McDuff

I must be somewhere in the vicinity, but not quite at the confluence described above. I have my Canadian bacon drying in the reefer so I can smoke it while I rake the yard and keep my eye on the K. Derby. Then the plan is to have it for breakfast Sunday with some sage and thyme sausage I made yesterday. Made bacon for Easter morning, but didn't smoke it, and had the corned beef for March 17. And I come home today to find out I must now be on Butcher Packer's mailing list. (Actually it's Sausage Maker's) I'd love to do the dried sausage thing, but my cellar is home to any number of pernicious molds.

I'd go for the Gisslen. Friberg, and I have two of his books, is a little in la-la land. I think there's more usable stuff in Gisslen.

They will crack and split in a heartbreaking way if they get too dry. Pack them in sawdust, lots of sawdust, keep them out of the sun, see what happens. Have them cut extra thick so if they warp you can flatten them with a router using a mortising bit riding on a frame around them. It might take months for them to fully dry, but the sawdust should keep them from drying too fast.

You will NEVER see either of these contraptions being used in a professional kitchen.

It's the size...1m is a mini choc chip, the 4m is a teeny bit bigger than a Nestle's.

I make pickles, dill, half sours, bread and butter, malt vinegar pickled onions, green tomato relish, red pepper relish, sauerkraut, hot pepper jelly, blueberry preserves, gooseberry jelly, peach marmalade, Concord grape jelly, pickled beets, pickled eggs, I always have something in the fridge.

I use both the 1m and the 4m chips. I prefer the 1m to make ganache as the 4m seem to be grainy.

I would try to tighten it with gelatin. Bloom the gelatin, melt it, then very quickly whip some of the mousee into it, then very quickly fold this back into the rest of the mousse.

I will never again stick my finger into a canning jar full of brown speckled granular material, taste it, wonder what it is, keep tasting it, ask my wife to taste it, and then realize it's the curing salt mix from Charcuterie, laced with sodium nitrite. Labels, honey, labels.

that's just gross. I've had that happen before. Took the money from the customer in front of me, then made my sub with the same gloves. Yesterday I was in a ...way and the girl peeled off the gloves and tossed them before taking the money. I almost said, you're well trained. People at work constantly take off their gloves and leave them on the counter. To me, it might as well be toilet paper. "Hey Jane...you trying to make me sick?"

I'm calculating the amount of gelatin needed according to the total weight of the mousse. We've been using 36% heavy cream lately and I hate it, it gets really soft right away, and by tomorrow, is leaking. I'll have to go back into my stuff from school to see if the amount of gelatin in Bavarois is only to set the anglaise, or the entire thing including the whipped cream. As far as using lemon juice in a mousse, I'd be more likely to turn it into lemon curd first, add the gelatin while it was hot, then cool it and fold in the whipped cream. That's why I mix the puree with an equal amount of pastry cream. When I come up with a formula at work I have to be sure that pastry people of varying degrees of skill throughout our pastry program at the earthy crunchy groceria will be able to duplicate it without making themselves crazy. There are so many mousse cakes in our product list, and some of them are as simple as puree added to whipped cream, not for me thank you, or one that a lot of people use but I have never tried, a white chocolate ganache that is allowed to cool overnight, then whatever cocoa butter or fat that is floating on top is skimmed off and the rest of it is whipped to thicken it, but it comes out really sweet. Adding the puree to pastry cream gives a mousse base that is as close to a Bavarian base in consistency as you can get without the trouble of cooking an anglaise. I have a thing about mouthfeel. Puree and whipped cream, there's nothing to it..I want to have some roundness in the mouthfeel, if you know what I mean. It needs to be more than a one-dimensional flavor thing. I never got to the mousses today as matzoh crunch turned out to be more of a priority. As far as how much to use when you only have powder, I think you can pretty reliably count on .16 oz setting a pound of mousse. I don't know what that is in teaspoons, but I think that one envelope of Knox is .25 oz. A box of 4 envelopes is listed as 1 oz. cook's illustrated weighed a bunch of envelopes and compared the weights to the volume measurements and found a significant discrepancy. I'll see if I can find the article, if I can stay awake tonight.

The whipped cream experiment was a success. Three sheets of gelatin per one pound and it held up all week. My boss tasted it and said it wasn't too bouncy. I'm going to make lemon mousse and raspberry mousse tomorrow. It will be equal parts of puree, pastry cream and whipped cream, as it needs to be easy enough for that mechanic on an icy night in Peoria.

