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Grilled cheese sandwiches are made from pre-baked bread that is toasted on the grill long enough to melt the cheese, but the cheese never goes through the change of state that you get when you bake cheese in a really hot oven. (And there are some cheeses that don't make that transition well, getting really oily when they fully melt.)
Mind you, a good grilled cheese sandwich is an excellent cold-weather comfort food, but it isn't in the same category as pizza, IMHO.
My wife prefers to melt the cheese on a griddle and then soak it up with toasted bread (no need to butter the bread), but that's not pizza, either.
Back when I was in college (Northwestern), Gulliver's on Howard Street made the best pizza bread I've ever had, though these days I can come pretty close to what I remember it being back in the early 70's. But pizza bread (whether on a hoagie, baguette or naan) isn't pizza, either, because the bread is pre-baked.
Although many pizza fanatics say it is all about the crust, I think the real test of pizza is that thin zone where the dough, the sauce and perhaps some of the cheese and other toppings meld into the perfect gooey bite as the bread bakes through. And I think that's what makes Chicago Deep Dish Pizza so different from New York Pizza, the gooey zone is bigger.
Frozen pizza is a somewhat different issue, even the best frozen pizza (and some of them are fairly good these days) will never beat a good freshly baked pizza. Part of it is that the crust is already half-baked (or more) and the other part is that frozen pizzas are never baked in a HOT oven (eg, 500 degrees or more.) And I think ANY home pizza is going to suffer in comparison to one baked in a professional pizza oven, where the temperature could be anywhere from 650 to 1100 degrees.
Although my wife still uses the Nebraska Centennial Cookbook (her mother was the editor and her father was the publisher, nearly every recipe in it is one that her mother tested on her family), these days my wife has been using a lot of recipes out of the KAF Baker's Companion, which is probably one of the best 'recent' general books for bakers. I don't use it quite as much, though there are several recipes in the KAF Whole Grains book that I use a lot, but mostly because I've been working on recipes out of Michel Suas's textbook and am starting to work on recipes out of the copy of the 5th edition of Wayne Gisslen's textbook that Cass sent me.
But for non-baking, I often start with the '46 Joy and then see if Julia Child has a recipe in MTAOFC 1 or 2. Then if I have time, I'll check my James Beard books and maybe Graham Kerr.
The darker the rye flour, the more of the bran it contains. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does affect the texture of the dough and makes for a denser loaf. Using first clear flour would also darken it a bit, since it's more cream colored than white.
Many people use a little cocoa powder to darken a rye bread loaf, but I prefer using powdered caramel coloring, I think the cocoa powder can be detected on the tongue. Kitchen Bouquet browning sauce is another commonly used coloring agent.
I'm a 'Joy of Cooking' collector, too, I think I have over a half dozen copies of various editions, the oldest of them from 1943, though it is the 1946 edition that I consider the best for cooks, so that's our 'go-to' edition. I bought a 2nd '46 a while back that still needs to be rebound, but at least I only paid 50 cents for it.
I thought the book changed directions in the 1960's, after the death of Irma Rombauer, and again in the 1990's, IMHO neither was a change for the better.
If you've read Julia Child's autobiography, "My Life in France" or seen the movie "Julie and Julia", she was quite disappointed with her meeting with Irma Rombauer.
I bought a bag of morels at the farmer's market last weekend, and I've been playing around with using them in some recipes. Tonight I'm doing crab stuffed morels.
$40 a pound is about average around here for morels. But one of the stores had eggs on sale (59 cents for an 18-pack), so it sort of averages out. If the weather doesn't get too hot I'll do a souffle later this week.
Made another semolina loaf today, I didn't braid this one but it came out quite nice, I took some pictures, I'll try to get them posted on Sunday.
I've never worked with Autocad, back when we were designing our house 20 years ago we had an architect who did the real work in Autocad (or a similar program) and I was using a version of Broderbund's 3D Home Architect program to shadow his work and do 3D 'walkthroughs' as we worked on room layouts, deciding where to locate appliances, doors, closets, built-in cabinets, furniture placement, etc.
As I told my wife the day they started digging the foundation, I could have probably walked through the house blind-folded before it was built. Interestingly enough, in 20 years we've found little reason to move anything around, we'd already done that hundreds of times on paper.
