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I made another semolina bread loaf and froze half of it.
I keep meaning to bake some baking soda into sodium carbonate and try that for pretzels or bagels. Finding food-grade lye locally might be difficult, baking soda is easy to find, and according to the NY Times it takes about an hour to turn it into sodium carbonate. (I don't know what I'd use as a pan, I'd be concerned it would damage my baking pans.)
It isn't quite as alkali as a lye solution, so you might not need to use gloves and eye protection. What I remember about working with sodium hydroxide from chemistry class is that you have to be very careful mixing it, it'll spatter.
Lye (sodium hydroxide) has a pH of 12.88 (at a concentration of 100 mmol/liter), sodium bicarbonate has a pH of 8.31, sodium carbonate has a pH of 11.26
(Source: http://www.aqion.de/site/191)
I suspect the lye solution that is used for making pretzels and bagels is a lower concentration.
I'm not sure what's in the stuff that I use to raise the pH in our hot tub, but it may be mixed with something that's not food-safe.
That's a very nice looking loaf, nice shape, great height and I don't think it needs to be darker.
I like avocado, my wife doesn't. She's a Miracle Whip person, I'm a mayo person. She doesn't like arugula, I think it's OK but not as the only green in a salad. How have we managed to stay married for over 44 years?
My mother loved wilted lettuce salad (made with hot bacon fat and vinegar), I think it's inedible.
Eggplant that hasn't been sweated tends to get really soft and gooey, and just seems texturally unappetizing to me. I've made ratatouille a number of times, it also seems like a lot of work but at least it freezes well.
When I make marinara sauce I usually make 6-8 quarts of it and freeze most of it. But recently I've discovered that Hunts Traditional Pasta Sauce is garlic-free and makes a decent sauce for most dishes. The last time I made pizza I just used a light coating of tomato sauce. (Sam's Club's tomato sauce is one of the few tomato sauces that is garlic-free, we've discovered.)
Tomato-based dishes all seem to be pretty high in carbs (starting with the tomatoes themselves), so they're not something we make as often as we used to.
I think the dish that I invested the most time in with the least return was the time I made turducken for Christmas. Deboning the duck took the most time, but assembly was a close second. But then several of us came down with some kind of flu on Christmas morning and, though I cooked the turducken anyway, most of us just picked at it.
Looked at the video on the sheet pan BLT salad, I'd have to swap out the arugula and the avacado/mayo dressing, but otherwise it looks like it has potential.
Your 'breakfast for dinner' menu doesn't sound like that much less work than the shrimp/pineapple menu. 🙂
After having well over 4 inches of rain in the last 72 hours, it let up enough that I was able to do the sliders, brats and dogs on the outdoor gas grill and the party went well. The Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake was, as always, devoured.
For our party today I'm making deviled eggs, crab-stuffed mushrooms and I will be making sliders, hot dogs and brats. It's expected to be cold and rainy, so I'll probably be using the indoor gas griddle and doing the dogs and brats under the broiler.
I made a 10x10 (1/2 recipe) Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake for a party we're hosting.
ImageMagick is (mostly) command-line based, but really simple to use for many things, to convert a file from my camera's high setting (6000 x 4000) to 600 x 400 I use something like:
image infilename.jpg -resize 600x400 outfilename.jpg
I used Pagemaker many years ago when i was the editor of our state chess magazine, but I never got into tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, though many folks on the Ugly Hedgehog photo site swear by it.
My Canon T6i came with a Canon tool for manipulating photo images, I've used it a few times, I doubt it has even half the options Photoshop has, but it has many more options than I know how to use. The local community college runs classes on how to use Photoshop, it's around $300 per course and they have two or three levels of courses on it.
I think in Lincoln you don't have to have a 'commercial' kitchen if all you're going to do is sell at farmer's markets, but you do have to pass an inspection to get an 'unlicensed kitchen' certificate. And as I recall, cats that have access to the kitchen is a no-no. I don't know why.
Thanks for posting this.
This is why I've never had any dreams of selling my breads at a farmer's market or opening a bakery. I cannot imagine baking 144 loaves of bread in a day, much less baking several times that much bread day in and day out. (Also, we already have a local artisan baker at the major farmer's markets in the city, French-trained, using French #55 flour, and people who've tasted their bread and visited Paris says they are better than most of the boulangeries in Paris.)
I don't have a smart phone so I have no experience with whether the photo resolution can be adjusted.
There are quite a few tools out there that can be used to scale down the resolution of a digital photo, crop it or convert it from one image type to another. (I use ImageMagick, a Linux-platform tool, but I've been a Linux geek for longer than I care to think about, dating back to before version 1.0.)
Challah makes such good French toast that I doubt I'd even try this one for French toast.
It does make a pretty good BLT, though. I've been tinkering with the recipe a bit, but this one came out so nice I may stick with that variant.
I think I have the site set to support 'large' images up to 1250 x 1250 pixels and 'medium' images of 400 x 300 pixels.
My big camera is usually set to produce 4000 x 6000 pixel images that are between 5MB and 6MB each, I usually reduce them down to 400 x 600 for posting here, although technically I upload them to another site of mine and then just post a link. The two I posted earlier today reduced down to under 170K when I did that.
A stretch and fold or two and/or getting a tighter skin when shaping might have helped produce a taller loaf, but I find it difficult to get a free form rectangular loaf that is taller than about 3.5 inches. The right type of slashing can also help produce rise in the direction you want the loaf to go. Large round loaves are easier to get tall, but I prefer loaves where most of the slices are around the same size, and I suspect someone running a deli would need that as well. If you want a true 'deli loaf' shape you might need to bake it in a deli loaf pan. I think I've seen 4, 6 or 8 gang deli loaf pans on some professional baking sites.
Adding pickle juice is a good way to add some sour without going the sourdough starter route, but you have to be careful about how much salt you add then, because pickle juice is often high in salt.
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