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Today I'm making Honey Wheat bread, which I haven't made in several months. My wife is slowly adding some carbs back into her diet.
I tried using cocoa to darken rye bread once, but could taste it in the bread, so I use caramel coloring, available in liquid form (such as Kitchen Bouquet or caramel food color) and in powder form. (King Arthur and the Great American Spice Company both sell the powder form.)
The powder is very hygroscopic, though, so be sure to keep it well sealed or it'll turn into a black lump. I don't know if keeping it in the freezer would help or make things worse.
The egg crisis appears to be over, I saw them at a promotional price of 40 cents a dozen recently, almost a 10th of where they peaked. (But there are new reports of avian flu at chicken ranches, so who knows what will happen by summer.)
I've read about some possible disruptions in the vegetable market due to unstable weather in California.
And of course import duties on Mexican produce at the border (a bad idea, Mr. President) might cause major problems.
And farmers need to make SOME profit!
In some small towns in Nebraska, the challenge these days is keeping the local supermarket in business!
I don't see anything on the KAF site about a heat rating, but I had the oven as high as I can get it (about 525 degrees) and it seems to have survived.
I oiled the pan a little, though KAF says it is non-stick. A little dough stuck to the pan anyway, probably because I pushed it through the holes too much when stretching it. I may try putting it on parchment next time, but would probably need to pull the parchment out after the crust sets, because I'm not sure what temperature parchment can handle. (Paper, as Ray Bradbury taught us, burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.)
Assuming you get 12 slices overall (6 along the long edge and 2 along the short edge), my wife says the KAF crust recipe comes out to about 9.6 grams of carbs per slice. (plus whatever the sauce and toppings add, of course.)
I've put a little rye flour in pizza dough before, but I prefer adding semolina or durum flour, I think it makes the crust crispier.
The frozen Ron Santo Pro Pizzas were available in the 60's (and were, of course, the ones sold at Wrigley Field back then), but I don't think the company lasted past the late 70's. There were several on the west side of Chicago but none near Evanston, which is where we lived.
I thought the ones at the ballpark were not quite as crisp as the ones made at home, but that's probably just due to the limitations of ballpark concession food.
I remember an article in Sport Magazine back in the 60's about Ron's business interests, he also had part ownership of an insurance company back then and was an executive at Torco Oil for a while. More than a few baseball players wound up with beer distributor franchises, especially if they played for the Cardinals, who were owned by the Busch family. Car dealerships and sporting goods stores were other post-baseball occupations for ballplayers.
I will never forgive the Baseball Writers of America for not putting Ron Santo in the Hall of Fame until after his death!
I made a pizza tonight using the 8 x 18 Flatbread Pizza Pan I got from King Arthur Flour last week. I also used it to bake the sesame-semolina bread I made from the BBGA recipe. I can see this is going to be my favorite baking pan for a while.
The pan is just a bit larger than a 12" pizza pan, so I made a half-recipe of the Ultra-Thin Pizza Crust, let it age for a day and streeeetched it to fit. It was very thin but crisp, just the way I like it.
My wife still needs to run the recipe through the My Fitness Pal website, so I don't know how many carbs it is, but if it isn't TOO bad pizza may be back on the menu here at least as an occasional treat, the little oven takes a lot less time to heat up and this size pizza is just about right for 2 people with some leftovers, it'd be enough for 3 people if I added a salad.
I had marinara in the freezer, so I used that, but I think next time I'm just going to try spreading a little tomato paste over the dough, I think that might be similar to what the pizza we had in Ottawa CA did.
I probably don't post enough photos, myself. But I have to transfer them off the camera, move them to another system and resize them before I post them. (I tend to take all my photos at high resolution, 4000 x 6000.)
Made the BBGA sesame semolina bread today. It's pretty good, but I next time I may use something other than olive oil and I may leave the millet out of the soaker or possibly replace it with semolina. (There's actually no semolina in the bread, but there is durum flour.)
Overall, it's a pretty good bread, with a nice airy crumb. I think it could have benefited from one or two stretch and folds, but otherwise it's got a good shape. It'll make good sandwiches this week.
I think my wife prefers the loaf of honey wheat bread I got out of the freezer, but that's a bread I've been making for 10 years.
I use multiple computers, depending on where I am in the house. WordPress seems to log me out of computer A after I've been on computer B for a while.
Otherwise, there's no harm in staying logged in, as long as your computer is reasonably secure.
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.
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