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Haven't actually used it, but I've seen several positive references:
Salt and baking soda, though both have sodium, have very different impacts on both the taste and structure of baked goods, so they're not interchangeable.
Aside from the olives, the filling is basically a piperade (peppers, onions and tomatoes), which make for a good pizza.
The last few things I made using sweet peppers bothered Diane's stomach, so I haven't made anything with them lately.
Retired as King Arthur's head baker, Jeffrey Hamelman made a post on the BGGA forums the other day that seems to suggest he keeps a starter that weighs only 15 grams in between feedings and I think he feeds it every day. I wonder if he refrigerates it at all? I'll have to ask him.
He build it up a bit ahead of baking, I think, but keeping a starter that small would minimize the waste of throwing out half the starter when it is fed.
The Tartine books are interesting in that he uses very small amounts of starter in most of his recipes, and he prefers what he calls an immature starter, making a levain that has maybe 3-5% starter in it that is used for baking within a day
An article came up on my phone the other day with a headline about people are using too many probiotics and why that's a problem. I didn't read it, but I have read other articles suggesting this trend might be overdone.
But by the time the scientists can conduct and publish multi-year time studies on the impact of a heavily probiotic diet (assuming they can get funding for one), the foodies will likely have moved on to something else.
The more breads I make from the Ginsberg book, the further away they are getting from store-bought rye breads, which I suspect are often no more than 20-30% rye flour. I think we actually prefer the lighter ones over the 75-100% rye flour breads, which are dense and heavy, even when sliced thin, often quite sour, and rather strong tasting.
The Westphalian rye that I made a few weeks back smelled really interesting when baking but was too strong tasting for us. I haven't written that one up yet, because I'm not sure if I consider it a successful interpretation of the recipe, and I'm really not up for doing it a second time yet, either.
I use a ratio of 40% rye to 60% wheat flour when I make Reinhart's marbled rye bread, the original recipe calls for 30/70 (Bread Baker's Apprentice), I also double the caraway.
Spinach and ricotta filling is easy to make in a blender or food processor, and I'd just spread it on like I would a compound butter for cinnamon rolls, but thicker.
I don't know the ratio of spinach to ricotta I use, but it comes out pretty solidly green.
Let's say you have 200 grams of starter.
If you follow the traditional home method for feeding it, you'd use or discard 100 grams of starter, then add 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water to the rest, getting it back to 200 grams. You then set it aside until next time. (Whether or not you refrigerate it is a separate issue.)
But consider a different scenario:
You have 200 grams of starter. You add 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of water, getting to 400 grams. 12 hours later you remove 200 grams of recently-fed and now quite active starter and use it to make bread.
You still have 200 grams of starter left, which was fed with a 1-1 ratio of water and flour. The difference is a matter of timing.
So figure out how much starter you need to make a batch of bread, and consider that your 'carryover' amount, each time you feed it you double that, then use half of it for making bread, getting back to the carryover amount.
I guarantee you that professional bakers are more likely to do it this way than to throw away half of their starter at each feeding.
We had mac and cheese
I sent a followup note to Unified Mills speculating what they were after when using yogurt in the preferment, I don't expect a response until next week at the earliest.
I think the buttermilk plant relies on there being an active culture in the buttermilk that is used to seed it, otherwise it wouldn't regenerate itself.
We had salads with tuna fish tonight.
Maybe that recipe was looking for 'active culture' yogurt, which I don't think most yogurts are, it didn't specify greek yogurt.
We haven't been eating much yogurt lately, I don't care for it at all, for several years that was my wife's breakfast but she's been on a cottage cheese and fruit kick lately.
I couldn't find a small container of plain yogurt, so I bought a small one of vanilla yogurt, that seemed like the least 'flavored' one in a small container. (A quart of plain yogurt would have been $3.00 or more, and 99% of it would have gone to waste.)
I actually thought about using kefir instead of yogurt for the einkorn test bread, because active culture kefir is getting easier to find, for some reason. Sour cream was another possibility I considered.
In any event, I didn't see any indication of any kind of fermentation activity in the preferment for that bread, but it seemed to come out OK.
BTW, that einkorn bread made pretty good fried cheese sandwiches last night. I paired it with some Cabot 'seriously sharp' cheddar cheese. Dipped in tomato soup, the cheese sandwiches on the einkorn bread were really good.
Self-rising flour isn't something I see on shelves here much, it's more of a Southern thing, although we saw more self-rising flour than AP flour when we were in England and Ireland 17 years ago. I'd consider it a single-ingredient item in the same way that I'd consider baking powder a single-ingredient item.
I'm planning to make peanut butter cookies on Saturday. After several days in the 80's, the projected high on Saturday is 47 with a low of 31 Sunday/Monday, with intermittent rain, so no steaks or pizza on the grill this weekend.
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