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BA, I know of Ginsberg's book, but it is not one I currently have. I don't currently maintain any starters because the sourness of most sourdough breads is something my wife can't tolerate. Oddly enough, when we're in San Francisco, where our younger son lives, she has no trouble with sourdough bread there.
One of these days I may try the Chad Robertson (Tartine Bakery) method for producing a less 'mature' sourdough starter, to see if my wife could handle it. But it's kind of an intense process and there are a lot of steps where you have to throw away as much as 95% of your starter, and I hate throwing usable food away.
That's how I make oat flour from rolled oats, the longer you process it in the food processor the finer it is ground up.
There are a number of King Arthur Flour recipes that utilize products that they sell on their website, the Whole Grain Bread Improver is one of those products. Hopefully the Vital Wheat Gluten and a little vinegar will have a similar effect.
Diastatic Barley Malt is often added to wheat flour at the mill. (Look on the label, you may see 'barley flour' or DBM listed.) It contains enzymes that help break down the starch in the flour into simple sugars that yeast can digest. Yeast contains similar enzymes, but adding the DBM gives the yeast a bit of assistance.
You may also see sources for non-diastatic barley malt. In this case, the barley has been heated to disable those enzymes. NDBM is basically a flavoring ingredient, it adds a nutty taste and a bit of sweetness to the dough. Adding barley syrup accomplishes pretty much the same thing.
'Malting' refers to sprouting a seed before grinding it up. When a seed sprouts, it becomes a chemical factory, manufacturing a number of compounds, including several enzymes, that aren't present in the seed if it is just ground up into flour. So you will sometimes see malted barley flour or malted wheat flour in the grocery store, there are a number of interesting recipes that call for malted wheat flour.
Here are three of my favorite recipes from the Whole Grains book: Pretzels, Scottish Shortbread and Hot Cross Buns. (I tried a number of hot cross buns recipes, these are the best I found.)
Like any cookbook, there are good recipes and ones that aren't so good in the KAF Whole Grains book.
I ran the KAF 100% whole wheat sandwich bread (with walnuts and sunflower seeds) through my recipe analyzer, it comes up as quite moist, around 73% hydration. I'd probably recommend adding up to a half-cup of flour to it. It's also on the sweet side, which helps to explain the wide variance in rise times, especially if your kitchen is cool, so an osmotolerant yeast like SAF Gold might help.
In the absence of the KAF Whole Grain Bread Improver, I'd suggest adding 2 teaspoons of vital wheat gluten and replacing 2 tablespoons of the water with vinegar. If you have diastatic barley malt, I'd suggest adding a teaspoon of it as well.
I love rye breads, even throwing a 1/4 cup of rye flour in a white bread recipe adds a nice flavor to it. I used to get a very good coarse pumpernickel flour when I was on site at my company's HQ in Tennessee, but now that I'm retired I probably won't be making that trip. I probably should buy another bag of rye berries and grind it myself.
There's a new professor at the department of Agronomy and Horticulture who is from Germany. He's been disappointed with the bread he finds here, so my wife had me make some of my honey wheat bread and she took a loaf of it to him today. I hope he likes it.
If he asks for something more like a German black bread I'm hoping he has some recipes for it, because I haven't been able to make anything like the black bread we had in Germany. As I understand it, it is baked in a brick oven for a long time, like 18 hours, which causes the flour to caramelize even on the inside and turns it dark, and that might be difficult to replicate. Adding caramel coloring, cocoa or coffee to turn it dark is a kludge.
Personally, I prefer breads that are not baked in a loaf pan, it gives more character and substance to the crust, and you can play with the shape a lot. (Shape has a surprisingly significant impact on the taste of bread, something many authors tend to ignore.)
Last night I made Honey Wheat Bread.
In general, the dough should fill 2/3 to 3/4 of the pan before the final rise. I've always called the part that extended beyond the width of the pan 'wings', but 'ears' is a reasonable description, too. In extreme cases, you wind up with a loaf where a slice looks like a mushroom.
I'll run that recipe through my analyzer later today, but it does look rather high in sugar, and I suspect the yeast was increased to compensate. An osmotolerant yeast like SAF Gold might help, it's designed for use in sweeter doughs, although some people use it for all their baking.
