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Greg Patent wrote what may be the definitive article on the history of Boston Cream Pie for the journal Gastronomica back in 2001. He had it on his website, but it looks like the link is messed up again. I'll drop him a note to see if he can fix it again.
I had a series of emails with Greg a few years back, I was convinced (and he later confirmed) that the original icing on a Boston Cream pie was made using confectioner's fondant. (This is NOT the same thing as cake decorating fondant.) Almost nobody does it that way anymore, though, most use a chocolate ganache, whether it is semisweet or more of a milk chocolate ganache seems to vary depending on what part of the country you're in.
When I took my chocolate academy course last fall, other than the instructor I was the only one there who had ever made confectioner's fondant. It's made sort of like an unflavored fudge, but then is creamed on a marble surface until it becomes crumbly. Then you store it in a sealed jar and after a few days it softens and becomes almost like silly putty. It will last several weeks at that point.
The Fannie Farmer cookbook supposedly has the original Parker House rolls recipe in it.
I made the chocolate mushroom cookie dough today, my wife is going to roll them out and bake them either later today or tomorrow. (Probably just circles, not the mushroom shape.)
I spent quite a few months trying to get Parker House rolls that didn't pop open when they were baked.
Tried several different recipes and quite a few different ways to shape/fold them. Some recipes were so buttery that they were slippery on the outside before baking. But they all popped open. They were tasty, but I wanted to solve the popping open problem.
Then King Arthur had a blog post on them: Parker House Rolls
The recipe wasn't my favorite (in general I don't like rolls made with mashed potatoes, potato flour or potato starch) but the instructions they gave pretty much solved the problem and that method works with the recipes I prefer the taste of, too.
No matter what recipe you prefer, they're incredibly rich and buttery, so I save them for special occasions. I have my suspicion that restaurants have a trick to doing them.
Martha is about style, not utility. Whenever I see something recommended by her, I look for something else.
I have stainless steel backsplash with the big 48" stove that's part of the range hood, I think it is easier to keep clean than a large expanse of tile would be. It took me a while to find something to clean baked-on stains off it, I use the same thing commercial kitchens use, carbon-off.
Our range hood isn't a commercial one, it's the one DCS was selling with the 48" dual fuel range 20 years ago. It has a shelf, 2 heat lamps (that we almost never use), a light and a variable speed fan that at high speed clears a lot of smoke quickly.
True commercial range hoods these days have fire suppression systems in them that make them way too expensive for a home kitchen, and they're huge to boot.
The single sink in the kitchen is 23 x 17 x 9. It was designed to be the 'prep' sink, but it's the best one for washing the large pots and pans. We have an even bigger double sink in the laundry room, both 23 x 17 but over 11 inches deep. At the time it was the biggest stainless steel sink we could find in either the US or Canada.
A commercial pot sink is usually big enough to hold a full sheet pan, so the bottom is at least 26x18, but they're not very pretty, I've seen one in a laundry room but never in a home kitchen.
Lifting a pot with 10 or more quarts of water is something I try to avoid, too. I never put the pot in the sink unless I'm washing it, and that sink is large enough that I can just tip it over to drain it.
To fill it I use the sprayer hose with the pot on the counter or the edge of the sink. These days I'm more likely to put the pot on the stove and fill it using a two quart pitcher.
I debated having a cold water tap by the stove, which I've seen in some commercial kitchens for filling large pots, but my plumbers recommended against it, because they drip.
I thought about suggesting Bakewell Cream, but I looked at the ingredients and it has sodium pyrophosphate.
One item that I would not be without in a kitchen these days is an instant hot water tap. It's great for making tea or any dish or task that calls for boiling water, the water that comes out of the tap is at 185 degrees. (The only downside is that they wear out, we've replaced the one in the kitchen 3-4 times in 20 years, hard water might make that worse.)
We put a whole house filter in our house, a 5 micron particulate filter and an activated charcoal one, but we're on city water. Every time the plumbing folks asked us about a water softener, I told them: I don't add chemicals to water, I take them out!
There are whole house filters specifically designed for high iron (well) water.
We found out the hard way a couple of years ago that your water heater has to have an anode element designed for the chemistry of your water. The city changed its water chemistry a bit, and the hot water heater needed a different anode. We wound up replacing the basement dishwasher and then the input valve on the replacement unit several times before we figured that out, because there was this sludge that was collecting in the valve. It also caused at least one water heater replacement. Between appliance replacements and plumbing bills (plus $100 to have the state lab test our water, which was when we figured out the real problem), we probably spent more than $2000.
We have two sinks in our kitchen, one on the north wall and one on the center island. The original plan was to put in a standalone commercial pot sink (really deep, for washing things like stock pots), but that ran into aesthetic issues. But we did find an especially large/deep sink at a homebuilder show, made in Canada by Kindred. That was 20 years ago, since then US manufacturers are making bigger/deeper stainless steel sinks.
I recently read an article about a chef who designed the kitchen in his new restaurant around the 'pit' (the place where dirty dishes are taken and washed.)
Sounds like you may need to avoid the double-acting baking powders, because it appears those all use phosphorus, but a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and cream of tartar might be OK on your diet. Let us know if you find anything out.
We have a Moen and a Price-Pfister pull-out style faucet in our two kitchen sinks. Of the two, I think the cheaper Price-Pfister might actually work better.
Both are replacements for the original Kohler faucets we put in, both of which had separate hose sprayers that just didn't work well for us.
I've not spent a lot of time working in commercial kitchens, mostly when taking classes, but I kind of like the spring-loaded sprayers I've used there. They're not very pretty, though.
It strikes me as sort of a cross between a pie crust and a blitz puff pastry.
Kenji Lopez-Alt more or less disproved the idea that you can't get a flaky piecrust if you work the butter into small pieces, but his method requires some discipline. (Most good ideas do.)
The real key with piecrust is not to overwork it once the water has been added, that'll lead to a tough and definitely NOT flaky piecrust.
Whole wheat pastry flour is the only pastry flour I can find locally.
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