spent Grain #15297
                      Mike Nolan
                      Keymaster

                        I've had and made a number of breads made with beer, I can't say any of them made my top 10 favorites list. However, the spent grain I got didn't really smell much like beer, and the breads I made with it did not remind me at all of those 'beer breads', they were more like some of the ancient grains or 10 grain breads.

                        in reply to: Bread from Spent Grain #15296
                        Mike Nolan
                        Keymaster

                          Sourdough is a very complicated subject. The best research I've seen on it seems to indicate that the temperature at which the starter is maintained has a lot to do with how sour it gets, because some of the bacteria in the starter culture generate a lot of lactic acid and others do not. Low temperature bacteria tend to be more prone to produce higher acid concentrates, or maybe they just thrive better under high acid conditions, they're not really sure which--probably a bit of both.

                          Another challenge is that the bacteria present in your starter tend to adapt to your locale over time. If you buy some San Francisco starter, it will be high in a bacteria called Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis. But tests on starters that have been maintained for a year or longer tend to show that the percentage of L. sanfranciscensis goes down if you're not in San Francisco, as the local indigenous bacteria tend to dominate the sourdough culture.

                          My wife won't eat the local sourdoughs, they're just too sour for her, she thinks, and they bother her stomach. (I suspect that some of the bakeries, notably Panera, add acid to their dough to increase how sour it is in an attempt to make their dough taste the same regardless of location.)

                          Oddly enough, when we visit our son in San Francisco, she handles the sourdough breads available there just fine.

                          I've been tempted to try Chad Robertsons's techniques (as documented in the Tartine Bakery cookbook series) to create and maintain a less mature sourdough starter, which he says is much milder. But it involves throwing out 95% of your starter on a frequent basis.

                          in reply to: What are you Cooking the week of March 24, 2019? #15284
                          Mike Nolan
                          Keymaster

                            Tonight was YOYO (You're On Your Own), so I had leftover spaghetti and meatballs and my wife had McD's on the way home from her chiropractor.

                            in reply to: Bread from Spent Grain #15283
                            Mike Nolan
                            Keymaster

                              Restaurants are a high risk operation, even franchise operations for major brands like McDonalds can fail, independent restaurants, even a small chain, are even more prone to fail.

                              One of my professors and I did some studying of this when I was in grad school. We found that among non-franchise restaurants, fewer than 20% of them lasted as long as 5 years, and half were gone within 18 months.

                              There's a building near us that has been at least 5 different restaurants in the past 22 years. Most lasted 2-3 years, even the most recent attempt, a second location for one of the most popular restaurants in Lincoln, recently closed after a 4-5 year run. I think it's just a bad location. The building size and configuration may also be a problem, it's big enough that it requires a lot of covers in a day to break even.

                              I'm not a beer drinker, either, so it's kind of funny that for several years I was developing software for beer distributors. There's a brewpub/restaurant near us that is a second location for the place I got the spent grain from, we go there a few times a year. My older son really likes their beer cheese soup, several times he's ordered a gallon or more of it frozen and takes it back to Pittsburgh. They do some interesting breads with their spent grain, but my wife's favorite thing on their menu is the lavash pizza. Now that we've found a place to get good lavash, that'll limit the number of times we go back.

                              The liquor industry would go broke if it had to depend on me, and with my wife's garlic problems and low carb diet, there aren't very many local restaurants we go to on a regular basis, either. We do some fast food takeout, burgers, pizza and fried chicken mostly.

                              We've spent the night in South Bend a number of times when driving back and forth between Lincoln and Pittsburgh. Haven't done enough exploring of it to get away from the I-80 corridor, which may also be where a lot of the college/tourist crowd goes, so we don't know where the locals eat.

                              in reply to: Bread from Spent Grain #15278
                              Mike Nolan
                              Keymaster

                                Peter Reinhart has a number of recipes for spent grain breads in his whole grains book. About 10 years ago I called one of the local brewpubs and got a 5 gallon bucket of spent grain from them. (They usually just give it to local farmers to feed pigs, though they do use some of it in the bread they bring to the table and in some of the sandwiches they serve.)

                                I tried several spent grain bread recipes, but I think the most successful recipe I made was a variant on bran muffins. I think all the barley made for a sweet muffin. See Spent Grain Muffins

                                I did discover that since spent grain has a lot of hulls, sometimes it gets a bit chewy with stuff stuck between your teeth, almost like eating a bread with caraway in it. I took some of the spent grain, dried it in the oven and then ran it through the food processor to chop it up a bit, that made for a softer less toothsome bread, but it would take a lot of time to do that with a large quantity of spent grain and I don't know how long it would last after being dried. You can also run it through the food processor while its still damp, but it gets kind of messy to clean up.

                                From discussions I've had with others who bake with spent grains, depending on what kind of grains they're using in their beers, there's quite a bit of variability in the taste and texture of the breads made with spent grains.

                                Interestingly enough, there was no 'beery' flavor to any of the breads I made.

                                Beer makers also use a lot of different types of yeast in their beers, the local home-brew supply store must have two dozen yeast varieties, and that's just a small selection of what's available online. I don't know what impact different varieties of yeast would have on making bread, that could be a subject for a lot of experimentation.

                                I can't help you on using bread to make beer.

                                in reply to: More on the Egg Debate #15273
                                Mike Nolan
                                Keymaster

                                  I don't think a course in statistics was required of the journalism majors at Northwestern when I went there. I was an engineering major, I took lots of courses in math, mostly things like calculus and differential equations, but I did take one course in probability theory as an undergrad and then several course in social science research methodology and statistics in grad school.

                                  Of the various articles I've read based on the recent JAMA article, this one appears to be fairly well balanced:
                                  Eggs and Cholesterol

                                Viewing 15 posts - 5,656 through 5,670 (of 7,560 total)