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Thanks for posting this.
This is why I've never had any dreams of selling my breads at a farmer's market or opening a bakery. I cannot imagine baking 144 loaves of bread in a day, much less baking several times that much bread day in and day out. (Also, we already have a local artisan baker at the major farmer's markets in the city, French-trained, using French #55 flour, and people who've tasted their bread and visited Paris says they are better than most of the boulangeries in Paris.)
I don't have a smart phone so I have no experience with whether the photo resolution can be adjusted.
There are quite a few tools out there that can be used to scale down the resolution of a digital photo, crop it or convert it from one image type to another. (I use ImageMagick, a Linux-platform tool, but I've been a Linux geek for longer than I care to think about, dating back to before version 1.0.)
Challah makes such good French toast that I doubt I'd even try this one for French toast.
It does make a pretty good BLT, though. I've been tinkering with the recipe a bit, but this one came out so nice I may stick with that variant.
I think I have the site set to support 'large' images up to 1250 x 1250 pixels and 'medium' images of 400 x 300 pixels.
My big camera is usually set to produce 4000 x 6000 pixel images that are between 5MB and 6MB each, I usually reduce them down to 400 x 600 for posting here, although technically I upload them to another site of mine and then just post a link. The two I posted earlier today reduced down to under 170K when I did that.
A stretch and fold or two and/or getting a tighter skin when shaping might have helped produce a taller loaf, but I find it difficult to get a free form rectangular loaf that is taller than about 3.5 inches. The right type of slashing can also help produce rise in the direction you want the loaf to go. Large round loaves are easier to get tall, but I prefer loaves where most of the slices are around the same size, and I suspect someone running a deli would need that as well. If you want a true 'deli loaf' shape you might need to bake it in a deli loaf pan. I think I've seen 4, 6 or 8 gang deli loaf pans on some professional baking sites.
Adding pickle juice is a good way to add some sour without going the sourdough starter route, but you have to be careful about how much salt you add then, because pickle juice is often high in salt.
Here are some photos of my sesame-semolina bread:
The loaf size is about 10x6x3 inches. As you can see, it has a very open crumb, almost like a baguette. There are more sesame seeds in the bread (from the soaker) than on it, I forgot to refill the shaker.
My mother was big on Velveeta for grilled cheese sandwiches but I don't honestly remember the last time I bought any Velveeta, probably not in over 20 years.
We often use a combination of sharp cheddar and colby or co-jack cheese for grilled cheese sandwiches.
Slashing can be done for both decorative and functional purposes, ie, more control over the rise and preventing blowouts. I've always suspected that some bakeries use the slashing pattern to help identify the type of bread, too.
I read a note on another baking site recently that said when making diagonal slashes across a loaf, an odd number of slashes (ie, 3 or 5) is more pleasing than an even number of slashes. Do people agree?
Rye breads also take well to decorative stencils.
I've only made risotto a few times and haven't had it in restaurants much, either, but if you watch Hell's Kitchen, it's one of Gordon Ramsay's standard dishes for testing a cook, and he's pretty fussy about it, not too firm, not too liquid. (When I have had it in restaurants, it's generally been firmer than what it looks like on Hell's Kitchen.)
I avoid most packaged stocks because they usually have garlic in them, and most of them don't taste like anything I'd want to consume. (If you've ever been to a Zoup restaurant, they advertise that their stock is good enough to drink, and they sell their stock in jars and I've seen it in a local grocery store, too.)
I always have several containers (ranging from a few ounces to several quarts) of stock in the freezer, I currently have white chicken stock, brown chicken stock (the meat/bones are roasted first), beef stock, veal stock, duck stock and goose stock on hand. I've never made or used vegetable stock.
For most breads, I aim for 200 degrees, but a few degrees over 200 degrees is what I aim for with rye bread, which seems to need a slightly higher final temperature than white breads, I'm not sure why.
Rye bread also needs to sit until the loaf is COMPLETELY COOL before slicing it.
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.
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