[Mike Nolan]

Here are some photos of my sesame-semolina bread:

The loaf size is about 10x6x3 inches. As you can see, it has a very open crumb, almost like a baguette. There are more sesame seeds in the bread (from the soaker) than on it, I forgot to refill the shaker.

[Mike Nolan]

My mother was big on Velveeta for grilled cheese sandwiches but I don't honestly remember the last time I bought any Velveeta, probably not in over 20 years.

We often use a combination of sharp cheddar and colby or co-jack cheese for grilled cheese sandwiches.

[Mike Nolan]

Slashing can be done for both decorative and functional purposes, ie, more control over the rise and preventing blowouts. I've always suspected that some bakeries use the slashing pattern to help identify the type of bread, too.

I read a note on another baking site recently that said when making diagonal slashes across a loaf, an odd number of slashes (ie, 3 or 5) is more pleasing than an even number of slashes. Do people agree?

Rye breads also take well to decorative stencils.

[Mike Nolan]

I've only made risotto a few times and haven't had it in restaurants much, either, but if you watch Hell's Kitchen, it's one of Gordon Ramsay's standard dishes for testing a cook, and he's pretty fussy about it, not too firm, not too liquid. (When I have had it in restaurants, it's generally been firmer than what it looks like on Hell's Kitchen.)

I avoid most packaged stocks because they usually have garlic in them, and most of them don't taste like anything I'd want to consume. (If you've ever been to a Zoup restaurant, they advertise that their stock is good enough to drink, and they sell their stock in jars and I've seen it in a local grocery store, too.)

I always have several containers (ranging from a few ounces to several quarts) of stock in the freezer, I currently have white chicken stock, brown chicken stock (the meat/bones are roasted first), beef stock, veal stock, duck stock and goose stock on hand. I've never made or used vegetable stock.

[Mike Nolan]

For most breads, I aim for 200 degrees, but a few degrees over 200 degrees is what I aim for with rye bread, which seems to need a slightly higher final temperature than white breads, I'm not sure why.

Rye bread also needs to sit until the loaf is COMPLETELY COOL before slicing it.

[Mike Nolan]

Grilled cheese sandwiches are made from pre-baked bread that is toasted on the grill long enough to melt the cheese, but the cheese never goes through the change of state that you get when you bake cheese in a really hot oven. (And there are some cheeses that don't make that transition well, getting really oily when they fully melt.)

Mind you, a good grilled cheese sandwich is an excellent cold-weather comfort food, but it isn't in the same category as pizza, IMHO.

My wife prefers to melt the cheese on a griddle and then soak it up with toasted bread (no need to butter the bread), but that's not pizza, either.

Back when I was in college (Northwestern), Gulliver's on Howard Street made the best pizza bread I've ever had, though these days I can come pretty close to what I remember it being back in the early 70's. But pizza bread (whether on a hoagie, baguette or naan) isn't pizza, either, because the bread is pre-baked.

Although many pizza fanatics say it is all about the crust, I think the real test of pizza is that thin zone where the dough, the sauce and perhaps some of the cheese and other toppings meld into the perfect gooey bite as the bread bakes through. And I think that's what makes Chicago Deep Dish Pizza so different from New York Pizza, the gooey zone is bigger.

Frozen pizza is a somewhat different issue, even the best frozen pizza (and some of them are fairly good these days) will never beat a good freshly baked pizza. Part of it is that the crust is already half-baked (or more) and the other part is that frozen pizzas are never baked in a HOT oven (eg, 500 degrees or more.) And I think ANY home pizza is going to suffer in comparison to one baked in a professional pizza oven, where the temperature could be anywhere from 650 to 1100 degrees.

[Mike Nolan]

Although my wife still uses the Nebraska Centennial Cookbook (her mother was the editor and her father was the publisher, nearly every recipe in it is one that her mother tested on her family), these days my wife has been using a lot of recipes out of the KAF Baker's Companion, which is probably one of the best 'recent' general books for bakers. I don't use it quite as much, though there are several recipes in the KAF Whole Grains book that I use a lot, but mostly because I've been working on recipes out of Michel Suas's textbook and am starting to work on recipes out of the copy of the 5th edition of Wayne Gisslen's textbook that Cass sent me.

But for non-baking, I often start with the '46 Joy and then see if Julia Child has a recipe in MTAOFC 1 or 2. Then if I have time, I'll check my James Beard books and maybe Graham Kerr.

[Mike Nolan]

The darker the rye flour, the more of the bran it contains. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does affect the texture of the dough and makes for a denser loaf. Using first clear flour would also darken it a bit, since it's more cream colored than white.

Many people use a little cocoa powder to darken a rye bread loaf, but I prefer using powdered caramel coloring, I think the cocoa powder can be detected on the tongue. Kitchen Bouquet browning sauce is another commonly used coloring agent.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm a 'Joy of Cooking' collector, too, I think I have over a half dozen copies of various editions, the oldest of them from 1943, though it is the 1946 edition that I consider the best for cooks, so that's our 'go-to' edition. I bought a 2nd '46 a while back that still needs to be rebound, but at least I only paid 50 cents for it.

I thought the book changed directions in the 1960's, after the death of Irma Rombauer, and again in the 1990's, IMHO neither was a change for the better.

If you've read Julia Child's autobiography, "My Life in France" or seen the movie "Julie and Julia", she was quite disappointed with her meeting with Irma Rombauer.

[Mike Nolan]

I bought a bag of morels at the farmer's market last weekend, and I've been playing around with using them in some recipes. Tonight I'm doing crab stuffed morels.

$40 a pound is about average around here for morels. But one of the stores had eggs on sale (59 cents for an 18-pack), so it sort of averages out. If the weather doesn't get too hot I'll do a souffle later this week.

[Mike Nolan]

Made another semolina loaf today, I didn't braid this one but it came out quite nice, I took some pictures, I'll try to get them posted on Sunday.

[Mike Nolan]

I've never worked with Autocad, back when we were designing our house 20 years ago we had an architect who did the real work in Autocad (or a similar program) and I was using a version of Broderbund's 3D Home Architect program to shadow his work and do 3D 'walkthroughs' as we worked on room layouts, deciding where to locate appliances, doors, closets, built-in cabinets, furniture placement, etc.

As I told my wife the day they started digging the foundation, I could have probably walked through the house blind-folded before it was built. Interestingly enough, in 20 years we've found little reason to move anything around, we'd already done that hundreds of times on paper.

[Mike Nolan]

I made a chicken dish last night, for lack of anything better I'd call it chicken ragout.

First I sauteed onions, red peppers, pimentos, celery, carrots, potatoes, tomato sauce and some pea pods in butter and a little white wine, added salt, pepper, sage and celery seed and poured it over top of chicken breasts cut into fairly large pieces, covered it with aluminum foil and baked it in the oven for about an hour.

Makes great leftovers, and the sauce is great with my freshly baked bread.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

I messed up the 6 strand braid, unwound it as far as I could, and redid it, but it still wound up a bit mis-shaped, though not badly so. One or more two tries on the recipe and then I'll post it, maybe by then I'll have a picture-perfect loaf too.

I need to have my son bring a couple of loaves from McGinnis Sisters when he comes to visit this summer, so I can comparison-taste. (Of course it isn't a true taste test unless he also brings some of their famous spinach dip, even if it does have garlic in it.)

[Mike Nolan]

Well, I've watched the video about 6 times, done it twice with my macrame practice strands, so I think I'm going to try a six-strand braid on the semolina bread I make tomorrow.

I'm still tweaking the BBGA recipe, but it's getting REAL close to the bread at McGinnis Sisters in Pittsburgh!

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