Mike Nolan
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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.)
Personally, I like a combination of beef and lamb, but my wife doesn't care for lamb. I've used beef and pork, it tends to get a bit too greasy for our taste. I've tried various fat levels of ground beef, from 70% lean all the way up to 93%, 80 to 85% seems to make the best meatballs.
I'm not sure what the point is to ground veal, to me the whole point to cooking with veal is that because the animal was still young it hasn't developed the heavy muscle fibers found in fully grown beef, so it is is very tender. But when you grind up meat, that pretty much takes care of the tougher muscle fibers.
The main advantage of using a wine over plain water (I often use vermouth or sherry, and have been known to use brandy) is that the alcohol helps dissolve the fond.
An acid should also work better than plain water, if you don't use too much of it that shouldn't flavor your sauce much. I've used white wine vinegar and rice wine vinegar to deglaze a pan and help flavor a sauce One challenge with apple cider vinegar is that sometimes it's labeled 'apple cider flavored' and I don't honestly know what that means, so I don't buy those brands.
If I'm adding chicken or beef stock to my sauce, sometimes I'll use some of it to deglaze the pan.
You probably wouldn't want to use balsamic, in part because of the flavor profile, but also because it tends to be expensive, I've seen bottles of it that cost over $100.
BLT's
Semolina is made from durum wheat, the difference is in how coarsely ground it is.
In a modern roller mill, the first thing they do when milling wheat is grind off the germ and bran in a series of grooved rollers. What's left is called the middlings and is pretty much all endosperm. The bran and germ is separated out, then the middlings are ground to produce patent flour. (This is a major simplification of the process, leaving out a lot of steps.)
Semolina is made by cracking durum middlings into pieces rather than grinding it to produce durum flour. The semolina can be further processed using steam to produce couscous.
Semolina is a bit more granular, somewhere in between a flour and couscous for size. Because it is more granular, it has a different consistency when turned into dough, it tends to be more extensible and less elastic, which are good properties for a pasta dough but not so much for a bread dough.
For bread, I'd probably use durum, for pasta I'd use semolina.
We're having cheese souffle with mushroom sauce and broccoli.
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
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