[Mike Nolan]

The wine teacher told Diane the parsnip-apple-coriander-cumin soup was very good both cold and warm.

[Mike Nolan]

There aren't a lot of soups that work as cold soups, but there are a few. There are some soups that work as cold soups but not as hot ones, for example, aspics, since the gelling is important to what makes it an aspic and that requires it be cold.

Soups with proteins in them generally don't work as cold soups, I think because the fats in them have an odd mouth feel when cold.

I've never tried a cold melon soup, but recipes for those seem to show up every summer.

[Mike Nolan]

The sourdough cheese crackers that I baked this week are OK, I still think I need to use a finer ground whole wheat flour. I could taste the cheese more, but I think they could be even cheesier. I can't say I could tell there was rye flour in the dough but there wasn't a lot of it, maybe 10%.

I didn't brush any oil on the top or sprinkle on salt, though I did add some salt to the dough and there's some salt in the cheese as well. They still seemed a bit bland, maybe more salt is needed.

I might try the Azure Standard durum flour in a batch, it's whole wheat but very finely ground. It'd be nice to have a way to use it up, too, we've decided it doesn't work in pasta or in semolina bread.

Bakeraunt, do you let your crackers rise after rollout before baking them? I think they rose some during baking but still seemed a bit dense.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm sending a cup of the parsnip-apple-coriander-cumin soup in with Diane for the wine teacher to try.

I have to say that it is better several days old and cold that it was the day I made it. The spices have mellowed and the parsnip-apple combination is the dominant flavor profile. I could actually see serving this as a cold soup appetizer now, at the right type of dinner party, possibly using less coriander and/or cumin.

[Mike Nolan]

I stopped being annoyed with King Arthur after I realized I could find most of what they sell online, including many of their branded items, sometimes at a cheaper price and/or with free delivery and no minimum order size.

[Mike Nolan]

We had eye of round roast with mashed potatoes, gravy, and a salad.

[Mike Nolan]

The general rule of thumb on eggs is that 15% of the weight is the shell.

[Mike Nolan]

Yes, I roll them out on the parchment, that way when I'm done I just move the whole thing onto a half size sheet pan for baking. You do need a little flour under the dough so it doesn't buckle as it gets thinner, but that's true when you roll stuff out just using the platform.

I use a straightedge tool (like the kind used for painting or wallpapering that are reinforced so they don't bend, see link below) and just press it down firmly into the dough. I start by trimming the edges into a rectangle (the trim gets added to the dough for the next tray), then just work my way across. They aren't quite the same size, but pretty close.

https://www.lowes.com/pd/Warner-12-in-Plastic-Paint-Guide/1000024777

When I took my chocolate course, that's what they were using as a straightedge. So now I have them in two sizes.

[Mike Nolan]

The package size is another field I'm playing with, it is intended for things that are packaged in multiples, like a dozen cookies or rolls, so I can see the package ingredient cost. For breads it would usually be a 1.

[Mike Nolan]

A half inch, as recommended.

[Mike Nolan]

My wife loves apple butter, most of the time I find it too heavily spiced. I think the batch I just made might be just enough milder for me to enjoy it.

[Mike Nolan]

Aaron, I went back and looked at the challah spreadsheet I posted on Sep. 21st, it doesn't have post-bake weight information (that's something I'm still experimenting with, along with a way to generate nutrition information).

I don't know where you got 16 ounces as the post-bake weight, unless that's something from an earlier post you made as your target weight. I used 24 ounces in part because that's what it was set to from the spreadsheet I used as the starting point for this one.

I wind up weighing my ingredients when I resize a recipe, including eggs.

The USDA says large eggs are supposed to average 2 ounces each in the shell, but they lose weight through evaporation over time. (That's why there's a bigger air cavity in an egg that you've had in the fridge for a couple of weeks.) I get 1.7 ounces of liquid from a large egg or slightly less.

[Mike Nolan]

I think even the one at the top right corner of the photo is edible. Some of the first tray got a little darker than I wanted, too. Every day you learn something else about baking.

Measuring the thickness of very thin and soft things like cracker dough can be challenging. You can't just put them in a micrometer. 🙂

Assuming I understand the settings on my sheeter (and that they're accurate), I had it set on 2mm thickness at the end. They're on parchment so that has to be factored out. A sheet of parchment paper is about 1/500 of an inch thick, so that would make them about 1.95 mm thick, or 0.073 inches, which is a bit thicker than 1/16 of an inch but thinner than 3/32.

I can measure the thickness of the baked crackers using my micrometer, they're mostly between 2.8 and 3.8 mm thick.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's what the second tray looked like, I did them for a total of 9 minutes at 325 using a convection cycle. I did NOT rotate the pan, you can see that the top part (which was to the left side of the oven) is more well-done than the bottom part, though both appear to be fully baked inside.

So it seems the convection cycle in my oven doesn't even baking temperatures out across the entire baking area as much as I would have liked. That's something I've wondered about but never tried to test.

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[Mike Nolan]

5 of 7 jars sealed, I didn't have the band on properly on one jar and it leaked a lot, so there was apple butter on the outside of most of the jars. I carefully washed it off, hopefully I got it all. I might also have processed it in the pressure canner too long or at too high pressure.

It looks like there's apple butter stuck to the underside of the lid:

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