McDuff

I just pulled two soda breads out of the oven that came from a recipe in The Boston Globe. It called for a cup of sugar to four cups of flour. They spread quite a bit, but look good. I wonder if that is a misprint. Seems like a real lot of sugar. Also had 1 stick butter rubbed in, 4 t baking powder, 3/4 t soda, 1 egg and 1 1/2 cups buttermilk.

Here's the whole loaf. Formula made 2 of these. I dropped one off at a local liquor store where I had been looking for bottle conditioned beer. We know the woman who owns the place and the guy behind the counter was her son. When I went back in with the bread he said, Did you find some of that beer? And I said no, but I've been making this stuff since six this morning. When I got in my car I saw him through the front window with the loaf up to his nose, his head bowed. I love it when that happens.

I was astonished when I sliced this bread open. The dough was very wet and a bit of a pain to work with. I think my starter might be a little wet, and I did have to dribble a little water into the bowl to get all the loose flour to work into the dough. But I followed the timeline, and avoided the "aerobic" tendency to frantically flail at the dough, and this is what I got. Even the walls of the big bubbles have bubbles. I made this Tuesday, and while the crust is crunchy now, the crumb is still moist and sweet. I've been running it through the toaster oven with a 2 yr old Irish cheddar on it. I think the dried cherry fennel thing is next. The White Leaven Loaf

A lot of brownie recipes don't have any added leavening like baking powder or soda. I would think that the batter could hold without much if anything happening to it. However, most recipes also say to cool brownies for a period of time before cutting them. There is a recipe in an Alice Mederich book where the brownies go into the freezer right after coming out of the oven. That one might work for your situation.

That's the thread. Thank you for that, and the compliment. If anybody hasn't tried the bread in that thread, it's really unique. I hated to bake it and kill the dough, but it's really giving it life in a new form.

Just for the record when someone re-reads this thread years from now, would you post a link to the thread your referring to, please? ← I don't even know how to find it. I'll try when I can get back on the computer as a 14 yr old is glaring at me right now.

Here's my take on The Mill Loaf, the second formula in the book. I've been making the bread discussed in another thread on a regular basis and getting extraordinary results. I followed the formula and the timetable precisely, except that it didn't take anything like 3-4 hours to proof. Tasty stuff, nice and wheaty.

The Handmade Loaf arrived yesterday. I'm blown away by the writing. I'm about to refresh my levain and get serious with something on Sunday.

I've been boning up on the ServSafe course I'm taking Wednesday, and it's definitely 4 hours.

By the book a potentially hazardous food is allowed a 4 hour window between 40 and 140 degrees F, and then it's garbage. That time is cumulative. In other words, if you made the pastry cream and let it sit for an hour to cool before refrigerating it, then you need to deduct an hour from the 4 hours.

Here's the formula I use every day 1 qt milk 8 oz sugar 1 egg 6 yolks 2.5 oz cornstarch .5 oz ap flour pinch salt vanilla to taste 2 oz butter Put 3/4 of the milk and 1/2 the sugar on to the fire. Mix the cornstarch, flour, remaining sugar and salt together. Put the egg and yolks in a bowl, add the remaining milk, mix till blended. When the milk is almost boiling, mix the egg/milk mixture into the dry, stir to blend, then trickle it into the hot milk, stirring with a whip. Bring to a boil and cook for three minutes. Off the heat add the butter and the vanilla. Pour into a shallow pan, press plastic wrap right onto the surface and refrigerate. If the milk is almost boiling when you pour in the egg mixture in a thin stream, it will thicken almost immediately. This eliminates the need for tempering it in. I make a bigger batch of this every day and have never had it curdle. A starch thickened sauce with eggs in it must be boiled, and you can do this without fear of curdling it. Do this with a creme anglaise and it's a different story. You absolutely don't need to cook this for ten minutes. If this makes too much creme patisserie for you, it's so good that you're going to be eating it with a spoon. Your pate a choux recipe is a little suspect to me also. I would use a bigger one, make sure you cook the paste for a full 5 minutes to help dry it out, paddle it slowly in the mixer till it's not hot anymore, beat the eggs together and add them in an intermittent thin stream allowing the batter to absorb each addition before continuing. When 3/4 of the eggs are in, do what's called the tacky test. Pick up a blob of batter between the thumb and forefinger and pull them apart. If the dough breaks, it needs more egg. If it pulls into a string, it's ready. the finished dough should be shiny and smooth, and shouldn't slump when you pipe it. Use bread flour to make pate a choux. I used to struggle with this stuff, but now that I'm making a 15 lb batch a couple of times a week I'm getting really good results.

My lovely wife was looking at a recent Martha and was moaning over a picture of hanger steak with blah blah crispy shallots and shoestring taters. So today I bought skirt steak, large plump shallots, a bag of russets, and a tub of demi glace gold, for the first time. I marinated the meat in soy, oil, brown sugar, and cajun blackening spices. The taters I julienned and roasted. the shallots were frizzled in butter, deglazed with balsamic, then reduced to a glaze, then repeatedly deglazed with water and reduced till tender and finished with butter and tupelo honey. the meat was done a la Alton Brown in a white hot cast iron skillet, then rested under foil for 10 minutes. The demi was added to a cabernet/shallot reduction, the smell of which brought me back to a different time, different place as you don't often smell red wine boiling in the bake shop. Succulent. Why have I not bought that demi stuff before? this could get me back into actually using all the cookbooks and all the cookware.

