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As I recall, cornstarch doesn't really thicken until it gets to about 160 degrees, so just adding hot water won't thicken it much. I suspect your cornstarch was undercooked, and that makes it taste, well, cornstarchy. 🙂
Nearly any acid would help brighten the flavor, maybe a half teaspoon of red wine vinegar? Or anything with pectin, like apples.
Did you pre-cook the filling? My experience with cornstarch pie fillings is that they need to be precooked, because they don't get cooked enough in the oven.
The berry pie recipe we got at SFBI pastry school uses a little lemon juice, the extra acid perks up the flavor.
The tomato vines are growing nicely here, but I haven't seen much in the way of blooms. I suspect until we get a break in the weather, we won't see much fruit set. Usually we get such a break in mid-summer and that means late summer for tomatoes. But several booths at the farmer's market had some good looking tomatoes today.
The Irish Apple Cake I made for the 4th came out really good, I think it was because I made a 1.5 X batch, but used 2 eggs rather than 1.5 eggs, so it was closer to a cake batter than a pie dough. I wound up spreading it around with a pallet knife.
I find the best way to deal with meat smells is to put the trash outside, this gives it a chance to decay more rapidly.
And the red one probably came out more of a red-orange, too. I think that's one reason why red velvet cake has so much red food coloring in it.
Anyway, now you know how to make a lovely cake for Columbus Day. 🙂
We stopped at the North Market in Columbus OH on the way home from Pittsburgh and I bought some veal. I used it tonight to make Veal Zurich (veal in a white wine and cream sauce), served on spaetzle.
I used my honey wheat recipe which calls for equal weights of AP and whole wheat flour. The whole wheat flour was a mixture of hard red winter wheat and soft red spring wheat that I had ground up in my impact mill. I substituted the clear flour for the AP.
I wound up filling 4 plastic bags with about 4 pounds each of clear flour, plus several large flour canisters. The bags and possibly one of the flour canisters will go in the freezer.
Clear flour has a somewhat higher protein content than most AP flours, so the loaves may have risen a bit more than normal, but the taste is about the same.
The irony of first clear flour being expensive these days is that it used to be an inexpensive alternative to patent flour, but the cream color was considered undesirable for a 'white bread', so it was used mostly for rye bread.
I made Irish Apple Cake using Darina Allen's recipe for dough and the Winesap apple pie filling I made last fall. I made 9 of them in ramekins, now I just have to wait for them to cool enough to dig in. They look and smell great.
I made potato salad to go with hot dogs and Irish apple cake.
Yesterday I made the honey wheat bread using first clear flour and whole wheat flour, I doubt that anyone could tell much difference, I sure couldn't.
After almost two weeks on the road, we're back home and I'm making Vienna bread. I'll start experimenting with the first clear flour another day, probably starting with using it in the honey wheat recipe, since we're out of that, too.
Now you know why I wanted to get a 50 pound bag!
I got it at a restaurant supply store, 50 pounds for about $19. I figure even if I don't use 3/4 of it, I'm ahead financially. I'm going to double bag a bunch of it and freeze it.
A few year back I had my (now former) neighbor check and while ConAgra and Gold Medal both have clear flours in their catalogs, they're only carried by the east coast distribution centers (and sometimes on the west coast.) Unless he wanted to order a pallet (probably 40 bags), it wasn't available in the midwest.
I haven't done any baking all week, as I'm at my son's house, but I did buy a 50 pound bag of first clear flour to take home. I'm going to be experimenting with using that in place of AP flour in some recipes.
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