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I had the last of Saturday's pizza for supper, Diane had a take-out burrito.
Looks great, Joan. I like the look of a lattice crust on a cherry pie but my wife prefers a regular top crust.
These days I'm tending to minimize the crust around the outside, sometimes there's a half-inch thick section that's just pie dough without any filling to make it worth eating. I was always terrible at fluting, anyway.
The next time I make the keto apple pie I'm going to make about 25% less pie dough, I figure that will save 2-3 carbs/serving.
Left over pizza, plus a salad (for me) and a small slice of apple pie.
If you have space, time and other resources for it, you might consider trying to make a new starter while reviving your old one and see if you can tell them apart after a few months.
We had pizza again tonight. We had tickets to see The Capital Steps last night, they were funny--as usual, so we postponed pizza night until Saturday.
Biggest difference was I baked this one directly on my 14" pizza steel, so the crust is a lot crisper on the bottom. (I couldn't figure out how to get a good photo of that.)
Worked fairly well, I'll do that again.
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You must be logged in to view attached files.I figure my lasagna is well over a dozen layers, (3-4 layers of pasta, plus layers of sauce, multiple types of cheeses including a ricotta/spinach blend, meats, and mushrooms.)
I tried counting the layers of pasta in that picture and came up with around 30, which means something like pasta-sauce-cheese-pasta repeated around 30 times.
As Len says, mostly for show, sort of like the 12 pattie 'special' at In-N-Out. People can order it, and even eat it, but is it a gustatory experience worth repeating?
There's not a lot of research on how a frozen starter that is re-established compares to the original, though being able to rebuild a lost starter is the point of the Puratos Sourdough Library, where they keep sourdough samples frozen (including a portion in liquid nitrogen, I think.)
Prof. Michael Ganzle's writings, though, seem to support the concept that a starter is largely a product of its feeding and handling, ie, how often you feed it, what you feed it with and how it is stored in between feedings. His research suggests that regardless of where a starter is (US, Europe, Africa, Asia) starters that are maintained using similar processes are remarkably similar in terms of their microbiological makeup, ie, what strains of yeast and bacteria wind up dominating the culture. (Refrigerating vs room temperature seems to be one of the key differences, and IMHO is the primary difference between a commercial bakery's sourdough starter and most home sourdough starters.)
If that is true, then whether you re-establish a frozen or dried starter, or one that got lost in the back of the fridge, get some starter from another baker or start from scratch, you're likely to end up in a similar place in 6 months to a year. And that's not a bad thing if you have a sourdough starter you're used to maintaining and using.
We had potato leek soup again, but based on a reddit topic I've been following on artichokes which led me to an artichoke-potato-leek soup recipe I chopped up a couple of baby artichokes and added that to the soup. It was great, and we'll definitely do that again!
Hmm, that probably means you need somewhere between 3 and 4 pounds of bread dough, depending on how much it rises. I'd probably aim for 3 to 3 1/4 pounds myself.
If all else fails, try getting an estimate of the volume of each half of the mold using something like rice or beans, or possibly even just water. Then, depending on the recipe, make enough dough to fill the mold about 3/4 full.
Estimating the volume of an irregular object is challenging. There should be some apps that can do this if your phone has a LIDAR-capable camera, but I haven't found one I could use for bread yet.
I have a long term ambition to create an 'encyclopedia of bread shapes', giving things like surface area, volume and maximum depth for bread shapes, as part of my long-held opinion that shape is a relatively unexplored aspect of bread taste and texture. I started by making up a list of all the bread shapes I could think of, I had at least 100 shapes, and I was just getting started listing things like braided shapes.
My wife's grandmother had a 'Christmas Coffee Cake' recipe that we tried to make several times and it never came out right (or at least matching my wife's recollection of what it tasted and looked like.)
It called for 'sour cream', and I've always suspected that given the age of the recipe it was really using heavy cream that had gone sour rather than the cultured stuff you get at the grocery store these days.
I've wondered about using creme fraiche to make it, as I think it is a lot closer to traditional 'sour cream'. These days I tend to keep heavy cream on hand for keto cooking and baking, I could also try letting a cup of it sit on the counter to go sour.
I'll see if I can find the recipe (it's in the Nebraska Centennial Cookbook, which my wife's mother edited) and post it.
Croutons made with the L'Oven Fresh keto bread from Aldi worked very well in the soup, adding no net carbs.
I've tried a number of keto-friendly recipes, ones without wheat, barley, rice, oats, corn or rye. (I generally don't do anything with teff, millet, sorghum, kamut, quinoa or other grains, so they didn't factor in to my testing, though I may play with teff to see if I can make a good injira.)
Mixed results--at best. Texture is an issue, few of them have the lightness you get with wheat. The ones that used a lot of whipped egg whites tended to be a bit lighter, but IMHO the egginess is an issue. It does not appear you can make them with liquid egg whites, not sure if powdered egg protein would work or not, so you need a plan for what to do with multiple egg yolks. (I've made gluten-free angel food cake and ladyfingers with powdered egg whites, the ladyfingers were more of a success though we used both in a gluten-free trifle, by the time the pastry cream, jello and fruits were added the cake and ladyfingers were not impacting flavor much.)
Almond flour is a common ingredient in keto baking and I got tired of the taste of almond flour quickly. Other nut flours didn't seem to help much. I concluded that flax meal adds a bitterness I don't like.
Fathead doughs (almond flour usually with cream cheese and mozzarella) never really gave us a 'bread' feel, though the taste wasn't too bad and it actually toasted fairly well. If I HAD to make my own keto breads without any wheat products, I'd probably start with a fathead recipe and see what I could do to improve it, a task many others have attempted with only modest results.
Coconut flour has potential but the trick is to avoid it tasting like a coconut candy.
I'm still playing with fibers, such as bamboo fiber and oat fiber, I don't know if the latter meets the criteria of 'grain free', though.
I'm making potato leek soup, not super low in carbs (hopefully under 20 carbs/serving before adding croutons.)
I've got some semolina bread croutons, they're about 50% carbs, but I'm taking some of the Aldi white keto bread and drying it out in the oven, it has essentially zero net carbs. I'm told it makes OK croutons once dried out.
Playing with Otter, a speech-to-text app for iPhone, to see if I could use it to verbally record a list of books. Looks like it might work, and that should save a lot of typing.
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