Mike Nolan
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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.)
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.)
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