Lasagna Chip Chicken Fat Ripple

The stuff I made yesterday was swill, right into the gahr-bage. My wife said it was the kind of thing you'd want to have with you if you got lost in the woods. I'll look for Hamelman at the library tomorrow.

I have some German style rye sitting on the floor under a chair in front of the heating duct for it's 18-24 hour repose in a warm place before baking it at 225F for four hours. the recipe is from a book called The Cook's Guide to Bread aby Christine Ingram and Jennie Shapter. Very interesting book. It will be interesting to see if this bread looks like the picture. It's nothing but rye flour, whole wheat flour, bulgur, salt, oil and molasses. I know we're not talking about it here, but I made the stollen from Artisan Baking the other day and it was excellent.

I ordered The Handmade Loaf through abebooks.com and come home from work every day anxiously pawing through the piles of credit card offers and medical bills looking for it. Estimated shipping time was 14-56 days! I can't wait to get it. I've got Baking with Passion already.

Kyle...... TBH

I'm leaving our kettle right where it is, on the back left burner on top of the home-made heat tamer, and I'm adopting an air of moral superiority about it. It's not going in the closet.

I recently saw Alton Brown sucking the hot sugar syrup into a stainless steel basting bulb and injecting it into the eggs. I've also seen people making IT in an 80- qt mixer and they just poured the hot syrup onto the meringue. Suppose there's a little less margin for pouring error in the amounts we talking about here.

I used to have to buy honey in 55 gallon drums and it was definitely a blend. They invariably were marked product of Argentina, China, and the United States. You want to read a good book about honey get "Robbing the Bees."

For me, the price. if you go to the van dyke restorer's website, you can buy sheets of zinc for a lot less than you can buy a countertop. Know anybody in the aluminum business with a brake?

He has a murky background. My mother knows some of the details. He claimed to have Choctaw Indian blood, and in pictures when he was a young man, you might almost believe it. He was a decorated veteran of action in the Philipines and spent his working career as a shoe machinery repairman in Marlborough MA, which had a lot of shoe factories. The rest of us come from a long line of Moynihans, Sweeneys, Hoeys and Killeens. County Clare and County Mayo are undoubted crawling with very distant relatives.

We lived with my maternal grandmother till I was 12, but we had separate kitchens. I remember her making fish chowder in a black iron skillet, but not much more. Oh, date bread, from the orange boxes of Dromedary dates, a recipe I got a couple of years ago from a buddy whose grandmother had written it down. Love that stuff with cream cheese. My father's mother was much better at baking and candy making than she was at cooking. Typical Sunday dinner would be an eye round she cooked to leather, Wonder Bread dinner rolls, relish trays with celery sticks and olives, mashed potatoes, the usual yada yada, but dessert might be a lovely lemon meringue pie. She made little sugar cookies in animal shapes, I have all the cookie cutters for them, including a very vintage Mickey Mouse, she made fudge, potato candy, and these filled cookies she was very proud of, but we always looked for the wastebasket after one bite. They had ground raisins in them. I make them for my fil and put mincemeat in them. He loves them. One year for Christmas I made my father a basket with all that stuff in it. Biggest memory would be waking up and hearing the tea kettle whistle. Her refrigerator always smelled like apples and strawberry soda. She served us Maple Leaf hot dogs, which might have been a very local thing, but they had an incredible snap to them. She had rhubarb in the yard, a strawberry barrel, a little summer house, an apple tree, beautiful gardens, a Dairy Queen on the corner, it was almost heaven to visit for the weekend. But she was a nervous nellie. I swear if she had ever hit on the cooking sherry she'd have been off to the races. Here's her kitchen.... On vacation..... I've been going through the mountain of pictures my father left, and putting together a slide show. It's been quite the trip down memory lane. Difference between her and my mother's mother...she said she went down in her cellar every day to make sure everything was ok, my maternal grandmother chuckled till her more than ample bosom bounced, and said I haven't been in my cellar for 20 years. That was a great house to live in, but 20 years after my mother sold it, a guy killed his wife in it, then took his two kids to a pond in a nearby town, drugged them, slit their wrists, and drowned them.

Google it. I grabbed a random one off the web and it's excellent. I have the formula at work, found it at work so the link isn't highlighted on my computer at home, otherwise I'd direct you to it. I use Jivara milk chocolate.

Here's a list from Dining With Marcel Proust, A Practical Guide to French Cuisine in the Belle Epoque, by Shirley King. Coffee eclair gateau St. Honore gateau d'amandes Pain d'epice Rum Babas macaroons tarte aux pommes tarte aux fraises tarte aux abricots barquettes aux cerises langues du chat coeurs a la creme empress rice glace aux chocolat glace au citron glace au fraise glace a la framboise sorbet au cassis granite au cafe pudding a la nesselrode glace fruits that's not all of them, but you get the drift.