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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.
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.
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