[Mike Nolan]

I made an apple pie on Sunday morning and made popovers to go with supper before the Super Bowl.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

I made boeuf bourguignon and Thousand Island salad dressing (starting by making my own mayonnaise).

[Mike Nolan]

Maybe it's like Velveeta or the Kraft jar cheeses, no refrigeration needed until it's opened.

[Mike Nolan]

Well, now I need to itemize mine:

KAF AP
KAF bread
GM unbleached
pastry flour
cake flour
White Lily Flour
bleached AP flour
whole wheat flour (freshly ground in my mill) from both hard red and soft red wheat berries
cracked wheat
wheat bran
vital gluten (seldom used these days)
semoina
sprouted wheat flour
rye flour
rye chops
corn meal
corn flour
cornstarch
potato flour
potato starch
sweet rice flour
brown rice flour
tapioca flour
barley flour
sorghum flour
millet flour
teff
garbanzo bean flour
arrowroot
almond flour
hazelnut flour
pecan meal
oat flour
oat bran
rolled oats
steel cut oats
buckwheat flour
soy
flax

Listing whole seeds would take some time, too.

And I may have missed a few.

[Mike Nolan]

I generally use whole-milk mozzarella on pizza and lasagna, but I do like to add a sprinkle of a four-cheese blend I get at Sams Club that has Romano, Parmesan, Asiago and Provolone. My mother used to say that a pizza without some Romano cheese on it is boring.

[Mike Nolan]

If I include non-wheat flours, I'm probably at 20 or more.

[Mike Nolan]

A cupcake-sized pot pie is small enough that I don't bother to cut vents in it.

[Mike Nolan]

There are enzymes present that might improve flavor by aging even in an unyeasted pizza dough.

[Mike Nolan]

If you didn't age the dough a long time, the baking soda might provide some rise.

Has anyone seen a pizza crust recipe with double acting baking powder in it?

[Mike Nolan]

I make individual sized chicken pot pies in a cupcake pan, topped with a little puff pastry, then I freeze them, take them out of the pans and put them in plastic bags. Pop one in the microwave for a few minutes and it's nice and warm.

Before my wife's mother died, we'd package up chili in individual servings for her. She always called it 'tomato soup' because it was heavy on tomatoes.

[Mike Nolan]

KP posted his thoughts on bleached flour and cookies more than once on the old BC, I think/hope one of them got archived and posted here.

Short form: Bleaching flour weakens the gluten bonds, so you wind up with less chewy cookies.

Alton Brown's episode on cookie-making did an excellent job of talking about how to get soft, crisp or chewy cookies by manipulating the amount of sugar and fat.

[Mike Nolan]

A few years ago I made a large batch of eclairs (like 8 dozen) and wound up making about 6 batches of pastry cream (several of them gluten-free, to go in gluten-free eclairs). With practice, the prepping/cooking part is not where you spend the most time.

The most time-consuming part of making pastry cream is chilling it, and spreading it fairly thin on a sheet pan then putting it in a blast chiller is one way cooking competitors have to speed that up. Using a drum sieve to strain it saves time, too.

And they don't usually wait for it to get fully chilled and set, they just get it down to about 80. An extra egg yolk or two will produce a fairly firm pastry cream even when it's tepid. I have discovered, though, that it is possible to have a pastry cream get too eggy, it tastes more like scrambled eggs than pastry cream.

[Mike Nolan]

Today I'm making bottom round with onion gravy. I started the onions an hour before adding the meat, so they should get nicely caramelized.

[Mike Nolan]

If it was me, I'd start by checking both the mixer and the beater to make sure nothing's clogged up or bent. I clean mine with a toothbrush every now and then, because stuff gets flung up into all sorts of nooks and crannies.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm skeptical of any recipe that calls for yeast but doesn't include significant rising time.

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