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We have gotten an invasion of mice from outside the last two falls, and our two cats don't seem to have much interest in catching mice. Well, the grey one caught some baby mice, but not any full-grown ones.
So I use old-fashioned traps, some baited with peanut butter and some baited with chocolate. This year it was about 50-50 as to which caught more.
Before the food truck craze got to Lincoln, we had two chefs set up huge barbecue tanks (no other word describes them properly) at local gas stations. You could smell them 2-3 blocks away!
If you haven't read the Tartine Bakery books, I suggest doing so, while the recipes and methods have been strucured for home use, the text talks a lot about how he does sourdough for the bakery. There used to be a couple of websites online that discuss how to maintain a sourdough culture for bakery production, I think I found one of them through the Bread Baker's Guild site, http://www.bbga.org/
Joan, I was reading too fast, for a moment I thought you put the chocolate cake in your soup!
I made snapper last night, but I may need to find a better recipe, it was kind of bland and possibly overcooked. (I normally cook salmon for me and orange roughy for my wife, because she doesn't like salmon and I think orange roughy is boring.)
I'm not sure what the Nebraska laws are, booths at the Lincoln farmers markets can apparently opt out of the commercial kitchen requirements, but does that allow a cat in the kitchen? I doubt it. (What's ironic about that is that historically bakers usually had a cat or two to control the rodent population.)
The food truck regulations here in Lincoln are basically stacked in favor of the brick-and-mortar restaurants, food trucks are not permitted to park on public streets for more than 15 minutes at a time, carts are not permitted on the sidewalks and none of the shopping centers that have restaurants in them will allow food trucks to park there except for rare special events. So they tend to use things like church parking lots. Two of the best food trucks have given up completely, and I think a third one (associated with a good Mexican restaurant) may have given up last fall.
Building and using a mother culture is much easier if you're baking nearly every day, you don't have to throw away half of the starter each time you feed it, you just use that for today's baking.
I see two challenges here.
The first is volume. A reasonably busy deli could easily go through 20 loaves of bread a day.
The second problem is meeting sanitary standards as a supplier to a restaurant, if that's your intent. Those vary so much around the country that it's hard to say much here, so you'll need to do your research.
The good news is that sourdough techniques scale up very well, in fact I think it's less work to maintain a large starter (eg, in a 4-10 gallon container) than a small one.
I always thought the secret ingredient in diner pancakes was a bit of orange juice.
Here's a link to it: Blintz Loaf
Well, substituting 50% semolina for the flour in the Austrian Malt recipe was not very successful. The bread didn't rise as much as I would have liked and it is way too sweet. It is OK as a savory sandwich bread. like with roast beef, but I won't make it again.
I have made my mother's oatmeal crisp cookies without the chocolate chips, they're still very dunkable. And you can substitute raisins for the chocolate chips.
My mother often made them with nuts, usually hickory nuts, but those are so hard to find these days. (I actually have two small bags of them, but I haven't put them in cookies yet.)
For molasses cookies, Big Lake Judy's recipe is still the best I've found, and it's available here. And if you don't like molasses, substitute Lyle's Golden Syrup, you'll get a cookie unlike any you've ever had before! Lyle's is my secret ingredient for when I want something that will have a unique taste.
My wife is allergic to saffron, so I've never made it, but most recipes seem to use chicken stock instead of water, and maybe a little onion.
I'm making a loaf of bread today, the Austrian Malt recipe but with 50% semolina flour. I haven't decided yet if I'm baking it free-form or in a loaf pan, probably the latter.
They had lovely (and BIG) red peppers at the store the other day at 3/$1.00, so I made some stuffed peppers tonight. I blanched the peppers after hollowing them out and filled them with a mixture of browned ground beef, some oatmeal and a bit of barbecue sauce and sprinkled cheese on top. 35 minutes at 350 covered, then another 15 minutes uncovered.
I moved her post to the general forum, but I don't see a recipe that looks likely to be the one she was after. Maybe Sarah will remember it, but I haven't seen her online much lately.
Some varieties of garlic are much stronger than others, and how you cook it also makes a difference. And then there's black garlic, which has been fermented.
(Just because I can't use garlic in my home cooking that doesn't mean I'm totally disinterested in it.)
I tend to agree that 1-2 days of retarded fermentation is great for pizza dough. After 3 days, it starts to taste and act more like a sourdough.
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