[Mike Nolan]

Personally, I don't care for the taste of a corn starch glaze on bread, when I glaze rye bread I do it with egg, usually egg white, using whole egg or egg yolk darkens the loaf. (I don't care for the 'Dutch Crunch' glaze on Vienna bread, either.) YMMV.

If your seam isn't closing, you may need (more) slashes to control the expansion of the dough in the desired direction.

The semolina loaf I've been playing with uses a soaker that sits for at least 12 hours and a sponge that sits for about 90 minutes. As you can see from the picture I first posted about a week ago, the internal structure has lots of big holes in it, and the taste has some sourdough-like tang to it, too:

I will need to make this bread again in the next week, I've been tinkering with the flour ratios, which affects the amount of water needed, and I need to get final weights so I can post the recipe. I've been weighing this one in grams, converting it to ounces might involve resizing it a bit or using a lot of fractions.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't see a display panel, so it seems likely that the oven dial just has temperatures notches on it, like mine does. Mine has buttons to select things like broil, bake, convection, I don't see those, so there may be 2 knobs to control the oven, one to set the mode and one to set the temperature.

It looks like they've made a lot of changes in 20 years.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's a brand I had not heard of: Thor.

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Thor-Kitchen-30-in-4-2-cu-ft-Dual-Fuel-Range-in-Stainless-Steel-HRD3088U/300401499?cm_mmc=Shopping%7cTHD%7cG%7c0%7cG-BASE-PLA-D29-Appliances%7c&gclid=CjwKEAjwpJ_JBRC3tYai4Ky09zQSJAC5r7rukO04UgXZaryvMC1eRZsU-ALM6g7FgUrlzwpVIe3aMxoCHpPw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

[Mike Nolan]

The brand is DCS, not DCR.

[Mike Nolan]

South Bend is about 80 miles into Indiana, but Schaumburg is in the NW suburbs, so you have to factor in another hour or more on the Chicago freeways. The Bolingbrook store would be closer anyway, that's further south in the west suburbs.

There's definitely an art to baking bread in a convection oven, I haven't mastered it but I'm not sure how good the convection fan is in my DCS range. I have been using it for the first part of baking fruit pies lately.

I'm tempted to try turning it down to 275-300 and see how it does then.

A deck oven is kind of a convection oven on steroids, but I've never had a chance to use one of those, either.

My older son's house has a Fisher and Paykel dual wall oven, it's got more cooking cycles than I've got fingers.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

Gas ovens and gas grills will have hot spots, too. Try the 'bread test' in your gas oven sometime. (Cover a rack with slices of bread and see how evenly they toast. A chef friend told me this is the first thing he does when he moves to a different kitchen.)

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

One thing you have to be careful about with ovens that advertise they can handle a full sheet pan is they may not provide enough space for air circulation around it. You need at least an inch in every direction. I can fit a full sheet pan in my big oven, but just barely, and there's less than a half inch between the pan and the walls. I found some 3/4 sized sheet pans at a restaurant supply store in Pittsburgh, they're about 22 x 17.

[Mike Nolan]

According to the Ikea website, the only Ikea in Indiana is one that will open this fall in Fishers, which I think is near Indianapolis. They stick to major metro areas.

I remember looking at Wolf back in 1996 and thinking it was the ugliest range we'd ever seen. We went with a DCS 48" dual fuel range, DCS was splitting off from Viking at the time. (DCS used to be the manufacturing division of Viking.) They got kind of a bad rep after some financial problems in the early 2000's and were acquired by Fisher and Paykel in 2004. I had to order a replacement oven rack bracket for mine a couple of years ago, I think it came from Australia; it took 6 weeks. Otherwise, mine has been very dependable, the only other problem we've had in 20 years was a hinge issue that was covered by the warranty.

I know a few people who have installed commercial ranges, they had to put fireboard behind the range and on both sides. I hadn't heard about the lack of door insulation, but I'm not surprised by that.

[Mike Nolan]

David Lebovitz's recipes are pretty reliable and usually pretty good, too. His recipe for chocolate macarons is the best macaron recipe I've tried. He gave two fillings, one that was an 'ordinary' chocolate ganache and one that also used pureed prunes. I thought the latter was awesome!

When I was in college, a Jewish friend introduced me to halva, which is kind of an acquired taste.

[Mike Nolan]

The original article does list them.

Of the five mother sauces, espagnole is seldom used except as a base for other sauces. I made it once as part of making a batch of demi-glace. a task that took about 2 1/2 days. It's interesting that of the two dozen or so trained chefs that I know, NONE of them have ever made demi-glace from scratch, not even back in cooking school. Most chefs who use demi-glace buy concentrated demi-glace for use in their kitchens.

Michael Ruhlman does talk about the process of making demi-glace in his book, "The Making of a Chef".

[Mike Nolan]

I would say that's probably the 2nd or 3rd generation beyond the package that I used back in 1996, but probably related technology. I thought it was fairly simple to use at the time, and although I'm a techie, I'm got really into doing graphical things. It's pretty good at making sure your corners match up correctly, but if you've got any odd angles, it'll handle those as well.

One of the successors to the 3D Home Architect program that I used for a while (I sort of lost interest in keeping up with all the updates after a few years, because the house was finished) did 3D color renderings that were so good they almost looked like photographs!

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Mike Nolan.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

The primary advantage that a store's design program has is that it's free and they do most of the work, the primary disadvantage is that the program is designed primarily to sell the things that the store carries, so it may not have some makes and models of appliances, cabinets, etc.

During the 9-12 months that we spent designing our house, I paralleled the architect's work on nearly a daily basis. This affected a number of design decisions, including resizing a number of rooms because the furniture and appliances wouldn't lay out the way we wanted them. At one point we pushed the west wall out a foot, increasing the kitchen from 17 x 17 to 17 x 18.

When I would visit the work site during construction, I knew where every wall and support structure had to be, so I was able to point it out when they had one wall in the wrong place by about 8 inches.

[Mike Nolan]

You might want to see if there's a PC 'home design' or 'kitchen design' program, the one I used 22 years ago when we were designing our house was a big help. That was Broderbund 3D Home Architect.

It did 3D renderings, including detailed sketches of the kitchen appliances and cabinets, that were pretty realistic, I felt I could have walked through our entire house blindfolded before they had even dug the foundation.

[Mike Nolan]

Sears/Kenmore was selling a dual-fuel range at one point, I don't know who really made it or what the price point was.

These days I think I'd lean in the direction of a dual wall oven and an induction cooktop.

[Mike Nolan]

I generally use a 'granny fork', though for larger quantities of gravy (like when I'm making a big batch of chicken pot pies), I'll use a silicone spatula.

Back when we were first married, my wife was thickening some gravy with cornstarch, and got some lumps, probably because she added the cornstarch directly to the gravy rather than make a slurry. I showed her how to beat the lumps out with a granny fork. A few months later we were visiting her mother and my wife said something about how I had shown her how to get lumps out of gravy.

Her mother simply said, "I never get lumps in gravy."

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