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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.
I'm not sure what you meant, Aaron, but a teaspoon of salt is about 5690 milligrams (2300 mg of sodium), not 12.
Some aromatics need to be added later in the cooking cycle because they either dissipate if added too soon or turn bitter if cooked for a long time. Vanilla is always added at the end, and basil will turn bitter if added too soon. By contrast, bay leaf needs to be added early in the cooking cycle, because it has to be cooked a long time to extract the flavor.
Onion if added early will caramelize and turn sweeter, if added towards the end it retains more of the sharp ohion flavor.
Salt is a complicated ingredient, it has culinary purposes beyond just flavor. Because it is hygroscopic (it absorbs water), it affects the food it's added to. For example, it is commonplace to 'sweat' vegetables like zucchini or eggplant by sprinkling them with salt to extract the moisture. What I don't know is whether if you then rinse them off if that removes most of the salt. I'll have to do some research into that.
Similarly, adding salt to bread dough will tighten the dough considerably. Kidpizza/Cass is one of many bakers who recommend waiting until towards the end of the mixing cycle to add salt to bread.
As I recall, most dough enhancers include vital wheat gluten and some kind of acid, and often either barley or soy flour, which would add enzymes.
King Arthur's whole wheat improver has vital wheat gluten, soy flour, inactive yeast and ascorbic acid.
I think you could replicate much of what it does by adding some vital wheat gluten, a little vinegar and some diastatic barley malt.
Most bread recipes are usually between 1.25% and 2% salt (baker's weight, ie, compared to the weight of the flour). A few years back I did some experimenting and found that you can cut the salt down to about 1% before you start to notice much change in either texture or taste.
The no-salt challah I made yesterday was rather bland, Peter Reinhart's challah uses about 1.4% salt.
The cinnamon rolls I made yesterday called for 1/4 teaspoon of salt in a recipe that used 150 grams of flour, so it was already only at about 1% salt. I cut that to 1/8 teaspoon and couldn't tell the difference in taste at all. They might have been a bit more puffy, but I don't consider that a bad thing in a cinnamon roll!
Paddy's Clonmel Kitchens Double Crusty Bread recipe, which I use to make Vienna bread, has 2 teaspoons of salt in about 32 ounces of flour, or about 1.25% salt (though it does have an egg, so that adds some sodium from the egg white.) I may try making it with just one teaspoon of salt.
And of course there is a little sodium in wheat flour, too.
As I recall, different brands of kosher salt have a different weight per teaspoon, because the size of the salt crystals isn't standard. But if you measure by teaspoon, you're definitely adding less salt by weight when you use kosher salt.
The salt manufacturers do not recommend using kosher salt for baking bread, because it may not dissolve as well as finer grained table salt does. It's OK for other kinds of cooking.
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