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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.
I used to buy a pumpernickel (coarse rye) flour from the Mennonite store in TN when I was down there on business, but now that I've retired and probably won't be going there again, I have no source.
A local 'gourmet' grocery store used to carry a medium rye flour, but it burned down and I'm not sure they're going to rebuild it. The owners have a second store with some of the items but I don't know if they have the medium rye flour.
I may have to buy a five pound bag of rye berries and make my own.
I have some rye chops (think cracked wheat), I've used them in rye bread. I think they're better if soaked for about half hour first.
Do you have charnushka seeds for the top?
To be honest, I don't understand why an altus works, it's not like baked bread has any live cultures in it, but I can tell you from direct experience that it DOES have an impact on the flavor.
Peter Reinhart's Marbled Rye Bread in BBA is the one I make the most these days, though my own buttermilk rye bread is still the one I make specifically for Reubens. (Which may, or may not, have been invented in Omaha Nebraska)
When I remember it, I take some old rye bread out of the freezer, soak it in water for 5-10 minutes and use it as an altus. I think it produces a similar result to a sourdough, with a lot less effort (and my wife doesn't react to it.)
We have gotten an invasion of mice from outside the last two falls, and our two cats don't seem to have much interest in catching mice. Well, the grey one caught some baby mice, but not any full-grown ones.
So I use old-fashioned traps, some baited with peanut butter and some baited with chocolate. This year it was about 50-50 as to which caught more.
Before the food truck craze got to Lincoln, we had two chefs set up huge barbecue tanks (no other word describes them properly) at local gas stations. You could smell them 2-3 blocks away!
If you haven't read the Tartine Bakery books, I suggest doing so, while the recipes and methods have been strucured for home use, the text talks a lot about how he does sourdough for the bakery. There used to be a couple of websites online that discuss how to maintain a sourdough culture for bakery production, I think I found one of them through the Bread Baker's Guild site, http://www.bbga.org/
Joan, I was reading too fast, for a moment I thought you put the chocolate cake in your soup!
I made snapper last night, but I may need to find a better recipe, it was kind of bland and possibly overcooked. (I normally cook salmon for me and orange roughy for my wife, because she doesn't like salmon and I think orange roughy is boring.)
I'm not sure what the Nebraska laws are, booths at the Lincoln farmers markets can apparently opt out of the commercial kitchen requirements, but does that allow a cat in the kitchen? I doubt it. (What's ironic about that is that historically bakers usually had a cat or two to control the rodent population.)
The food truck regulations here in Lincoln are basically stacked in favor of the brick-and-mortar restaurants, food trucks are not permitted to park on public streets for more than 15 minutes at a time, carts are not permitted on the sidewalks and none of the shopping centers that have restaurants in them will allow food trucks to park there except for rare special events. So they tend to use things like church parking lots. Two of the best food trucks have given up completely, and I think a third one (associated with a good Mexican restaurant) may have given up last fall.
Building and using a mother culture is much easier if you're baking nearly every day, you don't have to throw away half of the starter each time you feed it, you just use that for today's baking.
I see two challenges here.
The first is volume. A reasonably busy deli could easily go through 20 loaves of bread a day.
The second problem is meeting sanitary standards as a supplier to a restaurant, if that's your intent. Those vary so much around the country that it's hard to say much here, so you'll need to do your research.
The good news is that sourdough techniques scale up very well, in fact I think it's less work to maintain a large starter (eg, in a 4-10 gallon container) than a small one.
I always thought the secret ingredient in diner pancakes was a bit of orange juice.
Here's a link to it: Blintz Loaf
Well, substituting 50% semolina for the flour in the Austrian Malt recipe was not very successful. The bread didn't rise as much as I would have liked and it is way too sweet. It is OK as a savory sandwich bread. like with roast beef, but I won't make it again.
I have made my mother's oatmeal crisp cookies without the chocolate chips, they're still very dunkable. And you can substitute raisins for the chocolate chips.
My mother often made them with nuts, usually hickory nuts, but those are so hard to find these days. (I actually have two small bags of them, but I haven't put them in cookies yet.)
For molasses cookies, Big Lake Judy's recipe is still the best I've found, and it's available here. And if you don't like molasses, substitute Lyle's Golden Syrup, you'll get a cookie unlike any you've ever had before! Lyle's is my secret ingredient for when I want something that will have a unique taste.
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