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Whole grain recipes are always challenging. The 100% whole wheat recipe that you make in the food processor is probably the most successful one I've ever tried. That's a part of the repertoire here now, we're on either our 3rd or 4th loaf of it.
I'm tempted to try the techniques of that recipe (a 2 1/2 hour autolyse and using the food processor instead of the mixer) on some of the other whole grain recipes I've tried unsuccessfully over the years.
The last time we went to Pittsburgh we came back through Indianapolis rather than I-80. It's an hour or two longer, but we thought it was a less stressful drive. Indianapolis traffic was bad, but nothing like having to drive through Chicago. The only real downside was we couldn't stop at a Portillo's in Chicago for Italian Beef sandwiches.
It also allowed us to stop at the North Market in Columbus Ohio. I'm really glad we don't live close to Columbus, I could spent thousands of dollars there every month! Best meat, poultry and fish markets I've seen in 40 years, some pretty good bakeries, too. One case had venison and bison steaks, ground yak meat, ground camel meat, ground elk meat and ground water buffalo meat! When we were there in December of 2016 they had about 5 different varieties of whole duck plus duck breasts and duck legs confit. The only meat market that comes even close to the ones at North Market are at McGinnis Sisters in Monroeville PA.
There's a Penzeys in Indianapolis, but that's probably a good 100 miles away.
The nearest one to us is in Omaha, I think I've been there just once. I've probably been to the one in the Strip District in Pittsburgh more times than that. 🙂
Today was a leftovers day.
We had steak, mushrooms, baked potato and a salad for dinner tonight.
We had lavash pizza again tonight. (The lavash come 3 to a package.) Didn't have a tomato, so I put on some tomato sauce, which was an acceptable substitute.
Irish soda bread covers a wide range of breads. Some are sweet, some are not. Some have fruit and/or nuts in them, some do not. Some are light in color, some are quite dark. I've even seen some dusted with powdered sugar or a light glaze.
You can make them with a gluten-free flour, too. (Although I haven't tried that myself, I've made other GF chemically leavened breads, so I suspect they'd work well.)
I usually only make Hot Cross Buns for Good Friday. I like the recipe in the KAF Whole Grains book best of the ones I've tried.
The oven may have been the biggest difference, how it preheats and the range of temperatures it goes through each time it cycles (engineers call this hysteresis) can both affect the cake, as could some of the other factors you mentioned.
Was it more dry along the edges than in the center? That could be the cake strips. (I've got some but haven't ever used them.)
Isn't a new oven part of the kitchen remodeling, meaning you'll be using a new oven again next year?
Not really, most of Lincoln is well above even the 500 year flood plains, and we're pretty much at the high point of our neighborhood, so it'd take a flood of Biblical proportions to affect us. We have, on one occasion, had a little water come in by the walk-out basement door, but that was after something like 12 inches of rain in 3 days and we've done some re-grading of the yard since then and redone the master deck so that it is less likely to direct water towards the house.
I just read online that we have mandatory water restrictions as of this evening, though. Lincoln's main well fields are on the Platte near Ashland, about 30 miles northeast of us, and they've had some power issues due to flooding there. The treatment plants have not been impacted so city water is still safe, but the mandatory restrictions are intended to cut usage so that the reserves aren't drained.
The oven-roasted corned beef brisket was excellent, slow cooking rendered out much of the fat and it didn't boil out the flavor.
I put a sliced onion and some carrots and celery on top, cooked it for about 4 hours then cut a bunch of it off for the soup and put the brisket back in the oven for another 2+ hours. The roasted veggies went in the soup pot along with the cabbage, some diced potatoes, a bay leaf, thyme, basil and parsley.
My mother made corned beef hash a lot, it was an easy way to feed 6 kids on a budget in a hurry. We'd take turns grinding the onions and potatoes for it.
I like a good kosher corned beef, my wife prefers pastrami. (If I could get Montreal Smoked Meat here, that's even better.)
The vending machines at college had excellent corned beef on rye sandwiches, I'm not sure if Sinai 48 products are even still available, they were bought out by another company some years ago.
I also like a good reuben. (Local historians claim that the reuben was invented in Omaha.)
I've got a brisket, I'm going to roast most of it and put part of it in a corned beef and cabbage soup. (My wife doesn't really like cooked cabbage, so I'm not making a large pot of soup.)
The soda bread we had in Ireland (at a bed and breakfast near Kilkenny) was fairly dark, a little on the sweet side and had raisins in it.
I took several recipes and combined them, I'm using raisins, walnuts, whole wheat flour, oatmeal, AP flour, baking soda, baking powder, sugar, salt, buttermilk and a little orange juice.
Some recipes bake it free-form, others in a 9" skillet, I'm trying it free-form, we'll see how much it spreads. Smells good so far.
Followup: Tastes pretty good, too. A little crumbly, but that's normal with a soda bread, because you don't mix it enough to form much gluten. I'll post my recipe shortly.
Glad to hear things are progressing, even if it won't be done by Easter. We have a couple of fix-it projects that I may try to get done next summer, one inside and one outside.
Tonight we had steak, mushrooms, baked potato and a salad consisting of a bed of romaine with artichoke hearts and five bean salad on it.
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