alanamoana

the necessity of preheating your applies to the chemical and physical changes that take place within your product when it is placed in the oven: 1. fats melt 2. gases form and expand 3. sugar dissolves 4. microorganisms die (yeast) 5. proteins coagulate 6. starches gelatinize 7. gases evaporate 8. caramelization or maillard browning occurs 9. enzymes are inactivated etc. edited to add: all of these processes take place at a specific temperature. if it takes too long to get to that temperature, problems arise. of course, you can start at too high of a temperature as well. baking is really the ability to control oven temperature to get the desired result from your product. with very few exceptions (i think there's a recipe in recipeGullet for a cold oven pound cake), if you start your oven from cold, the process takes too long and you end up with an inferior product. example: meringue - you spend time whipping a meringue, carefully adding sugar and creating a stable foam. if you want to end up with a crisp light product but start off with a cold oven, the foam breaks down before the proteins surrounding the air bubbles can coagulate. the bubble breaks, the gases escape and the foam deflates. you end up with a dense cracker instead of the nice light meringue you were looking for example: puff pastry - time spend rolling butter into dough to create hundreds of layers. when placed in a hot oven, the butter melts, the moisture turns to steam which expands and separates the layers of dough. the proteins in the dough coagulate and set which results in a light flaky and crisp pastry. if you start in a cold oven, the butter will melt out without allowing the moisture to turn to steam. the proteins not being able to coagulate, will stick together and you'll end up with a greasy mass of grossness. i could go on and on. i think some of these processes are easily translated to meat and vegetable cookery as well. edited to add: a good book to read about all of this is "How Baking Works - Exploring the Fundamentals of Baking Science" by Paula Figoni

thus my completely lazy and un-ecologically sound use of DISPOSABLE PIPING BAGS!!! anything that is oversized is my enemy: 60+ qt mixer bowls, etc. anything that is undersized is also my enemy: little tiny tartlette molds so, pretty much anything i have to clean

a scone should be tender and crumbly, but neither wet nor dry inside. sounds to me like your oven temp might have been too high: outside browned before the inside could finish cooking. try lowering the temp. i usually bake my scones without letting them get too much color because if i take them out too brown, they dry out as they cool down.

i don't think you've ever had to worry about what you've posted here!!! what a great looking tart

Chris - I have a mould - I would never get them to look neat otherwise! Alanamoana, I am testing my egullet skills now but I think this link will take you to the post where you can download the excel spreadsheet for checking ganache recipes. schneich's balancing ganache post The thread is titled Balancing your Ganache Recipes 2.0 You need to change the formulae to match the ingredients you are using ie cocoa butter percentages for your chocolate and fat percentages of cream etc. But I have found it quite fun to use. ← thank you so much for the quick response! beautiful capuccino (cappucino?!) chocolates, by the way!

can you point this out to me? thanks!

also, chrisamirault's report from the Johnson & Wales campus has some great pictures of perfect baguettes (in the P&B forum) edited to add: link to One Day at Jonson & Wales thread

Rob, Nice loaves! The crust looks beautiful, great color and blistering. To be honest though, they look more like batards than baguettes...but that's semantics! Regarding your side-splitting...as you may have diagnosed yourself, probably due a little bit to underproofing and too much ovenspring (very hot oven) where the outside crust sets up too quickly in the oven, not allowing for full expansion of the gases and the spring causes the crust to split where it is weakest. The weakness along the bottom edge is common due to drying out of the top of the loaf during proofing and a skin forming on the dough. The bottom is kept moist due to contact with the paper/couche and when placed in the oven, the spring will split along this moist-dry seam. Less likely (from the appearance of your loaves) could be a shaping problem where you didn't seal your seams well enough and the split would occur along the seam. edited to add: just went further upthread and read jackal10's post where he more succinctly wrote exactly what i just did...damn

the appearance and consistency for piping will not be the same once it has been stored (to its detriment). usually buttercream needs to be 'reconstituted' before being piped...even if it is stored at room temp.