Although I don't hunt myself (I get too impatient and have trouble standing still that long), I know a lot of people who do (my wife works at the Ag college), and I know that rite of passage quite well, as I grew up in deer country in NW Illinois. We would get a lot of hunters coming out from Chicago, many of them clueless. I wondered if some of them knew which end of a rifle the bullets came out of.
There's an old story about a farmer who was tired of having his cattle shot during deer season, so he painted COW on the side of them with whitewash. Didn't help.
And there's an even more extreme rite of passage among bow hunters when they get their first deer.
Tell your granddaughter congratulations!
Too many people just turn venison into sausage or burger meat. A venison roast is delicious, though it is so lean you often have to coat it with fat (like bacon strips) or bard it.
One of the higher sodium content vegetables is celery, 32 mg in each stalk. I have a friend who is a celery fanatic, she could eat an entire bunch of celery in a few hours.
It's because both are a complex blend of naturally occurring substances.
Milk contains water, fat, proteins, lactose (milk sugar), minerals, pigments, enzymes and compounds called phospholipids.
Egg white contains water, proteins (including albumen and mucoproteins) and globulins.
In both cases, several of those compounds have sodium in them. There are other naturally occurring elements in eggs as well, notably sulfur in the yolk.
Some of it is based on the type of animal, some cows produce a milk that is higher in butterfat, for example. There are at least two breeds of hens that produce an egg that has a blue shell.
Eggs that are high in riboflavin (Vitamin B2) can have a greenish tint to the egg white.
And it is also somewhat affected by diet, corn fed hens tend to produce yellower egg yolks, for example, and high-omega eggs come from chickens that have been fed a diet specifically designed to produce omega-3 and related fats in eggs, though I think most of that is in the yolk.
But there's only about 62 mg of sodium in a large egg, most of that in the egg white. So if you're watching your sodium intake, unless you're eating 4 dozen eggs a day (like Gaston in Beauty and the Beast), it is probably not something to worry about.
Interestingly enough, when I was looking at almond milk the other day, it actually has more sodium than cow's milk does, though there is very little sodium in almonds, 1 mg in a cup of almonds. I'm guessing they add it (along with things like vanilla) to make it taste better.
I just did a quick test with two of my measuring spoons, a round one and a rectangular one that fits in the salt container better.
I measured what appeared to my eye to be a level teaspoon of salt several times.
5687.5 mg is what the chemistry texts say is a teaspoon of salt.
The round one generally came in at about 5750 to 5850 mg, or just a bit high.
The rectangular one came up with two readings in the 5750 mg range and two in the 7500 mg range! I guess that rectangular shape is more deceiving as to when it is level.
At 4 1/4 ounces/cup, 4 cups or 17 ounces of flour and 1 teaspoon of salt works out to about 1.18% salt by baker's percentages.
Of course, just like how you measure flour makes a difference, your teaspoon measure could be off by 10-20%. (I've got a digital scale that measures is milligrams, 5687.5 milligrams of salt is a teaspoon.)
Remember wheat flour has some sodium in it and so will other ingredients, like milk or egg.
As I have said before, when I did some tests on several bread recipes cutting the salt to 1% did not appear to have a noticeable impact on either flavor or texture/crumb.
I know several people who make their own sausages. Some of them are deer hunters and that's what they do with the deer they get during deer hunting season. (A terrible waste of venison, IMHO.)
But when I've had their sausage, it actually tasted saltier than the store ones.
I remember Peter Reinhart had some comments in the recipes I was helping test for his Artisan book about the different weight of various brands of kosher salt. As I recall, Diamond kosher salt was slightly lighter than Morton kosher salt, because the crystals were larger, so there was more space between crystals. I don't recall if those comments made it into the published book.
I've made fresh ricotta by adding acid to warm milk and then straining it. It's fascinating to watch and quite different in taste from the ricotta you buy at the store. One of the vendors at the local farmer's market is an award-winning cheesemaker, she has her own herd of goats just so she has goat's milk to make cheese from.
Some years ago when we were in Oregon we stopped by the Tilamook cheese plant and watched them 'cheddar' a batch of milk by heating it. It was interesting to see this big tray of milk turn into cheese curds as we watched.
The New England Cheesemaking Supply Company has a fascinating website. I buy cheesecloth from them because it's far better and much cheaper than the stuff you can get at the store.
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