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I just got the winter issue of Bread Lines (BBGA newsletter) and it has a sesame semolina bread recipe that I'm going to try tomorrow. I need to pick up some ingredients for the soaker and get it going tonight.
When I took my pastry class at SFBI, one of the breakfasts we got was a savory bread pudding (with mushrooms and sausage, I think), which they made with left-over croissants. It was wonderful.
They gave us the recipe, but I never have left over croissants around here!
I use my big oven's convection feature for fruit pies for the first 20 minutes, then I turn it down and turn it to conventional bake for the rest of the baking period.
I've tried it once or twice with breads, wasn't happy with the result, maybe I just need to experiment more?
I'm still happy with our 20 year old 48" dual fuel range, which is a good thing, because replacing it would be a major challenge due to placement. We'd probably have to pull the island out to be able to get the range out the door. (The thing must weigh about 700 pounds, too.)
If we ever have to replace the ceramic cooktop in the island I'd probably replace it with an induction system.
My son's kitchen has a gas cooktop with dual electric wall ovens, but I find the ovens have too many settings I don't understand.
Home Run Inn is not one I knew back in the 70's.
I may be one of a few dozen people who still remember Ron Santo's Pro's Pizza, the frozen ones were pretty good for 1960's frozen pizza.
The local paper in Lincoln recently ran a feature on local pizza, there were a dozen or so places I've not been to, but since my wife is on a low-carb diet pizza isn't high on our food list. And I've called about half of those restaurants to ask if there's garlic in their pizza sauce, the answer is always yes.
Even Vals has a little garlic in their pizza sauce, but we have it every now and then anyway.
I've tried pickle juice in rye bread a couple of times, can't say I noticed much difference, though you probably want to cut back on the salt because pickle juice is really salty.
I doubt any grocery store carries clear flour. Some of the Mennonite stores repackage bulk flour for resale, I've only been to the one in Crossville TN and didn't see first clear flour there, but it's worth checking elsewhere.
I don't know what part of the country you live in, Aaron, but if you're in the eastern USA or possibly west coast you should be able to get it from a restaurant supply house. It was in the Gold Medal commercial/restaurant online catalog a few years ago, I didn't see it today, but their site has been reorganized and is really slow too. Your friends will need to buy other stuff from the restaurant supply houses anyway.
If you're west of that, you may be out of luck. (When I had my neighbor look into it, the Gold Medal rep, who had never heard of first clear flour, eventually found out that it isn't produced by the mills west of roughly Ohio, but can be ordered in 40 bag pallets. Oddly enough, it apparently WAS available on the West coast, just not in the central US.)
However, I just did a search on 'first clear flour bulk' with some possibly useful results. Searching on 'clear flour bulk' produces additional results.
Stover & Company in Cheswick PA (just north of Pittsburgh) has it for $15.73 for a 50 pound bag. Delivery charges to Nebraska would be $37.53 for a total of $53.26 or $1.065 a pound. That's still a lot better than either Amazon or King Arthur Flour, where a 3 pound bag is $8.50 plus shipping).
Obviously if you could pick it up at their warehouse, it'd be a lot less. I bought about 25 pounds of chocolate couverture from them over Christmas, they're easy to deal with. I'll be tempted to pick up a 50 pound bag the next time we're in PA, we usually go there about once a year.
Another possibility is to contact the smaller mills (like for me the ones down in KS, a few of whom mill flour for King Arthur) to see if any of them bag first clear flour for direct sale. As I understand it, separating out first clear flour is an early step in the process of milling flour anyway, it's just a question of whether they bag any of it for sale.
The classic deli rye bread recipe uses first clear flour, something that apparently only exists on the east coast. I've ordered it from King Arthur a couple of times, it's pretty pricey in a small bag.
The irony is that first clear flour was originally used in rye bread because it was cheap, it is almost yellow in color but because the rye flour is the dominant color in rye bread, first clear flour could be used.
My former next door neighbor, the head of the local Sysco office, (he moved last fall) tried to get first clear flour for me from his suppliers, his flour sales reps from both Pillsbury and Gold Medal had never even HEARD of it, though it was in the Gold Medal catalog, but wasn't available for shipment this far west unless you ordered a pallet of it. (40 bags, 50 pounds each.)
The first clear flour DOES make a difference, by the way, but it's just too expensive to order in small bags. But Aaron, if you're trying to develop a recipe for your friends to use in a deli, it might be worth looking into whether you/they can get first clear flour.
