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For lunch today I made pizza bread using half of the hoagie buns I baked yesterday.
For supper we made the third sous vide protein, tri-tip, sliced thin and served au jus, like a French dip, on the hoagie rolls I baked yesterday. We cooked the meat to 142 degrees, that's in the 'medium' range and it was light pink, which was exactly where I wanted it.
I made chocolate souffle today, using a Mary Berry recipe. It isn't a screamingly CHOCOLATE dessert, next time I think I'd also make some kind of sauce, like an Anglaise sauce.
Book editors are seldom heroes, but Judith Jones deserves that accolade. Julia Child was one of several cookbook authors she 'discovered', and she also was the one who told Doubleday that they just HAD to publish "The Diary of Anne Frank".
I made hoagie rolls today in preparation for tomorrow's meals. I forgot to put the butter in the dough, it was still in the microwave. I hadn't use the sandwich roll pan in a while and probably didn't oil it enough, the rolls stuck badly to the perforations in the pan, but I was able to get them off without too much damage.
Last night we made sous vide scallops and orange roughy. Both were excellent. My son made a lemon/orange glaze to go with them, it was quite interesting.
Our 2nd son was a fussy eater until his late teens. Then he went to study in Germany for 7 months. When he came back, he'd eat just about anything we fixed.
I grew up in a family with 6 kids. We ate what was on the table, or went hungry.
I've used it to make roux many times when cooking GF, but I've not baked with it much.
Some years ago, I tried making a small batch of Béchamel sauce with six or so flours, including wheat, to see how they worked and tasted and had my family taste them all. (Our GF daughter-in-law didn't taste the one made with wheat flour, of course.)
Chick pea/garbanzo bean flour was the non-wheat one we liked the taste of the most. Since then, I've made gravies, sauces and even souffles with garbanzo bean flour, and also with gar-fava bean flour, which is sometimes easier to find from Bobs Red Mill.
As a thickener, it isn't quite as strong as wheat flour. (I think McGee rates it a 3 on a 1-5 scale, wheat is a 4 and potato and tapioca are both 5's.)
Tonight we made sous vide flank steak. I can see where one issue I would have with a circulation heater is finding the appropriate level of doneness for beef, my wife doesn't care for rare/medium rare beef. (A second issue is that it's considerably more work when cooking for just two.)
Last night's peaches were delicious, especially with a bit of ice cream. My son chose to leave the peach skins on, I think I would have peeled them as I find peach fuzz a bit chewy.
My son brought his Anova circulation heater with him, so we're going to be playing around with some sous vide cooking over the next few days, we bought scallops, flank steak and tri-tip for proteins, and he's going to do some peaches in brandy tonight.
Yesterday I made Clonmel Doubly Crusty/Vienna Bread.
Historically, scalding milk accomplished at least 2 purposes. One is that it killed any bacteria in the milk. (Pasteurization took care of that problem decades ago for most bakers.) The other is that it neutralized the protease enzymes in the milk, which can inhibit yeast growth. The experts are somewhat split on whether pasteurization disables the protease enzymes. I suspect ultra-pasteurization (which is what most dairies use these days, because it's faster) might do a better job neutralizing the protease enzymes than the old pasteurization process did, because it uses a somewhat higher temperature for a shorter time, but I haven't looked to see if there are any scientific tests of that hypothesis in the journals.
I think there's a third reason, though. Scalded milk smells and tastes different than milk straight out of the carton, and I think that has an impact on the bread flavor and possibly on texture.
I always let scalded milk cool back down to the point where it's no more than warm (say, 110 degrees) before using it to make bread. Yeast dies at 138 degrees, so you certainly don't want to pour HOT milk in with yeast.
The tangzhong method (pouring boiling hot water/milk on the flour or cooking it on the stove to gelatinize it) is another option for bread recipes that call for milk, but that might be a separate thread.
My son and his family are here visiting, so I'll be doing a lot of baking over the next week or so.
Today my granddaughter and I made a batch of bagels and a batch of madelines.
I actually have two madeline pans, but neither had been used before now.
I did some research on madelines recipes, most of them call for using brown butter, some call for grated lemon zest. I used the madelines recipe in the KAF Cookie Book, and had a lot of trouble getting the first batch to release from the pan. I used canola oil for the first batch, but probably not enough of it, and I think I overfilled it a bit, too. The recipe says it makes 24 cookies and I used less than half of the dough for the first dozen , but madeline pans come in multiple sizes--I know because I have two sizes of them. I used the larger one, but KAF may be using an even bigger size pan than the ones I have.
I moved from a #60 to a #100 scoop for the 2nd batch, and I also followed the prep instructions (more or less) in the Foxrun pan box, which had you grease the pan with a mixture of melted (or browned) butter and flour. I didn't take the time to brown this small amount of butter. That helped a lot with the releasing, and the cookies had a browner surface as well. Of course, they're quite a bit smaller.
For the final batch (not quite a dozen) I really slathered the pan with the butter/flour mixture. I let them cool in the pan a big longer, too. They all came out easily and have the best shape, too. Lesson learned.
The cookies are a bit softer than I was expecting, perhaps they'll harden up over time. They're tasty, though. I'm going to dip them in chocolate later on, my chocolate pot takes over an hour to heat up and temper a batch of chocolate. I just hope there are some cookies left by the time the chocolate is ready.
I may have to try one of the variants in the KAF cookie book and add some cocoa powder to the batter.
How old is that recipe? Canned peaches used to be packed in a heavy sugar solution; these days I'm not sure if they are, most canned fruits have gone to a light sugar solution or just use fruit juices--and not always the same fruit as what's in the can, I've seen at least one can of fruit, pears I think, that was packed using apple juice.
And that's assuming the can sizes haven't changed, which is also commonplace with older recipes.
I don't recall where I read it, but I've seen references saying that powdered turmeric loses most of its flavor quickly. It will still add color, but not much flavor.
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