[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, 10 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.)

[Mike Nolan]

Lunch for me today was a turkey sandwich made with the no-salt Challah and some of the turkey breast tender that I roasted yesterday. I am hoping to find some ways to infuse some additional flavor into the turkey without adding salt.

Supper was pain perdue (French Toast), also made with the no-salt Challah.

[Mike Nolan]

When I make pizza I get the oven as hot as I can, at least 500 degrees. A commercial pizza oven is probably going to be set at 650 degrees if not hotter than that.

[Mike Nolan]

I used to make Peter Reinhart's Vienna Bread from the Bread Baker's Apprentice, but I have discovered that if I substitute butter for the oil in the Clonmel Double Crusty bread and follow the instructions for shaping, scoring and baking Vienna Bread in BBA, it makes a very acceptable Vienna bread. In fact, I did a taste test with my family and the Double Crusty version won hands down.

When I was growing up, my grandmother would often take us to Savanna Illinois on Saturdays to go shopping. The highlight of the trip was a trip to the bakery. The Clonmel recipe has a smell that takes me back to that bakery. Now, if I could just figure out how to make their creme horns!

[Mike Nolan]

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.

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