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The day started off great here, today was the Lincoln Marathon and the morning weather was wonderful. It started to heat up in the afternoon. We were just getting ready to have the 'what are we having for dinner' conversation when the tornado sirens went off at about 5:30 this afternoon. For the meterologically inclined, we had a mesocyclone supercell pass through the city a bit north of us. The radar images were really fascinating.
So we relocated to the basement for about 90 minutes. Since it was getting late by the time we were back upstairs, we had a lavash pizza, fast and easy.
A long time ice cream stand in west Lincoln was flattened and there are some other damage reports from areas a bit north and west of us.
The National Weather Service will decide whether there was an actual tornado touchdown, but wind gusts in the 80's were reported, and one report was over 100!
No damage that I can see here, other than a few of our bedding plants waiting to be planted got blown around a bit. We got a little hail and some strong wind gusts, but I don't think enough to cause any roof damage.
Breads are among the more forgiving things in baking, especially enrichment ingredients like sugar and oils. Get the flour-to-water ratio right, use enough leavening and salt, and you'll usually get a good loaf of bread.
Cakes require more precision.
For bread it'll work just fine, Peter Reinhart's marbled rye bread uses a little shortening in it, and I've seen it in other recipes. You don't even need to melt it (and there are probably reasons not to, according to Peter, he thinks adding shortening instead of oil makes his rye bread lighter), unless you don't know how much you need by weight. If you do melt it, let it cool down a bit.
2.23 cups of crisco (1 pound) melts down to 2 cups of oil, so most recipes just say to substitute measure for measure, if the recipe calls for a half cup of oil, use a half cup of crisco. (I always weigh crisco, though, because you get air pockets when you try to measure it out, a cup is about 7.2 ounces.)
Without know what you'll be using it, it's hard to say, but for things like cooking and frying it should work just fine. I'm not sure I'd use it for an oil-and-vinegar dressing, though.
We had tacos tonight. I'm also using my immersion circulator today to prepare a batch of cocoa butter silk, which is used to quickly temper a batch of chocolate.
I've done that far too many times myself. I think I've even ordered a few things by clicking on the wrong button.
Tonight we're doing a lavash pizza
I saw, and I moved it over to the 'recipes' category. They look great!
Gee, and I thought this was one of the easier questions I've asked.
Tomorrow's question was inspired by recent posts here.
We used two different formulas for pâte brisée (short crust pie dough) at pastry school, one had more butter with slightly larger sized pieces of it after it was cut in. It produced a flakier crust, though it was a bit trickier to roll out, and I've pretty much standardized on the other one. (I do add a little more sugar for a cherry pie dough. My wife's grandmother would roll in a little granulated sugar for a cherry pie crust at the end, I just mix it in up front.)
I've tried several other recipes for pie dough, including ones that used a combination of shortening and butter and Rose Levy Beranbaum's cream cheese one, I keep going back to the SFBI one. I'm probably going to try an all lard one once I render the 4 pounds of lard I bought a week ago. (I do like Susan Purdy's hot water crust recipe for pot pies, and it uses a combination of butter and shortening.)
At pastry school, they made us cut the butter in using a chef's knife several times. That's a lot more work, but it does teach you exactly what it should look and feel like.
It took me several tries before I got the technique down at home, formulas don't tell you everything, but at this point I can make it either in the food processor or in the mixer.
Here's the formula I use:
Pastry Flour 100%
Sugar 5%
Salt 2%
Unsalted Butter 70%
Water 30%I have tables in my notebook for 1-4 crusts, in metric weights. I measure the sugar and salt using a scale that has 0.1 gram increments. (In fact, any time I'm measuring less than 15 grams of something, I use the micro-scale. I have a third scale which measures in milligrams, but don't use it for baking.)
Most of the time I use KAF white Pastry Flour. I prefer the 8% protein pastry flour over the 10.3% protein one which they call their 'pastry flour blend', but I've also had good results using Gold Medal Unbleached AP flour. I may try a bag of Bob's Red Mill white pastry flour as I'm probably going to order semolina from them next time, and I can't get white pastry flour locally, only whole wheat ones.
I find I sometimes need an extra teaspoon or so of water. (As with all bakers percentages formulas, the water is by weight not by volume.)
There seems to be a divergence of opinion among baking experts about freezing butter, at pastry school we were cautioned not to use butter that had been frozen for making pie crust, even if it had been thawed. But I've seen a number of places recommending using shredded frozen butter for pie crusts lately.
A minor milestone: Today's quiz was the 50th quiz posted.
Although there's at least one day that I can't find records for, it appears that on average people are getting the right answer about 56% of the time.
I got some nice spinach at the farmer's market yesterday, so we had spinach salad with tuna and egg tonight.
Spaghetti with meat/mushroom sauce and oven cheese toast here.
We had theatre tickets this afternoon to Something Rotten, so we had Blaze pizza on the way home, since it's about a block from the theatre.
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