Mike Nolan

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  • in reply to: What are You Baking the Week of February 12, 2017? #6611
    Mike Nolan
    Keymaster

      I recommend you look for 'langues de chat' recipes. (Yes, that means "cat's tongue".) That's basically what the cookie part of a Milano cookie is. I haven't found the right filling recipe yet, though. Next time I'm just going to try some tempered milk chocolate. (Or maybe a mix of milk and dark chocolate.)

      When you say 'cut off a corner', it sounds like you were using a ziplock bag. I find it difficult to make precise shapes that way, the bag is clumsy to hold compared to a standard pastry bag. I went to the restaurant supply store and bought a roll of disposable pastry bags in two different sizes. I just looked online, a roll of a hundred Ateco 12" pastry bags is about $10, or a dime each.

      Or you can do what I've been practicing since I went to chocolate school, make pastry bags out of parchment for less than a penny. It took me about a dozen tries to get the basics worked out, and I probably need to do a few dozen more to make it nearly effortless.

      in reply to: What are You Baking the Week of February 12, 2017? #6600
      Mike Nolan
      Keymaster

        Looking at the Wikipedia guide on Good Eats, Season 1, Episode 13, "The Art of Darkness", is probably the episode where he talks about tempering chocolate.

        I think I saw that episode in the list of programs on the Food Channel over the weekend, too.

        in reply to: What are You Baking the Week of February 12, 2017? #6595
        Mike Nolan
        Keymaster

          There are quite a few pages on the web that talk about how to temper chocolate. I had read several of them before going to chocolate school, it isn't that we did things differently there, but the hands-on experience was worth the time and cost.

          The biggest trick on tempering chocolate is to be able to control and measure the temperature fairly precisely. In school we used infrared thermometers to test the temperature of the chocolate as we stirred it.

          The temperatures below are for dark chocolate. For milk chocolate subtract 2-3 degrees (C) and for white chocolate subtract 6-8 degrees.

          You need to get the chocolate warm enough to melt out all the existing fat crystals (45-50 degrees C) then cool it to the point where it can form new crystals. The crystals you want have the highest melting point of the five crystal structures, so you want the chocolate in the 28-32 degree range. (There is a sixth crystal structure, but it generally only forms when chocolate sits for a very long time.)

          If you have some tempered chocolate on hand, you can use that to 'seed' the right crystals by stirring it into your un-tempered melted chocolate. You need to add about 10% by weight to seed it properly.

          Otherwise you need to let the chocolate cool, working it to develop crystals (we did this on a marble surface), then reheat it to melt the 'wrong' crystal structures, which have a lower melting point and stir it some more to get the right crystals to spread.

          We used strips of parchment paper to test how well tempered our chocolate was. Dip a strip in the chocolate then set it on a second strip of parchment to cool. If it is well-tempered, you won't get any streaks in the cooled chocolate and it will have a 'snap' to it.

          I bought a small chocolate pot after spending a week at chocolate school. It gives me fairly precise temperature controls over a range of 20-50 degrees (C).

          • This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by Mike Nolan.
          in reply to: Wonky Kitchen Aid bowl #6590
          Mike Nolan
          Keymaster

            I don't have a loose bowl, but I've been told that putting a small piece of masking tape on the bowl helps lock it in without making it so firm you can't get it off.

            in reply to: What are You Baking the Week of February 12, 2017? #6589
            Mike Nolan
            Keymaster

              when I have extra egg whites, I often make meringue cookies with mini chocolate chips in them.

              in reply to: What are You Cooking the Week of February 5, 2017? #6572
              Mike Nolan
              Keymaster

                I just posted both my recipe for mayonnaise and my recipe for Thousand Island salad dressing, which uses the mayonnaise recipe.

                in reply to: What are You Cooking the Week of February 5, 2017? #6569
                Mike Nolan
                Keymaster

                  Earlier this week I made chicken breasts with mirepoix and sweet peppers, tonight I'm making pepper steak.