I think I would address that by keeping the ganache out of customer reach and scooping out a tasting spoonful to hand to the customer instead of letting them help themselves. ← you could also get those cheap portion cups and just pipe some ganache into each one. use a start tip so it is slightly decorative. that way, you can bring your ganaches already made in piping bags for easy portability. ← Sort of like this? I pipped some couverture chocolate into the candy cups; once set, starred in some ganache. I used this technique to sample various ganaches this winter at the Chocolate Ball and a chocolate festival at Pastaworks, a local gourmet market here in Portland. Very nice and you can really knock out a lot of these quickly. But you do need to use them pretty much right away (within 1-2 days?) because they'll dry out and/or spoil. Not a bad idea to bring your ganache in a piping bag all set to go, with your trays of chocolate disks in the cups. Plus, I think folks would enjoy seeing you "work." ← Leave it to John to have already come up with a clever/fast/nice looking solution!

I think I would address that by keeping the ganache out of customer reach and scooping out a tasting spoonful to hand to the customer instead of letting them help themselves. ← you could also get those cheap portion cups and just pipe some ganache into each one. use a start tip so it is slightly decorative. that way, you can bring your ganaches already made in piping bags for easy portability.

Rob, it could be in the shaping as well. If you aren't getting out all of the larger air bubbles during shaping, you could have a large gas pocket which will give you a tumor or blowout during baking. Really work for that nice surface tension and make sure to seal all your seams well when you're shaping your loaves.

Yeah, I know they use a (,) instead of a (.), but why the extra zeros?

did you mis-type the quantity of emulsifier? it would seem that one and a half kilos would be missed in a recipe...i'm assuming you meant 1.5 grams?! there are other threads on eG that list sources for some of the ingredients you listed. try: Le Sanctuaire or L'Epicerie or Chef Rubber to start.

oh and i love your votive holder...it is food related as you have dried beans in there, correct? very cute.

I'm going to argue semantics just for clarification: while the op meant chocolate chips for cookies (semi-sweet morsels), this can be confusing to some since so many 'high quality' chocolates come in a non-block/non-bar form...often, each brand has their own word for this chip form: Valrhona - feves Callebaut - callets (sp?) Michel Cluizel - mini-gramme etc. etc. These 'chips' are easier to use than bars as they don't need to be chopped, but they shouldn't be confused with chocolate chips which are meant for cookies as they are the same formula as the bar form. And Annie, I know you know this

the boats are really cute, did you use a mold of some sort to keep the shape (standing up)?

Wow...definitely a photo for the food pornographers! You can practically smell the cinnamon wafting through the monitor...beautiful! (can I use this emoticon to represent my licking of the screen?!)

now that sounds delicious!!!

this is way old school, but when i was in high school and worked at mcdonalds we used to make all kinds of things...my favorite was the filet-o-fish with ketchup, lettuce, cheese and onions instead of tartar sauce and on a toasted bun (it was normally served steamed).

you answered your own question. leakage is usually due to proofing at too high a temp and baking at too low a temp

you could probably talk to chef stamm and find a wholesale source... but here's another link for a scoop. i think the one you initially linked to is the same thing...just a slightly different shape or perspective of the photo

i wouldn't get the magic bullet. doesn't really work very well. instead, i'd recommend a version of an immersion blender/stick blender/burr mixer... i really like my Braun Multiquick hand blender. this isn't the exact model that i have, but the one i do have has the larger blender attachment with an ice crushing insert as well as a small multi-purpose chopper. everything is lightweight, durable and easy to clean. i think this type of thing would be perfect for someone a bit older. from what i can tell, the braun really gives you bang for the buck (while not cheap).

professional kitchen convection ovens are gas. i don't know anything about consumer versions. i would think that you'd get decent air flow and even heating to an extent, but there isn't an oven made in the universe that bakes perfectly evenly!

Chris, Can you expand a little on this comment, please. Thanks! ← while i'm a firm believer in surface tension giving structure to hand formed bread, how does this compare with 'no knead' recipes that don't require any shaping at all? i know they're baked in a vessel, but certainly not in a loaf pan. and even doughs like brioche that are baked in a loaf pan are shaped first (with proper tension and technique) before being placed in the pan to proof.