[Mike Nolan]

I don't know what the upper limit is on images, I'll have to see if I can find out what it is and whether it can be changed.

I've never made, and as far as I can recall I've never had, a chess pie. What recipe do you use?

I mangled pie crusts for years, but my week of pastry school is still paying dividends. I've used 3 or 4 different recipes since then, they've all been pretty successful.

Kenji Lopez-Alt's article on the Science of Pie Dough is worth reading, I've used his method more than once, I just tend to prefer the recipe/method I learned at SFBI--with one trick from Kenji's method, I hold back about 1/3 cup of pastry flour to add in after the butter is cut in.

I think the SFBI recipe is just a little flakier and more buttery.

[Mike Nolan]

I saw one of the contestants scaling dough for dinner rolls to get them the same size, they may just not be showing anyone scaling ingredients.

[Mike Nolan]

Just watched the bread episode, it was only a one-hour episode this week. Next week is pies and tarts.

[Mike Nolan]

I second Sarah's recommendation to check out 3rd party parts depots, I've had mixed results ordering parts from KitchenAid. I ordered a new set of rubber feet for our stand mixer, they were the wrong size. (Our mixer is from 1972.) If you've got a local small appliance repair shop nearby, use them, they're an endangered species and need our support.

I had to unbury it on the counter to check it, we also have a Kitchenaid hand mixer, though as I recall it only has 3 speeds. I don't recall when anyone last used it, probably 3-4 years ago when someone was making 7-minute icing. I use my stand mixer frequently, my Bamix stick blender several times a month and beyond that I use whisks or a kitchen fork. (My favorite whisk is one that ATK gave a low score to.)

My wife gave me a hand egg beater with removable blades (easier to clean) a year ago, i think I've used it twice.

[Mike Nolan]

You don't think Johnny L meets that requirement??

The on-demand feature on our cable system has it, I assume episodes show up a day after they air.

I recorded this last night (Project Runway has precedence here), hopefully I'll have time to watch it over the weekend. I think last night included the 'bread' challenges.

[Mike Nolan]

I can't say I'm surprised, even commercially frozen products with eggs in them (sandwiches, etc) are, at best, mediocre.

[Mike Nolan]

Welcome back. I'm puzzled as to what was causing your password problems, I'm on a lot of WordPress-based sites and the account/password/login stuff works well on all of them. I've reset my passwords (I have 3 different logins for testing purposes) here over a dozen times since May, mostly to test that it works properly, never had a problem once.

[Mike Nolan]

One of the local farmers markets here does a special 'holiday' market just ahead of Thanksgiving and again just ahead of Christmas. It is a HUGE success. I've had to park at least 2 blocks away more than once. They hold it indoors at one of the city's parks buildings.

[Mike Nolan]

To add to this thread, I can report from personal experience that my mother's oatmeal crisp chocolate chip cookies survive transit very well and may actually get better as they age.

[Mike Nolan]

I won't comment on the shows themselves, as there are too many opportunities for spoilers.

The time limits are on the short side but are generally reasonable IF YOU ARE WELL-ORGANIZED AND YOU DON"T MAKE ANY MISTAKES! That's a pretty big if, though.

I watched last week's episode last night, I didn't find the hosts excessively intrusive in the show, no more than their British counterparts at least. Mary is still Mary and Johnny Luzzini is well known as a judge on American reality cooking shows and is fine, and not much got past the pair of them.

However, it looks like it did poorly in the ratings, perhaps because it had too much competition for the 'homemaker' market from the well-establshed Project Runway, I'm not sure what else is in that time slot. (NFL football, but the Thursday night games have been awful this year, and I don't see those viewers as likely bakers.)

Daily Mirror Article

[Mike Nolan]

My mother always used oatmeal as the binder in meat loaf, sometimes adding an egg.

I've got a recipe posted for meat loaf with a can of black beans and sauteed mushrooms, it's a bit high in carbs for my wife these days, but it's delicious.

[Mike Nolan]

I know it doesn't reconstitute, but would it work in a frosting?

[Mike Nolan]

My concern about using powdered milk from the store is the smell, how do you keep that from permeating the frosting?

[Mike Nolan]

An immersion circulation heater is used for sous vide cooking.

In some ways it's similar to a convection oven, but much more efficient because water conducts heat better than air. Because the water is always circulating it produces a constant heat at the specified temperature everywhere in the pot, as opposed to having a pot on a stove where the temperature at the bottom is going to be much warmer than at the top.

Fish and chicken are the most frequently mentioned proteins in sous vice cooking, but you can cook nearly anything this way.

For example, if you want a steak cooked to 135 degrees, you just put it in a boiling bag, set the immersion heater to 135 and when you're done it is a uniform 135 degrees throughout, which means it's the same degree of redness from edge to edge.

If you want a seared outside or grill marks on the outside, a minute or two in a pan or on the grill will finish it off.

By contract, when you cook a steak in a pan or on the grill, by the time the center gets to 135 degrees the outside is probably at 170 or higher.

Restaurants often use sous vide techniques to par-cook foods to save time later on and ensure consistent results.

Something I learned about cooking potatoes from Harold McGee's book On Food and Cooking is that if you cook them at 130-140 degrees for about 20 minutes then raise the temperature to finish cooking them, they'll stay firm even after they're fully cooked and diced. This makes for a nicer potato salad. In essence this is a sous vide technique.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 7 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

Sounds like the cooked flour frosting that was the one originally used on Red Velvet cakes before most bakeries switched over to using a cream cheese frosting on them.

Sarah Wirth recommends that frosting, I tried making it once and must have done something wrong, because we thought it was inedible.

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