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I heard back from Greg, his site got hacked earlier this year and that link hadn't been restored yet. Hopefully he'll be able to get it fixed soon.
The KAF piece also had a photo of rolls from the Parker House Omni hotel in Boston, they were rectangular, too. But maybe they weren't rectangular when the recipe was first developed?
I've stayed at that hotel once, but didn't eat in the restaurant. (That was before I got seriously into baking, I've kicked myself a few times for not taking advantage of that opportunity, it's not like I didn't know the hotel's gastronomic history.)
I tried the 'dipping' method once, couldn't even get them to stay folded through the final proof at that point. But they were sure buttery!
One of the things we did in pastry school was to put a lid on a tray of puff pastry shapes that we were baking, with a stack of tart shells on all 4 corners to set the height. This limited how far it puffed up and gave it a uniform height. We used two perforated sheet pans on the top to ensure it had enough weight. We then assembled the six pieces (a bottom, a top and 4 sides) to make a box that we filled with fruit and pastry cream.
I've been tempted to try something like that with Parker House rolls for the final proof.
I have had very good luck with the Norpro non-stick pie pan. After the pie is baked, you just slide it out onto a plate (or into a regular pie pan), that way you don't damage the non-stick surface by cutting the pie in the pan. Sometimes you have to twist the pie pan a bit to get it free, but most of the time it is loose.
I've made cherry, apple and pecan pies in it, plus a chocolate creme pie with meringue in a blind baked graham cracker crust; all came out easily.
I think it was Tyler Florence who had a recipe that was pretty high on butter to start with, and then they were dipped or brushed with more butter after shaping. (His website is coming up as having malware on it in Firefox, which is getting pretty fussy about that sort of thing.)
A number of recipes say that overproofing the dough is what causes them to pop open.
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.
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