I made a chicken dish last night, for lack of anything better I'd call it chicken ragout.
First I sauteed onions, red peppers, pimentos, celery, carrots, potatoes, tomato sauce and some pea pods in butter and a little white wine, added salt, pepper, sage and celery seed and poured it over top of chicken breasts cut into fairly large pieces, covered it with aluminum foil and baked it in the oven for about an hour.
Makes great leftovers, and the sauce is great with my freshly baked bread.
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This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by
Mike Nolan.
I messed up the 6 strand braid, unwound it as far as I could, and redid it, but it still wound up a bit mis-shaped, though not badly so. One or more two tries on the recipe and then I'll post it, maybe by then I'll have a picture-perfect loaf too.
I need to have my son bring a couple of loaves from McGinnis Sisters when he comes to visit this summer, so I can comparison-taste. (Of course it isn't a true taste test unless he also brings some of their famous spinach dip, even if it does have garlic in it.)
Well, I've watched the video about 6 times, done it twice with my macrame practice strands, so I think I'm going to try a six-strand braid on the semolina bread I make tomorrow.
I'm still tweaking the BBGA recipe, but it's getting REAL close to the bread at McGinnis Sisters in Pittsburgh!
I saw a recipe a while back that had a soaker, a pre-ferment and also called for a cup of sourdough starter. Too complicated for me!
The rules for the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie permit but do not require the contestants to make a biga the day before the competition. I assume most of them do.
Bread is a series of trade-offs, time for flavor. There are subtle differences in what happens in a starter (like a biga or a poolish) versus retarded fermentation, there's more enzyme and bacteria action going on in the latter, the longer it sits around the more it starts to develop sourdough-like characteristics. I don't think it would be wrong to say that sourdough is the ultimate in retarded fermentation, as it represents the longest point on the time-for-flavor scale.
Does it make a BIG difference? You'd probably have to run side-by-side tests to see if you can even tell which is which.
When I was testing the baguette recipes for Peter Reinhart's 'Artisan' book, I tried delayed fermentation periods of up to 7 days. (After about 7 days the dough got funky, 1 of 3 test batches had to be tossed out on day 6 because I no longer trusted it.)
After about 4 days, the dough and resulting bread took on characteristics similar to a sourdough, with a slight tang in the taste. I thought the bread was best after about 48 hours of retarded fermentation, my wife and son couldn't detect any significant differences. The dough felt different, though, and I think there were differences in the crust as well.
We have a bakery with French-trained bakers in town that imports #55 flour from France and bakes it in a steam injection deck oven they imported from Italy. According to the people in the local French club their sourdough baguettes are as good as what you will find in most of the boulangeries in Paris. I agree that it's VERY good, my wife thinks it's a bit too sour for her. Their crust is incredible, you just can't duplicate what a good steam injection oven can do at home.
But they've been unwilling to sell flour to folks, they'd rather sell the bread. There's a place in California that sells #55 French flour in 2 kilo bags, but with shipping it gets kind of pricey.
Aaron, have you checked with the restaurant supply folks to see if clear flour is available in bulk?
As I recall, when my ex-neighbor checked on it, GM had it in 50 pound bags in the eastern US and on the west coast, but not in the central US. (Unless I wanted to order a pallet--40 bags.)
Stover & Company (Pittsburgh area restaurant supplier) has Bay State Milling clear flour in 50 pound bags. Star of the West Milling also sells clear flour.
It is not quite the same as adding bran to flour, clear flour has a yellow tint that make it almost cream colored. That's not a problem when making rye bread.
I've added rye chops to rye dough, it adds a crunch like cracked wheat.
Ask 10 bakers how to make rye bread and you'll probably get 15 or more methods. 🙂
I haven't been to Seattle, so I don't know what their sourdough is like. Not all San Francisco sourdough breads are really sour, it depends on the mix of bacteria in the mother culture. I suggest reading Chad Robertson's Tartine Bakery books for procedures for making a sourdough that isn't oppressively sour.
For what it's worth, my wife can't tolerate the sourdough breads that I buy from local bakeries here in Nebraska because it is way too sour, but she handles many San Francisco sourdoughs just fine when we've been out there.
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This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by
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