[Mike Nolan]

I didn't get the veal ragout made until tonight, but it was delicious, took about 90 minutes for the veal to get tender on the stovetop. Had it with a salad and a little cheese toast.

[Mike Nolan]

Last night I also made a ground beef Stroganoff, served on toast. Tonight I'm going to be experimenting with some veal stew meat, tomatoes, peppers, onions and mushrooms. I bought a 7 bone chuck roast to make over the weekend.

[Mike Nolan]

That's because your chocolate was not tempered. Heating chocolate higher than about 105 degrees causes the cocoa butter to lose all crystal structure, and when it cools a random mixture of various crystal states (alpha-1 through alpha-5) will form. Only alpha-5 is solid at room temperature. It might harden up some over time (a few weeks) because there's a sixth crystal state (alpha-6) that is also solid at room temperature but doesn't appear until chocolate sits for several weeks.

[Mike Nolan]

Thanks for the status update, Len. You should drop then a note letting them know about your concerns and see how they respond.

[Mike Nolan]

The weather is supposed to be taking a turn for the worse today, and I'll be making a batch of chicken noodle soup.

[Mike Nolan]

Today I'm making Vienna Bread from the Double Crusty recipe, but I only used 3/4 of a teaspoon of salt instead of 2 teaspoons.

[Mike Nolan]

Tonight I'm roasting a half-chicken with sage, rosemary and thyme seasoning. I'll probably throw the other half of the chicken in the stockpot tomorrow for soup. (It was a big bird, about 7 pounds.)

I'm no longer sure there's much point to searing the outside of a roast before cooking it. It doesn't "hold in the juices" as was incorrectly stated by German chemist Justus von Liebig in 1847 and then repeated for the next 150 years. All it really does is make sure that the outside is more well-done than the rest, and I'm far from convinced that's a good thing.

[Mike Nolan]

The nutrition labels in the USA don't give you a lot to go on, because they usually consider a 'serving' of flour to be somewhere around 30 grams and they report protein content in gram intervals, so you basically will see 3 or 4 grams of protein per serving.

4 grams of protein per 30 gram serving really means somewhere between 3.50 grams and 4.49 grams, which means somewhere between 11.6666% protein and 14.96%, which is a pretty wide range.

So you can sort of tell whether a flour is a fairly low protein flour (below 11.66%) or not, but that's about it.

I've been reading nutrition labels a lot more lately, because of my low-sodium diet, but I still think they are less helpful than they could be. (And I hold out zero hope that they'll ever be meaningfully improved.)

Another annoying aspect of the labels is what they consider a serving. I bought a candy bar once that contained 2.5 servings. Yeah, right.

[Mike Nolan]

I always thought '00' flour referred to the degree to which it is ground, 00 being a fine grind (which cake flour is, too.) The protein content is going to depend on what kind of wheat it's made from.

Most European flours are lower in protein content than North American 'all purpose' flours, even after you take into account the differences in how the protein content is measured by European standards and American standards.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

I would think they'd be similar, though a metal dutch oven would be a lot dryer than a cloche, especially if you follow the instructions I've seen for soaking the cloche in water before putting the dough in it and then bringing it up to temp from a cold oven, so that it gets steamy inside. But your dough can lose up to 20% of its weight in evaporated water, so there's plenty of water available for steam, and you can always spray the top of the loaf and the sides of the pan after it rises, too.

I've seen instructions for baking bread in a dutch oven that has you pre-heat the pan and put the dough in it after it has been heated, that always sounds a bit tricky to pull off without burning yourself.

A heavy cast iron dutch oven might be a bigger heat sink, meaning it would hold more residual heat than a ceramic cloche.

[Mike Nolan]

If you're making thin crust pizza, 9 ounces of dough will make a 12" pizza.

[Mike Nolan]

Depending on the diameter, it might be interesting to utilize that basket weave with your round cloche.

[Mike Nolan]

Semolina is made from durum wheat, I"m not sure it makes a lot of difference if you use durum or semolina, which is a coarse ground durum endosperm, in pizza. I've got some bread recipes that call for both semolina and durum, though.

[Mike Nolan]

With a lean cut like round, a slow roasting should work. I usually stick to eye of round, because it slices well for sandwiches.

[Mike Nolan]

Congratulations on your find. You should be able to make nearly any type of bread in your new cloche. (I've heard of problems with breads with chocolate in them in a cloche because the chocolate scorches, but other than that you should be fine.)

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