[Mike Nolan]

Made meatballs in marinara sauce to go with pre-made cheese tortellini from Costco.

[Mike Nolan]

It should come as no great surprise that the test kitchen staff at any food company are considered part of the marketing department. Their job is to create demand for their products. Even distributors like Sysco have chefs on staff who travel around to key customers and show them new products and new ways to use existing products.

More than once I've gotten the impression that the buyers at King Arthur don't talk to the test kitchen staff. PJ once told me that she had spent several weeks working on an article only to find out that a key ingredient in it had been dropped from the warehouse (which is just down the stairs),

[Mike Nolan]

The thing that has always fascinated me about baking is how you take 4 ingredients that are either inedible or uninteresting, water, flour, yeast and salt, combine them, and the magic of bread happens!

And as you bring other ingredients such as oil, sugar and eggs, you get everything from cake to waffles.

As to cooking, I think it appeals to the engineer in me, cooking is just altering the properties of foodstuffs, so it's applied chemistry and physics. There's a precision to it, yet also an art.

I once saw a well-known (Iron) chef take a jumbo shrimp and with a few knife cuts turn it into a dragon in front of our eyes.

[Mike Nolan]

I've seen shortbread listed as a 3 ingredient product, but that generally includes salted butter. Shortbread without salt would probably be on the bland side.

Vanilla, contrary to its reputation, is another way of avoiding bland, but it is also possible to have too much vanilla.

The Scottish Shortbread recipe that I use as the basis for an apple crisp has vanilla in it, but it is also a King Arthur recipe.

The NYTimes has a shortbread 10 ways recipe, one of the ways is to add vanilla bean, another is to add citrus, a third is to add maple syrup, a fourth is to add spices like cardamom. All ways of avoiding bland.

Several of those ways sound good to me.

[Mike Nolan]

Most edible fats/oils are lighter than water, but they're not all the same density.

Butter is a complex substance, in addition to butterfat it has water and milk solids. The dairy controls how much of the water in butter is pressed out, in the USA butter is generally between 15 and 20% WATER. European butters tend to have more of the water pressed out, some of them can have a slow as 12% water. I think Ghee has essentially all the water and milk solids removed.

[Mike Nolan]

Spice vendors would like you to believe you need to replace all your herbs and spices once a year, if not more frequently. I don't do that, and neither do any of the professional chefs I know. (There is a noticeable difference between fresh herbs and dried ones, but once they're dried, the rate of change seems to be quite slow to me.)

I do think the type of container and where it is stored affects potency, though. In particular, the 'flip open' jars seem to dry out faster than the screw lid ones. And if you store them at the back of the stove or in a cabinet that is close to a heat source, then I'm sure they probably do dry out faster.

I do think that Penzy's may do a better job of pulling out-of-date items from their shelves than your typical grocery store does, but that assume you can find freshness dates on them at all. (Not every herb or spice has them, though most have tracking codes.)

And if you buy herbs and spices that are stored in bulk and weighted out when you buy them, who knows how long they've been there?!

[Mike Nolan]

I mill my own whole wheat flours, so I'm always on the lookout for places to buy wheat berries in bulk.

I used to be able to get Wheat Montana hard red spring/winter wheat in a 25 pound bag at the local WalMart or Hy-Vee, but both have stopped carrying it.

This summer we stopped by the Wheat Montana bakery/store in Three Forks MT, and I could have bought wheat berries in 50 pound bags, but didn't have space for them in the car. So I bought some 5 pound bags of wheat berries (at a much higher price per pound, sadly.)

My Nutrimill impact mill came from Pleasant Hill Grain, which sells wheat berries and other whole grains in 45 pound buckets. (I recommend also ordering the screw on Gamma Seal lid.) Their website has a pretty wide variety of things, and is a dangerous place to browse. I ordered my Bamix stick blender from them. (Bamix invented the stick blender and makes an industrial strength but home kitchen sized one, it's not cheap but it's durable, I went through 3 or 4 cheaper stick blenders in a few years.)

WalMart's online store has 26 pound tubs of Wheat Berries for a pretty good price.