                  in reply to: A Question about Restaurant Lettuce #6557
                  Mike Nolan
                  Keymaster

                    As far as I know, most bagged produce does not have a preservative in it. A good restaurant will wash it and spin it dry anyway, though.

                    in reply to: A Question about Restaurant Lettuce #6552
                    Mike Nolan
                    Keymaster

                      I've been in the kitchen of some high volume restaurants, the lettuce comes out of the bag and is onto a plate in such a short amount of time that preservatives are not needed.

                      in reply to: A Question about Restaurant Lettuce #6545
                      Mike Nolan
                      Keymaster

                        Salad bars are breeding grounds for all sort of food-borne illnesses and allergies. Too many salad bars don't keep warm foods hot enough or cold foods cold enough. Cross-contamination of foods at a salad bar is commonplace, so anyone with a gluten allergy (just to mention one) has to be very careful. I've been to far too many restaurants where the people stocking the salad bar know very little about what each item contains, many of them come straight out of a carton, jar or can. (One of our pet peeves is places that don't know that ranch dressing contains garlic.)

                        The reason garlic is considered 'healthy', as I wrote in my first blog post last spring, is that it slows down your digestion. That means you absorb less of the food and what you do absorb is broken down into things your body can handle better.

                        That's great unless, like my wife and perhaps another 2-3 % of the population, your body's reaction to garlic is to basically shut your digestive system down completely for several hours.

                        The FDA and USDA don't recognize garlic allergy as a food issue yet, but 30-40 years ago they didn't recognize gluten allergy issues, either, so there's still hope.

                        In many restaurants, they use jars of pre-minced garlic, which may contain preservatives. These days there are limitations on what preservatives can be used on salad bar items, but I suspect many restaurants make their own 'preservatives' that ignore those limitations.

                        in reply to: What are You Baking the Week of February 5, 2017? #6528
                        Mike Nolan
                        Keymaster

                          I made an apple pie on Sunday morning and made popovers to go with supper before the Super Bowl.

                          • This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Mike Nolan.
                          in reply to: What are You Cooking the Week of February 5, 2017? #6527
                          Mike Nolan
                          Keymaster

                            I made boeuf bourguignon and Thousand Island salad dressing (starting by making my own mayonnaise).

                            in reply to: Antacid in pizza dough? #6499
                            Mike Nolan
                            Keymaster

                              Maybe it's like Velveeta or the Kraft jar cheeses, no refrigeration needed until it's opened.

                              in reply to: How Many Different Flours Do You Have in Your House? #6489
                              Mike Nolan
                              Keymaster

                                Well, now I need to itemize mine:

                                KAF AP
                                KAF bread
                                GM unbleached
                                pastry flour
                                cake flour
                                White Lily Flour
                                bleached AP flour
                                whole wheat flour (freshly ground in my mill) from both hard red and soft red wheat berries
                                cracked wheat
                                wheat bran
                                vital gluten (seldom used these days)
                                semoina
                                sprouted wheat flour
                                rye flour
                                rye chops
                                corn meal
                                corn flour
                                cornstarch
                                potato flour
                                potato starch
                                sweet rice flour
                                brown rice flour
                                tapioca flour
                                barley flour
                                sorghum flour
                                millet flour
                                teff
                                garbanzo bean flour
                                arrowroot
                                almond flour
                                hazelnut flour
                                pecan meal
                                oat flour
                                oat bran
                                rolled oats
                                steel cut oats
                                buckwheat flour
                                soy
                                flax

                                Listing whole seeds would take some time, too.

                                And I may have missed a few.

                                in reply to: Antacid in pizza dough? #6486
                                Mike Nolan
                                Keymaster

                                  I generally use whole-milk mozzarella on pizza and lasagna, but I do like to add a sprinkle of a four-cheese blend I get at Sams Club that has Romano, Parmesan, Asiago and Provolone. My mother used to say that a pizza without some Romano cheese on it is boring.

                                Viewing 15 posts - 7,051 through 7,065 (of 7,565 total)