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KP posted his thoughts on bleached flour and cookies more than once on the old BC, I think/hope one of them got archived and posted here.
Short form: Bleaching flour weakens the gluten bonds, so you wind up with less chewy cookies.
Alton Brown's episode on cookie-making did an excellent job of talking about how to get soft, crisp or chewy cookies by manipulating the amount of sugar and fat.
A few years ago I made a large batch of eclairs (like 8 dozen) and wound up making about 6 batches of pastry cream (several of them gluten-free, to go in gluten-free eclairs). With practice, the prepping/cooking part is not where you spend the most time.
The most time-consuming part of making pastry cream is chilling it, and spreading it fairly thin on a sheet pan then putting it in a blast chiller is one way cooking competitors have to speed that up. Using a drum sieve to strain it saves time, too.
And they don't usually wait for it to get fully chilled and set, they just get it down to about 80. An extra egg yolk or two will produce a fairly firm pastry cream even when it's tepid. I have discovered, though, that it is possible to have a pastry cream get too eggy, it tastes more like scrambled eggs than pastry cream.
Today I'm making bottom round with onion gravy. I started the onions an hour before adding the meat, so they should get nicely caramelized.
If it was me, I'd start by checking both the mixer and the beater to make sure nothing's clogged up or bent. I clean mine with a toothbrush every now and then, because stuff gets flung up into all sorts of nooks and crannies.
I'm skeptical of any recipe that calls for yeast but doesn't include significant rising time.
Today I am making Vienna bread from the Clonmel Kitchens Double Crusty recipe. (Making this recipe reminds me that we haven't heard from Paddy L in a long time, I hope she's doing OK.)
With our lowered bread consumption, I am baking 3 loaves (about 17.5 ounces of dough each) and will slice them in half, freezing 2 1/2 loaves for future use. This'll probably last me 3-4 weeks.
I haven't made pizza in a while, with just the two of us cranking the oven up for 1 or 2 pizzas seems like a waste of energy, and now that my wife's on a low-carb diet she isn't eating pizza or pasta much.
Back in the day, We preferred whole milk mozzarella, which can be difficult to find in grocery stores, though we have been able to buy it in 5 pound bags at Sams Club. I like to top it with a 4-cheese blend: Parmesan, Romano, Asiago and Provolone.
I think several of the 'Chicago-style' pizza places ship frozen pizzas. I'd avoid Uno's, they went 'commercial' some years ago (and even sell them in airports) and they're a mere shadow of what
they were in the 70's.But one of the biggest challenges with buying frozen unbaked pizzas is you'll never be able to bake them in an oven that's as hot as the one in the pizzeria, their ovens will generally be set for 650 to 750, and some gas ovens can go as hot as 1000. Coal fired pizza ovens are the hottest, but I think there are only a half dozen or so of them left in the USA, most of those in NYC. Wood fired pizza ovens can get pretty hot, too.
I made about 11 quarts of vegetable beef soup yesterday. I added lots of red, orange and yellow peppers but forgot the carrots and celery, but it's still pretty good.
My wife prefers raised fried donuts I'm more of a cake donut fan, so the baked ones work well for me.
I don't have the donut pan, but I've made KAF's donut muffin recipe as donut holes several times.
What chocolate frosting recipe did you use?
I'm making a big batch of beef stock today, starting out by roasting some of the shank bones I got at the farmer's market, some beef shanks, various trim pieces from the kitchen that I've saved over the last few months, some neck bones and a sirloin tip roast (just to make sure I've got lots of beef for the soup), with onions, celery and carrots on top. I'll wind up with 10-14 quarts of beef stock, about half of which will go into a batch of vegetable beef soup tomorrow.
There's an ice storm heading our way, so this'll keep the house nice and warm and smelling wonderful.
What kind of bread did you use for your bahn mi? There are a half-dozen or so recipes for 'Vietnamese-style baguettes' on the Internet, but I'm not sure I'd know the difference. I think the local bahn mi shops here just use what's available from restaurant suppliers.
I've made a lamb/beef gyros mixture (which I cooked on the rotisserie), but my wife doesn't care for the taste of lamb. Our favorite local gyros maker uses an all-beef gyros meat, so that must be the local preference.
When our younger son was studying in Germany, he subsisted largely on Doner Kebabs, which were available nearly everywhere when we visited him in Berlin and came in a variety of types, beef, beef/lamb, chicken and fish.
I've got a tapered rolling pin, I've never figured out how to use it for anything. My go-to rolling pins these days are two non-tapered wooden ones with no handles, like the ones we used in pastry school, in two different diameters. I like the larger diameter one for pie crusts, the smaller diameter one for other doughs.
There were problems at first, and right after your host moved to a different ISP, but it's been up every time I've gone there for the past several months, so I think they got it worked out.
You should be able to find replacement wood strips at a hobby store, I've even seen them at hardware stores.
For that matter, 1/16 of an inch is 0.0625 of an inch, and the thickness of a penny is 0.0598 of an inch, so if you tape a row of pennies to the counter, that should be really close to 1/16 of an inch.
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