[Mike Nolan]

In 2015 I ordered a case (1000) of plastic gusseted bread bags that were 5.5 x 4.75 x 19 (.65 mil thickness) from International Plastics With shipping they were under 5 cents each.

The stock number was BR-HI1019L The only bread I've baked that didn't fit in them was the celebration Challahs I baked last fall, as those were about 20 inches long.

It'll probably take me another year to use up the rest of the case, but I think next time I'll order the slightly thicker BR-HI1019 bag, which should add less than 2 cents to the cost of each bag.

Side note: I've moved this thread over to the 'Sources' category.

[Mike Nolan]

I order citric acid powder, spices and wintergreen mints from Bulk Foods.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't blind bake much, but I have done some experimenting with it. I never use a baking sheet under the pan for blind baking, I think it interferes with the air flow.

I have played around a little with the convection cycle on my oven for blind baking, but not enough to have reached any conclusions yet. (I do use the convection cycle for the first 20 minutes of baking a fruit pie.)

I use white pie beans. When we blind-baked in pastry school, our instructor told most of us to add more beans, so make sure you use enough.

In pastry school we used parchment to line the pan (the beans should never touch the pie dough), I've also tried aluminum foil and coffee filters, of these commercial-sized coffee filters seem to be best, but mostly because they've already got the right shape. But you generally have to buy them in huge quantities. The biggest advantage of aluminum foil is if you mold it over the edges you generally don't need to use a pie shield to keep the top edge from getting over-baked.

All our pies in pastry school were made in disposable aluminum foil pie pans. At home I use a glass pie pan for blind baking, I use a Norpro non-stick pan for fruit pies. (It really is non-stick, you can slide the pie right out once it's cool.)

Some blind baking instructions (including, as I recall, King Arthur's) recommend you remove the pie beans for the last 5 minutes or so of baking, but that's challenging because they're HOT. I'm not sure it's necessary, either. We didn't do that in pastry school.

Lately my pie-baking experimentation has been geared towards trying to determine the optimal thickness of pie dough, from which I'm hoping to be able to create a pie dough recipe calculator, so you don't have too much left over pie dough or run short. To assist in this effort I'm using a digital caliper which can measure in 0.01 inch increments that I got at Shipwreck Beads.

One thing I wonder about pie dough is whether the type of pie dough (butter, lard, shortening or a combination of fats) affects the ideal thickness. I suppose it might affect proper blind baking as well.

I consider hot water pie crusts a different breed, worthy of its own set of investigations.

[Mike Nolan]

I've resigned myself to the fact that there are ingredients just that have to be ordered online, pastry flour, for example. (All I can find locally is whole wheat pastry flour, which I am not impressed with.) I can't find semolina locally any more, either. (The co-op used to stock it in bulk but dropped it.)

WalMart's selection often leaves a lot to be desired. I buy some items there because of price, but even then the local chains often beat them on the basics, especially if you watch for the sales.

[Mike Nolan]

We'll have 6 for supper tonight, our older son and his family are here, plus a family friend. (We think the last time he was here for Thanksgiving was around 1996.)

We'll be having:

Relish tray
Olive tray (one of our guests is allergic to olives, so we keep them separate)
Turkey and gravy
2 kinds of stuffing (bread cubes and GF cornbread)
Mashed potatoes
Dreaded Green Bean Casserole
Roasted Brussels Sprouts
Cranberry Sauce, two kinds (fresh and canned)
Apple Pie (currently in the oven)

It'll be in the 60's here today, so I'm doing the turkey on the outdoor gas rotisserie/grill, that always makes for the juiciest turkey.

[Mike Nolan]

Made bottom round with onion gravy and gluten-free cornbread, some to go with the beef, some to make GF stuffing with tomorrow.

[Mike Nolan]

I've made sweet potato breads before, so it's possible. But sweet potatoes really are sweeter than ordinary potatoes, so you may need to adjust the amount of sugar the recipe calls for.

[Mike Nolan]

Not really cooking or baking today, but I did temper a batch of milk chocolate and fill a bunch of chocolate molds to make pieces for a chocolate Advent calendar for our granddaughter. It's the first chocolate work I've done in a few months, so it was good to practice those skills.

[Author]

Posts