I made a pot roast tonight, nothing fancy but I did throw in a cup of red wine. I also made a small batch of popovers, I've discovered that the King Arthur popover recipe from the KAF Bakers Companion works great if you make 1/3 batch (1 whole egg) and that gives us 2 popover each. My wife says they're 10-11 carbs each.
Let's see if I can remember them all:
Deep Dish
Stuffed
Thin Crust
Cracker Crust (almost like Mazoh)
Cake-style (think 1-2 inch thick dough.) There were at least two variants on this, Nancy's (on the west side) was pretty good, The Inferno (in Evanston) tasted like raw dough to me.To that I would have added Pizza Bread, which was the specialty of the house at Gulliver's on Howard Street, just across the city line into Chicago, the stuff was so popular you'd place your order for 1 or usually more orders of pizza bread while waiting for a table. I"m told the place changed hands 10-15 years ago and the new owners changed the recipes, probably to save money, and the quality went downhill fast, so they lost the Northwestern student trade. But they probably lost a lot of that when Evanston stopped being a dry town, these days they even sell beer in the Student Union, what the WCTU (national HQ in Evanston) must think of THAT!!
There were some places making a flatbread pizza back then, too, including one that I think made it on naan, and one or two that made pizza on lavosh, which was similar but not quite the same as the cracker crust pizza, because the lavosh was pre-baked, sauce and cheese added, then essentially broiled to melt stuff, whereas the cracker-crust went into the oven with the dough still raw and all the toppings on it.
We lived near Main Street in Evanston for several years, there was a nearby place called The Pizza Oven that was just a hole-in-the-wall place with thin crust pizzas, but their sauce was the best pizza sauce I've ever had! I discovered them my freshman year at Northwestern, they didn't have sit-down space and were too far away for most of the students to go there, but they did delivery. A few years later, there was a Sunday just before finals that I was studying with my future wife at her sorority house and we ordered from Pizza Oven. When it came, her sorority sisters descended on us like locusts on a wheat field, so we pooled funds and ordered 2 more pizzas, then 2 more, I think we wound up ordering a total of 11 or 12 that day.
The original My Pie near the Loyola campus had a pizza that defied categorization. I think they moved, don't know if they still make the same pizzas.
Google says National Cake Day is Sunday, November 26th. (Didn't know there was one, did you?)
I placed a KAF order today, too, because I was running low on pastry flour. I also ordered semolina and durum flour because my challenge for the next few months is to try to come up with a bread similar to the semolina bread at McGinnis Sisters in Pittsburgh.
They also had a new 8 x 18 perforated flatbread pizza pan, that I ordered because that's the perfect size for the smaller of my two ovens. I might even make pizza on it. 🙂
I've made Peter's Marbled Rye bread with medium rye flour, with pumpernickel flour and with freshly ground rye berries using the coarsest setting on my flour mill, and I usually alter the ratio of rye to wheat flour to increase the amount of rye flour in the bread, that recipe always comes out great.
Going to San Antonio to learn pizza is like going to Los Angeles to learn clam chowder!
I think NY Times food writer Jeffrey Steingarten is the one who popularized the myth that Eastern pizza is 90% about the crust and 10% about the toppings. (Peter Reinhart believes it, though.)
In Chicago a slice of pizza is a meal. In New York, it's street food.
Lincoln NE is the home of Valentino's Pizza, and unfortunately that has infected most of the pizza places. There was a place that did Chicago style pizza, it lasted about 3 years.
I think my favorite local pizza is from the guy who does them at the farmers markets in a portable Forno Bravo wood-fired oven. (Of course it helps that he's also about the only one in town who doesn't use garlic in his pizza sauce.)
Right around the time that I moved from Chicago to Lincoln, Chicago Magazine was working on a piece on the '5 styles of Chicago Pizza', I knew their business manager so I saw a draft of the article. (My complaint was that I think they skipped at least 2 styles.) So diverse it definitely is!
Many East coast pizza fanatics say it is 90% about the crust and 10% about the toppings. I tend to disagree, but I lived in Chicago for a number of years, and Chicago pizza is really about the toppings. (I think that's why Peter Reinhart didn't really understand the Chicago pizza scene when doing the research for his book American Pie.)
If there's enough olive oil in a crust to be able to taste it, IMHO that's way too much! But I seldom cook with olive oil, because a friend is allergic to it and we're not really all that fond of the flavor.
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