[Mike Nolan]

It doesn't really qualify as cooking or baking but I made several trays worth of chocolates using Christmas themed molds last night (santas, trees, stars, snowflakes, etc.)

[Mike Nolan]

My mother would buy a quarter every few years, it always seemed like it was 2/3 ground beef.

[Mike Nolan]

Greg Patent's article from Gastronomica is probably the definitive article on the history of Boston Cream Pie

[Mike Nolan]

I hope your cold oven is cold enough, pastry cream should be kept cold, so I've always assumed Boston Cream Pie should be, too. Stores always keep pre-made ones in the refrigerated case.

A few years ago I was on a Boston Cream Pie quest, I made it at least a half dozen times, with various cakes, types of pastry cream and toppings. Never did find the perfect combination, they were all pretty good, though. I like the cake to have a hint of almond in it, enough so you can tell there's something there but not really get hit with ALMOND! The one that had a mixture of my mother-in-law's pastry cream and a classic creme patisserie was the best filling. These days I tend to use the pastry cream recipe in the KAF Baker's Companion, but sometimes with an extra egg yolk. The pastry cream we made at pastry school was so thick it was almost hard to pipe, but boy it was good.

I did get confirmation that the original topping on a Boston Cream Pie was a chocolate fondant (made with confectioners fondant), so it gets fairly firm, rather than a softer ganache, but nearly every modern recipe uses a ganache, and I'm OK with that.

One of the things we talked about a little in chocolate school was how to adjust the firmness and texture of a ganache. (To make it firmer, you add more cocoa butter.) I'd still like to take the 3rd course in the chocolate sequence at the Chocolate Academy some year, it deals with designing your own ganaches.

[Mike Nolan]

I've had twice baked potatoes, I was wondering if mashed potatoes made this way would have some similarity with twice-baked potatoes for flavor. Recently we've been settling for instant mashed potatoes.

The WSJ recipe keeps the skins on, and then you mash them, so the skins aren't removed. I can't say I'm all that fond of potato skins in my mashed potatoes, though I do like potato skins. When we have baked potatoes, I eat the whole potato, including the skin. But mashed potatoes should be creamy smooth, without lumps or pieces of skin in them--or garlic!

One of these days I want to try making Joel Robuchon's recipe for pommes puree. (As my wife says, well at least they'd be lower in carbs, since there are no carbs in cream and butter.)

[Mike Nolan]

Maggi is a seasoning that comes in both liquid and cube form. The ingredients vary depending upon what country you buy it in, but one of the ingredients is usually sodium glutamate.

Here's a page with more information on Maggi

[Mike Nolan]

If you haven't posted your peach cobbler recipe (the only one I found in the archives was from S_Wirth), please consider posting it.

I haven't had a good peach cobbler in a long time!

[Mike Nolan]

Thanks for finding an alternate source for the article, sites like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal seem to be going out of their way to make it difficult to link to their stories. And because my computer(s) are already logged in to their sites, the links work for me, just not for others.

[Mike Nolan]

Dry aging beef is an art form, it's essentially a carefully controlled decay. Properly dry-aged beef will lose up to 25% of its usable weight, as it loses water and the outermost edges have to be trimmed off because they're too dry.

According to the Wall Street Journal, millennials who are tired of the corporate world are turning to skills like meat butchery, so it is regaining favor in some parts of the country, but Nebraska retail stores aren't one of them yet. Despite or perhaps because of the fact that there are several large beef, pork and poultry processors in the state, in many chains use primarily meat that is cut into retail portions off-site and wrapped, about the only thing the local store does (and I'm not 100% sure of even that) is price it. One exception to this is ground beef, they do tend to grind that on site. (I've been working on a blog post about buying and using ground beef, it'll probably be out in early 2018.)

Even places that cut meat on site tend to buy it in already cut and vacuum packed into primal and sub-primal sections weighing anywhere from a few pounds to 30 pounds. If they don't happen to buy the primals that have the cuts you want, good luck finding those cuts. I make my own beef stock from beef shanks, but finding beef shanks or soup bones (knuckle bones or neck bones) from around the middle of April until mid or late September is challenging. It's almost like cattle don't have legs for 6 months of the year!

One interesting result of the off-site cutting and packaging is that they can inject pure nitrogen or even carbon monoxide into the package as they wrap it, which helps it stay bright red in the package for a week or longer. It also retards spoilage, I think.

[Mike Nolan]

Many meals I make wind up feeding the two of us for supper and lunch--sometimes several lunches. Some recipes just don't work well if you try to scale them down too much. Try making meat loaf for two, for example. When I make Vienna bread, I make two 14" loaves each weighing about 25 ounces before baking, then I cut each loaf in half and freeze them. Even then, sometimes a half-loaf will go bad before we eat that much bread, but at least that's better than throwing away 2/3 of a full loaf.

[Mike Nolan]

One time when I was trying to estimate how much batter to make for a shaped Wilton pan, I filled the pan to the 2/3 mark with pie beans, then poured them into a measuring cup.

[Mike Nolan]

I've been known to eat frozen cookie dough. 🙂

[Mike Nolan]

Sort of both. Around here a made-rite (without caps) is a seasoned loose ground beef sandwich, Made-Rite (with caps) is a small fast food restaurant chain featuring that type of sandwich, which they call a burger, though I don't think of them as burgers. I've seen them called tasty or tastee sandwiches, too.

One recipe for them is interesting for those on a low fat diet. You brown the ground beef, rinse it in boiling water, and then add spices. The boiling water removes most of the melted fat, so what's left is fairly low fat.

Nebraska is also home of the Runza, which has ground beef, cabbage and onions baked inside bread, often with other flavorings. Pirogis are similar sandwiches common out east.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

If it's loose but not sloppy, it sounds like what they call a Made-Rite. There's a Made-Rite at the Amana colonies exit on I-80 in Iowa. There used to be a place in Lincoln that made these (and the best onion chips in town), but it closed a few years ago after something like 5 decades, and is still sorely missed by many of us.

[Mike Nolan]

I've seen a pigeon hole cabinet used to store both rolling pins and rolls of waxed paper, plastic wrap, plastic bags, etc. (I've got the rolls and bags in a drawer, but the drawer is full and I've actually had to move some of the less frequently used ones to another drawer.)

Sometimes office supply stores have inexpensive cardboard ones for sorting mail that are 3x3 or 4x4.

Here's the Ikea wine rack I got, it sits at the back of the counter behind my flour bins, so it takes up very little space. I didn't bother fastening it to the wall, since it has flour bins in front of it.
Ikea wine rack

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