Mike Nolan
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The eye-opening experience for me was watching Susan Reid of KAF make a near-perfect batch of puff pastry under what had to be about the worst possible conditions. Most of her tools and ingredients didn't make it to the site, a motel in Kansas City, so she had to improvise, she was using a motel room card as a pastry scraper! And though the books usually tell you to treat the dough gently, she'd pick it up, flop it around and stretch the corners until she got a good rectangular shape. When I went to pastry school a few years later, we spent about a day on laminated doughs, and the instructor commented that I wasn't afraid to work with my dough.
When I do a 'turn' I want to roll the pastry out to about 3X its current size, since I do letter-fold turns. If you do book-fold turns, you want to roll it out to 4X its current size.
Most puff pastry is rolled out to 1/4 inch at the end, or possibly a bit thinner, depending on what you plan to make. Keep in mind the dough will shrink a bit after it has been rolled out and as it is cut.
1/4 inch is about the height of 4 pennies. I have my suspicion that most of us are poor judges of how thick pastry dough is and wind up with something that's 3/8" thick or thicker. Even in pastry school, where we were using a sheet roller, most of the students had to be told to keep rolling it thinner at the end.
When I was testing Peter Reinhart's laminated dough recipe (in the Artisan book), I used a laser leveler to check how thick and even the dough was, I even took pictures! Peter got a kick out of them.
There are several things that can cause brown spots on tomatoes, while some are fungal infections, most are related to having soil issues, watering issues or heat stress. (A hailstorm can also bruise tomatoes.) If it's widespread in the area, the weather-related issues are the most likely cause.
Your county extension service can help diagnose the problem and recommend solutions.
We've had problems here with blossom end rot, which is a calcium deficiency. It's actually possible to have too much nitrogen in the soil for tomatoes. I let my tomato garden go fallow again this year, it's got mostly alfalfa in it this year. Last year it had a mix of alfalfa and buckwheat. (Boy, do bees LOVE buckwheat flowers!)
I think I may let it sit idle for another season, or possibly plant something that's not in the nightshade family, which includes tomatoes, peppers, potatoes and eggplant. (Unfortunately, tomatoes, peppers and eggplants are what I have the most experience growing.)
I've been getting a pound or two of tomatoes at the farmers market about once a week, that's been enough for the two of us. But I do miss those sun-warmed tomatoes picked and eaten moments later.
I processed at least 60 pounds of tomatoes today, running them through my food mill to remove the seeds and skins. I wound up with nearly 10 pounds of skins and seeds left over, which I froze in 2 pound bags, I'll use them in place of canned tomatoes in beef stock recipes this winter. (I got some nice beef shank bones at the Farmer's Market a week ago, so I'm ready for cooler weather.)
I've got a 12 quart and a 16 quart pot of tomato sauce reducing on the stove overnight. Not sure how much they'll need to reduce, hopefully I'll wind up with 12-15 quarts of sauce for the freezer.
The tomatoes came from the test gardens at the University of Nebraska, the grad students running those tests said they picked over 1000 pounds of tomatoes today. The variety is Defiant, which is in the seed catalogs. It's a determinate with good disease resistance and a long season, the vines grow to 3-4 feet and produce 8-10 ounce red fruits that are very meaty. I may have her get a second batch of them the next time they pick, on Friday. I saved a few for slicing, BLT's may be on the menu tomorrow.
I only put in 4 tomato plants this year, and they're just starting to produce, so I was glad to get the ones from UNL. (Fringe benefits of my wife working for Agronomy and Horticulture.)
She also brought home some sweet corn from the test gardens, I think it's the best sweet corn we've had this season, too bad they're just about at the end of the season.
Every few years things that bakers have known for millennia are rediscovered. There are often a few new variants to the tricks, but most of it is the same old things all over again.
I've never had much success with blitz puff pastry, so I make the real stuff, a batch takes me 3-4 hours for 4-5 turns. Roll out, fold, refrigerate for 15 minutes, etc. I generally divide a batch in half for the final roll-out.