I finally got my hands on a pork belly and confidently went at it, and took the skin off. Duuuh. That's ok. I stopped for gas earlier, went in and said gimme 6 bucks on pump six, walked back out, got in the car and drove away without pumping. I was just mixing up the dry cure when I got distracted by something, so I'm going back to that. The guy across the street brought over three dried sausage of unknown etiology that the buddy of a buddy of his made. They were excellent. That's what you get when you belong to a social club called The Mangia Mangia Club. All these gualiones get together on sundays and cook and eat. You have to be 100% Italian heritage to get in.

I bloomed three sheets of silver leaf gelatine in water, drained it and squeezed it as dry as I could, then melted it, and drizzled it into 1 lb of 36% cream flavored with 1/8 cup florida crystals and a little vanilla as it was whipping around in the 5 qt mixer.This was almost the last thing I did before leaving work, but it had set nicely when I last checked it. I don't like the cream, it doesn't whip or hold as nice as 40%. I don't work again till Wednesday and it's in a bowl marked Test do not use, so we'll see what it's like after 48 hours.

You can fudge it for a while by knowing that a cup of flour is about 5.5 oz. And the reason I recommend finding a conversion chart and sticking to it is that you can pretty accurately guesstimate the yeast weights by knowing, as I said, that 1 tsp instant is .11 oz, a 1/2 t is .055 and so on. Google Craig Ponsford and see if you can find his Artisan Baker's site as he has a pretty complete explanation of baker's percentages. Most of the current crop of usable bread books does too. I'm a big fan of Reinhart's books.

You really need to learn how to bake bread by weight, rather than by volume measurements. Baker's percentages are very easy if you can grasp them mentally and is really the only way to figure this out. Using baker's percentages there is no muss nor fuss. If your formula calls for 2% yeast to make one loaf, it will be 2% to make 100 loaves. I would suggest finding a table of conversions in a Peter Reinhart book, and sticking to it. Off the top of my head I know that 1 tsp instant yeast is .11 oz for instance. It gets weird when you realize that most formulas are written with fresh yeast in mind, and then you have to multiply by .33 to get the weight for instant yeast. Scaling weight divided by formula percentage times 100 will give you the flour weight and all the other ingredients are a percentage of that. French bread is 100% flour, 60% water, 2% yeast, 2% salt, roughly, depending on your flour. So if you want to make 53 loaves weighing 14 oz each before baking it goes like this... 53 x 14= 742 oz for all the loaves formula percentage all added up is 164% divide 742 by 164= 4.52 times 100 is 452 oz of flour 452 x.60 for the water is 271 oz of water 452 x .02 for the salt is 9 oz salt 452 x .02 for the yeast is 9 oz fresh yeast 9 oz fresh times .33 = 2.98 oz instant yeast this is probably confusing you more, but it's well worth the effort to learn it.

I typically make a mousse in a big batch and store it in the ubiqitous fish bucket, rather than making it and using it immediately. If it comes out a little stiff that's ok, because I usually assemble a mousse cake by piping the mousse onto cake rounds and it squishes a little coming out of the tip. It will hold up better, I hope, if it's a little firm to begin with. I'll make some tomorrow and we'll see. I had been using mycryo to make mousse cakes but it was so hit or miss that I wanted to use gelatin because I know I can have mousse cakes on hand more consistently. That was a very interesting article but the scientific link nearly put me to sleep. thanks for the help with this.

Actually that's very helpful, if I can just sit with it for a while. I love arcane formulas once I get the hang of them, Bernoulli's priniciple, Avogadro's number, Langmuir's hypothesis of raindrop collisions, Foucalt testing, that kind of thing. I was taught to make up a gelatin solution of 1 oz of gelatin to 5 oz of water. One oz of this solution should gel 1 lb of mousse or whatever. If 10 sheets of gelatin equals an ounce, then 1.6 sheets should equal one oz of gelatin solution. But this is assuming the bloom strengths are equal. So basically if I would use an ounce of Knox, I need 1.2 oz of silver leaves. If one oz of gelatin solution has .17 oz of gelatin in it, 1 part in 6, then multiplying that by 1.2 gives me .204, so I need to replace one oz of solution with .25 oz of silver leaves, just to be on the safe side. That comes out to 7 grams plus a teeny fraction. At 2.5 g each, and I'm going to check that in the morning, that means I can start with 3 leaves to gel a lb, and see how it comes out, and maybe work my way down. I've been using the 1.6 to 1.8 range and had a passionfruit mousse come out a little loose yesterday. That make sense?

