[Mike Nolan]

I've found bugs in our unsweetened baking chocolate once or twice, I don't know what kind they were. I keep it in plastic bags these days.

I know one time I opened a flour canister and there were larvae in it, plus several moths escaped, and it took a while to get that infestation under control.

[Mike Nolan]

The most common form of bugs in flour is the Indian meal moth. There are pheromone traps for them, and they work fairly well. I've fought several invasions of them, and also dealt with warehouse or cabinet beetles, which are harder to kill off, and there aren't pheromone traps for them.

Bugs can arrive in flours, pasta and dry pet foods, I've even found warehouse beetles in the bottom of the paper bag. I found some Indian meal moths in a bag of wild rice once, and once in trail mix, though I'm not sure if those were the source or just a place they spread to. Putting flour in the freezer for 2-3 days is said to destroy both the eggs and any larvae, though I don't know if that's been scientifically tested.

[Mike Nolan]

Many people think seeds make the sauce bitter and don't like getting them in between their teeth. Looking at the reduced sauce (about 8 quarts) I don't see as many seeds as I was seeing at first, I think the seeds may rise to the top during cooking. I'm declaring it finished and will let it start cooling. If I get enough tomatoes for another batch of sauce, I may try to concasse them before running them through the Roma mill to remove the skins.

The temperature last night dipped into the lower 40's here, and the high is supposed
to be 72 today. It may hit the 80's again tomorrow, but I think the 90+ heat is over.

[Mike Nolan]

We got a break, the part came in and the service tech had a cancellation, so the freezer is repaired and getting nice and cold. We're starting to load it, so the sauce can go in there tomorrow.

I wound up with nearly 16 quarts of tomato pulp, which will likely reduce down to 10-12 quarts of sauce. For some reason I wound up with a lot more seeds in this batch than were in the last one, though I used the same processing method. I may try running some of the sauce through a canning screen to see how that works, it may trap too much pulp along with the seeds. I don't know if I have a Foley, but it might get rid of the pulp lumps, which we liked in the last batch.

[Mike Nolan]

I just picked about 45 pounds of tomatoes from the garden, so I'll be making sauce tonight, though I'm not sure where I'm storing it until the upstairs freezer is repaired, probably around the middle of next week.

These are fairly acetic tomatoes, I might try canning some, possibly adding a little citric acid. I've got a digital pH meter that I use for the hot tub, the information that came with it says it is safe for food use as long as I rinse it thoroughly before and after. USDA says it is safe to use the boiling water method for canning tomatoes as long as the pH is below 4.6.

Cooler weather and storms are headed this way, but if it doesn't get too cold or damp I should be able to pick another big harvest next week, and somewhat smaller batches for the next several weeks.

[Mike Nolan]

We had beans and wieners for supper tonight, as my wife's stomach is starting to get back to normal.

[Mike Nolan]

My experience has been that an immersion blender still leaves lots of tiny pieces of tomato skin, so I still skin tomatoes before saucing them, either manually or using my Roma Food Strainer.

Putting the tomatoes in boiling water for about 30 seconds deactivates an enzyme in tomatoes that causes them to separate when you make sauce. The last time I made sauce I used the Roma 'salsa' screen which removed all the skins and most of the seeds. The sauce had some lumpiness to it, but I actually liked that.

[Mike Nolan]

It may just need to cool and set up.

I've thought about using a slow cooker for trying an 18 hour black bread recipe.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't see any reason why whole wheat recipes wouldn't work if recipes using white flour work in a crock pot. The baking temperature and times are usually about the same.

[Mike Nolan]

A cobbler generally doesn't bake as long as a pie does, so the cinnamon roll idea on top is more likely to work.

[Mike Nolan]

An interesting idea, probably better done with pie dough, which shouldn't get hard.

A shortbread dough might have worked, too, since it's closer to pie crust than bread dough.

[Mike Nolan]

Yeah, a lot of whole grain breads are really dense, which is why the Pepperidge Farms loaves are sliced so thin.

Peter Reinhart has a recipe in his whole grains book for Broom Bread, that sometimes comes out fairly light but not always, and I'm not at all sure why.

[Mike Nolan]

Recipe writers from the 50's, 60's and 70's tended to use more yeast, though for the most part both active and instant dry yeast have been pretty consistent since the mid 60's when the current processes were developed. More recent authors, like Peter Reinhart have been advocating using only as much yeast as needed, often cutting back on yeast then adding additional rise time, the classic trade off for bakers is more time = more flavor.

[Mike Nolan]

Well, with loaf pans if they rise a bit more than you expected, it's usually not a major problem.

We don't drink coffee, but I don't think I've seen a traditional one-pound coffee can in the stores in years. Most of the ground coffees seem to be in plastic pouches these days.

[Mike Nolan]

I always wondered why they had the top spot to begin with, as they aren't very flavorful. Macintosh used to be the most commonly grown apple in Nebraska orchards, but I don't think it has the top spot here any more.

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