[Mike Nolan]

Recently I've been using celery seed in a lot of my cooking, I think it would go very well with salmon and couscous. Savory and marjoram also go good together. (And parsley is good on almost everything!)

[Mike Nolan]

I'm gearing up for my pre-Easter Hot Cross Buns baking marathon starting Thursday. This year I think I'll be making at least 2 batches of the Hot Cross Buns from the KAF Whole Grains book, because we have 3 new neighbors, all with several kids, and I think I may try one batch using a gluten-free recipe for some GF people at my wife's office, plus I'll send in some of the whole wheat ones.

Was at a banquet this evening and one of the other guests at our table was talking about a Finnish brown bread she had recently, one that was made with rye flour and molasses. I see several recipes for this on the Internet, she's going to try to get the one she had for me. She said it was sweet, but not like Boston brown bread, which she's also had. She thought it had some seeds in it, I see recipes that have both caraway and fennel in them.

I've been collecting dark rye recipes for a while, I'm going to be trying to make a black bread that doesn't use something like coffee, cocoa or caramel to color the dough dark.

(Note: I had posted this in the wrong thread, so I moved it and two other posts to the current week's thread.)

[Mike Nolan]

Happy Birthday, CW!

[Mike Nolan]

Apropos of this thread, over the weekend I ran across a recent Epicurious article talking about a recipe that is remarkably close to my mother's oatmeal crisps cookie recipe:

Epicurious post

What I found interesting about this article is that the author was trying to improve her grandmother's 'Cowboy Cookie' recipe. Her conclusions: Changing from Crisco to butter adds a nice buttery flavor, but causes the cookies to go flat, something I've known since the 1950's. (My sister always made these cookies with butter. When my younger son tried experimenting with the recipe about 10 years ago, his first thought was to change from Crisco to butter, too. As Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr first said in 1849: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!)

Otherwise, add more salt and use less leavening.

Do that (and reduce the vanilla) and you wind up with the recipe MY mother always used. (I've experimented with using alternate chocolates, but I usually go back to Nestles Morsels.)

Her other suggestion, let the dough rest for 24-36 hours, is one that would NEVER have worked in our house, we kids (and my mother) ate almost as much raw dough as we baked.

[Mike Nolan]

Look at recent winning recipes from the Pillsbury Bake-Off, they all feature shortcuts to actually making dough. (And Pillsbury has IMHO been stacking the contest to favor those types of recipes.)

These days half of my net searches seem to bring up Twitter posts.

Is it any wonder that, according to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon is replacing Google as the primary search tool for products?

[Mike Nolan]

The thing about barley malt, though, is that it colors the dough, so your bagels won't have a classic white interior. I like the flavor it brings, though. Non-diastatic barley malt powder is nearly colorless, and brings a similar sweetness but without the color.

[Mike Nolan]

Tonight I made boneless center cut pork chops, baked in the oven in a little butter and lemon, with a classic Sauce Robert. (Demi-glace, onions, white wine, dijon mustard)

This is the first time I've tried making Sauce Robert (possibly one of the oldest sauces in the repertoire), I was pleased that my wife liked it.

[Mike Nolan]

Bagels aren't hard to make, though most home bakers will boil them in an alkali solution made with baking soda rather than with cooking lye. (You really do need to wear gloves and use eye protection when using lye. I suspect you have to be careful what kind of pot you use for the lye solution, too, though I've not researched that.)

Several years ago an article in the New York Times suggested taking baking soda and baking it in a hot oven, turning it from sodium bicarbonate to sodium carbonate. That will make a more strongly alkaline solution, though still quite a bit weaker than one made with lye (sodium hydroxide.) I still haven't tried this.

Though I've done it a few times, I don't usually take the time to retard the bagels for 24 hours to develop the classic sour tang of a NY bagel, I can't say anybody's noticed.

I've tried several bagel dough recipes, the one I like best is Peter Reinhart's recipe in his Artisan book. He puts some barley syrup in the dough (and in the boiling water)

[Mike Nolan]

They may not carry it during certain times of the year, because without the cornstarch it is very prone to clump.

I wonder if baker's superfine sugar would work here? It's not as finely ground as powdered sugar, but it is much finer than granulated sugar.

[Mike Nolan]

It's the cornstarch in powdered sugar that impacts the taste. You can get powdered sugar without cornstarch in it, some people call it icing sugar, but it's kind of hard to find in the USA, and usually expensive. (KAF had it at one point, not sure if they still do.)

[Mike Nolan]

What's worse is that a lot of those repeated recipes are badly flawed.

[Mike Nolan]

Bagel molds?? Now, you can do it the classic ‘wrap around your hand’ way, or you can do it the ‘poke a hole in the middle’ way, but a mold is just SO WRONG!

We prefer bagels made with about 3 ounces of dough as opposed to the much bigger commercial bagels, which are more like 4.5 ounces each, if not bigger. (I think the Wolferman ones are closer to 6 ounces each.) 3 ounces is not enough dough for me to do it the ‘wrap around your hand’ way, but I have fat hands.

[Mike Nolan]

I've always considered baking both an art and a science. Both have to be reasonably right, but there's room for innovation and experimentation in both.

There are times I go into 'mad scientist' mode, but I also know I'm a better scientist than I am an artist. (Comes from that engineering training in college and the fact that I can't draw a straight line!)

I suspect many families would prefer their designated baker not experiment so much, I know my wife has said that to me.

[Mike Nolan]

My mother made a potato salad where she poured oil and vinegar over diced cooked potatoes while the potatoes were still hot, so the oil and vinegar soaked in. She'd add hard boiled egg, celery, onion and celery seed. No mustard or mayo.

Not sure if this is similar to some of the German potato salad recipes or not, as it is served cold, not hot.

I have discovered if you follow the instructions for cooking potatoes in McGee (soak the diced potatoes in 130-140 degree water for 20 minutes first), the potatoes don't get soggy.

My grandmother seldom used recipes. She'd add raisins to stuffing for Thanksgiving, but other than that it wasn't unique.

However, she made a rice pudding that I've never come close to duplicating. I remember helping her stir it for what seemed like hours. Closest I've come to it in the nearly 50 years since she died is to add some tapioca.

[Mike Nolan]

Last year Melissa Weller, the head baker at the bagel and bakery program at Sadelle's in NY, held a two-day class on bagels, bialys and babkas in Montclair NJ, for members of the Bread Bakers Guild of America. Maybe she'll repeat it some time.

Many of the BBGA classes are on the east coast or the west coast, but Jory Downer, owner of Bennison's Bakery and a member of the 2005 Gold Medal Coupe du Monde team, is doing one on laminated doughs in Chicago in September. Tempting! And the Chocolate Academy has said they'll be doing some kind of 10th anniversary celebration the week of Sep 23rd, might be reason enough to go to Chicago for a week!

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