I've seen some puff pastry recipes that recommend an overnight rest between turns, to let the flour continue to hydrate and give the dough time to relax. If you do that, you need to let the dough warm up for 15-20 minutes before starting the next step so the butter isn't rock hard.
Just tell them you learned the trick from a baker named 3 Fingered Pete!
I'll probably try it some time, but most of the time I make smaller bagels (about 3.25 ounces of dough per bagel, most deli bagels start with around 4.5 ounces of dough) and most of them get a big heap of asiago cheese on top, so slicing them this way might be a bit more challenging.
August 14, 2017 at 2:15 pm in reply to: Half and Half, Whipping Cream, and Heavy Whipping Cream #8546So far all I've gotten is the 'You'll hear from us in a few days' message, I'll give them a few more days to respond then probably give them a call.
They have fixed the web link you had posted, it now says serving size is 1 tablespoon and there are 64 servings in the package.
You're correct that self-rising flour is more commonly used in European/British recipes than in the USA (except perhaps in the South.) I haven't dug out my Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood books to check, but my recollection is that if they want self-rising flour they'll say that.
I'm making black bean meatloaf, because I have two pounds of ground beef to use up.
I've been known to make 2 six-inch cakes rather than an eight or nine inch cake for Boston Cream Pie (and then I give one to my neighbor), I should think about downsizing the recipe I've been experimenting with so it makes just one six inch pie.
So far I think the best one I've made was the time I made two different batches of pastry cream (one using a classic French creme patisserie recipe) and then combined them. It had the richness of the creme patisserie, made with lots of egg yolks and heavy cream, with the firmness of the other recipe.
I haven't made my mind up about the right topping. I think it needs to be on the bittersweet side rather than sweet, but that's probably because the Boston Cream Pie we used to get in Chicago had that kind of topping on it. My wife prefers something a bit sweeter, but I'm more of a dark chocolate fan than she is.
Adding some corn syrup (mostly glucose) to a sucrose solution is a common trick, changing the ratio of glucose to fructose (the two component sugars in sucrose) interferes with their tendency to crystallize.
If you research the history of Boston Cream Pie, it isn't supposed to be very tall.
I've tried a few GBBO recipes, with reasonable results, though many English recipes use caster sugar, which is not generally available in the USA, though I think superfine baker's sugar comes pretty close. In most recipes, I don't think it makes much difference. There are differences in flour as well, North American flours are generally much stronger (higher protein/gluten content).
The continued success of Hell's Kitchen amazes me as well. I can't say I've learned much about cooking from it, but I wonder about the skill levels of the cooks in the restaurants I go to more than I used to.
August 10, 2017 at 1:37 pm in reply to: Half and Half, Whipping Cream, and Heavy Whipping Cream #8497Milkfat and butterfat are the same thing, there is only one fat in milk.
I'll have to check the cream packages in the Lincoln stores the next time I go shopping. As I recall, one brand showed the milk/butterfat content and another did not.
Given that the shows from GBBO being shown on PBS now are from several seasons ago, it might take a while for Mary Berry's new show to make it to USA markets, if it does at all. (Gordon Ramsay's British series didn't do so well on USA TV, which is why Hell's Kitchen is done in Los Angeles.)
August 9, 2017 at 2:55 pm in reply to: Half and Half, Whipping Cream, and Heavy Whipping Cream #8486Buttermilk is historically what's left after the butter has been made from cream, but buttermilk hasn't been made like that in years, probably decades. It's a 'cultured' product made from milk, so low-fat buttermilk starts with low-fat milk. So is sour cream, though low-fat sour cream always sounds like a contrast in terms to me!
I've got a book on cooking with buttermilk that starts out by having you make European style butter from cream and some active culture product (such as tefir, though cultured buttermilk or sour cream might work as well) and what's left over is the buttermilk you use in the recipes. Along the way, you wind up making your own creme fraiche.
The book, in case anyone is interested, is the Animal Farm Buttermilk Cookbook, by Diane St. Clair.
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