I just googled silver 160 bloom gelatin leaves and turned up the not-so-astonishing fact that silver gelatin leaves at a weight of 2.5 gr are 160 bloom and gold at 2 gr are 200 strength. Knox gelatin, which we all know and love, is 225. I thought gelatin could be subsituted weight for weight, but not being real quick with the numbers, I can't finesse this. I've been using silver, and find that I need to use more, but one wonders if there is a way to come up with a handy dandy conversion ratio thing.

This is the white leaven loaf from The Handmade Loaf, made with King Arthur Special for bread machines, and made exactly according to Dan's formula and method. How much bigger do you want the holes? The flour is around 12% protein, and the bread takes almost 10 hours to make before you can start to eat it. So you've got both things going on..higher gluten and lots of time. It takes minimal mixing, but multiple short kneading intervals.

.2% yeast goes into the poolish and 1.3% into the final dough for a total of 1.5%. Hamelman has a curious, to me anyway, form of expressing dough formulas. He gives percentages for the starter, the overall formula, but not for the dough portion of the formula. So I'm guessing that when the pain rustique calls for .2% in the poolish, you have to subtract that from the 1.5% total in the overall formula. I've been making 10.01 lbs of poolish and it takes .053 oz of yeast or a scant 1/2 tsp. The dough takes .7 oz. I don't think this is a huge amount of yeast for 20.02 lbs of dough. The poolish alone would probably raise the dough, but the advantage to me is that I can have hot bread on the sales floor at 9:30 am without having to go to work at 2 am. I've got a picture of the stuff at work that I'll post thursday afternoon.

I bet if you followed RLB's technique of reducing fruit purees in the microwave you could come up with a reasonable substitute. I make a raspberry buttercream using that method and it has a nice bright clear flavor and color. Also, Frontier makes a line of flavorings you could use to jack up a dull flavor after the cooking.

There's a line by jackal10 somewhere in a thread about the large holes thing, saying that it takes either long fermentation to fully hydrate the flour, or full gluten development. I've been baking the Pain Rustique from Jeffrey Hamelman's book, which is a variation on a theme by Prof Raymond Calvel, his rustic bread from The Taste of Bread, and I've nailed it every time, and sell every loaf I make. And it has plenty of big holes. It's basically a 12-16 hour poolish, then a 2 minute mix with a 25 minute autolyse, a 2 minute mix after the salt and yeast go in, two folds, a brief rest, dividing, a brief proof, and get this, 3 1/2 hours after you start, except for the poolish, you got bread coming out of the oven. I don't think full development is the way to go. Long slow preferments, wet doughs, turning the dough, all this seems to work better.

I talked with a guy at Barry Callebaut about this stuff and came out by the same door where in I went. It's supposed to be used at such and such a percentage, but different if it's a thick puree, like raspberry, or thin, like passionfruit. So I used what I call a building block approach because products I come up with need to be accessible to pastry people of different skill levels at the earthy crunchy groceria. I use one third puree, one third pastry cream and one third lightly whipped cream. I heat part of the puree, dissolve the mycryo in that, then add the rest of the puree to the pastry cream, then the warm puree, which drops the temperature of it down to the recommended whatever it is, and then fold in the cream. I find if you overfold, it gets grainy. And sometimes it doesn't set the way I want. When it does, it's wonderful. It has a nice smooth mouthfeel. Now that I think of it, when I have the time I should try to work more with this stuff, but Bailey's Irish cream mousse I made two weeks ago just refused to set up. Here's some mousse cups we made for a benefit last spring...passionfruit, raspberry,blackcurrant, and Bailey's mousse. There's also some ganache tarts and lemon curd tarts in there. We're doing this same benefit this year and I was going to go nuts with the French Cookie book, but no way will I have time. Looks like champagne fingers, almond macs, and matzoh crunch.

Yes, powder to sheets is the same. ← I wish I knew for sure if that were true. Knox gelatin is rated at something like 225 bloom strength. I have a silver box of sheets at work that says 160 bloom. It's more like 16 sheets to the ounce instead of 10. I wonder if the difference between the silver and gold is the weight of the individual sheets. I've been going on the assumption that I need to use a little more sheet gelatin by weight to get the same results that I would get from powdered. I got mixed up in using mycryo, but the stuff drives me nuts. I switched one of my cakes to gelatin because I know I can just go ahead and make the filling and not worry if it's going to be ok. I want to do it to the rest of the mousse cakes but it's a lot of paperwork and people fretting about the use of gelatin.