McDuff

I'd make the pictured bread on a snowy New England day, but I don't have a clue what 1 x 5ml of yeast actually is. An online conversion thingy tells me that 1 ml is equal to .20 something tsp. So is 5 ml equal to 1 tsp? I can use my handy oz/gram conversion factor of .03527 to do the flour and water. Maybe I'll try, anything to get me away from the room where my 16 yr old is watching Nickelodeon with those annoying childish cartoons voices. She's been up all night, school is called off, and it's my day off. It ain't fair. I need some alone time after this past two weeks.

Fried pork cutlet sandwich with stuffing and duck sauce at Buzzy's Roast Beef under the wall of the Suffolk County Jail in Boston. Buzzy's is gone, and the jail is a freaking hotel, or something.

Never take the bucket of swill water from under the sink and pour it down the drain until you are done reconnecting all the damn pipes.

I'm sorry, I misspoke myself. You are Ignatius J. Reilly right down to the potato chip crumbs.

You are actually Wade Bogg's long lost cousin, now unmasked.

Nick Malgieri, Healy and Bugat, Flo Braker, Alice Mederich, Michel Roux, Pierre Herme, Friberg, RLB, and on the bread side, Reinhart and Glezer, and Calvel.

If you're in the area, Brookline Village T stop, Chris Kimball has been known to nosh at Matt Murphy's on Harvard St, about a block up from Station St. He had a lamb sandwich, my wife reported. Fabulous Irish breakfast there. I used to obsess about getting the latest issue of CI, but I do think they tend to recycle topics and I didn't spend the money on the current issue, but I may change my mind come payday. In general I do like the mag, and the show, and the recipes, I refer to them constantly, but I could never work with Chris Kimball. He would sneak his hand onto something I was working on once too often and ooops, sorry about the cut there, fella. I used to work for a guy who got fired by him. Said they had a difference of opinion on how to run the company.

Antique 5 gallon stoneware crock for pickle making, antique thing that holds paper for packaging like you might see in little house on the prairie, old empty 5 gallon glass water container from a 30's water cooler currently behind my radial saw in the cellar, huge lopsided Bennington pottery bowl never used for bread dough mixing, assorted half full bags of KA flour, plastic pail of slightly moldy glucose, and a couple of empty wine bottles.

what are you going to do with all those biscuits?

try freezing it.

I used to work in a retreat house and one of the priests had a habit of taking a walk in the afternoon and then coming into the kitchen and having a glass of coffee and a little chitchat with me. One afternoon I was mixing potato salad in a big bowl with my hands and he murmured, "I wonder how many of your epithelial cells we've eaten."

I was butchering a deer for a buddy several years ago and had my big old Labrador Oliver in the garage with me. My buddy kept telling me to keep the dog away from the meat, "He gets a taste of that and he'll be out in the woods killing deer." I said, "Muzzy, with all due respect, what are you, an idiot? He eats McDonald's and doesn't chase cows." Guy across the street was making a venison daube last night. I kept waiting, sent over some freshly baked bread....nothing.

Had to think about that for a second. What's taters?

If by "Reinhardt" you mean "Reinhart", he specifies .11 oz for 1 tsp of instant yeast. Not scalding the milk will allow a milk protein to interfere with the yeast. You get around this by using dry milk powder dissolved in the water.

Roasting flour in this way is called "torrefaction", I think, and I used to have to do it for a madman French chef I worked with one summer. We used about a cup of clarified butter in the bottom of a 20 qt Hobart bowl, then added about as much flour as we could without it spraying all over the kitchen. then we put it into a large roasting pan in a not too hot oven and stirred it often. He would use it just like cornstarch, mixing it with cold liquid before adding it to hot stock. the advantage is that you don't have all the fat going into the sauce, which in the distant past of saucemaking, was all skimmed off as the sauce cooked. Theoretically you can retrieve all the fat back out of the sauce, along with insoluble parts of the flour, as it is only the starch that is doing the thickening. Read The Saucier's Apprentice by Raymond Sokolove, and Sauces by James Peterson. You might as well read Escoffier on the subject also.

I have someone else's sugar notes from Jean-Luc Derron's class at Johnson & Wales posted here. You might find some answeres. Derron is really an artist. I once watched him make a recognizable Julia Child who was about 6 inches high.

I checked on the meat counter today...the little tub of chicken glace gold was $4.49 and the little tub of demi glace was $4.49. Go in and ask for the grocery team leader and ask him what's the deal. All it takes is a missing tag on a shelf and the person with the pricing gun can be looking at the wrong tag and put on the wrong price.

That's got to be wrong. It's only $4.49 in the WFM where I work. What store is this is, River St, Prospect St?

Why would a bernaise sauce contain gluten? ← it seems that there is a bit of an urban myth going on amongst celiacs... or maybe not. apparently, some think that some form of gluten is involved in vinegar, a key ingredient of hollandiase, bearnaise, etc. who knows. i dated a girl who was gluten-intolerant once, and beyond gluten in it's usual forms (i.e. breads, pasta, whatever), there were certain wheat-involved foods that she could not stomach, regardless of whether or not gluten could have formed in its preparation. it's a complicated allergy, and it's hard to find a place to eat out that is truly able to skirt gluten-containing ingredients for you. we do try pretty hard at the restaurant, and have one regular that is so appreciative that it makes it a pleasure to feed him properly. plus, he brings us the NYTimes on wednesdays. for a more involved interperetation, see: http://www.nowheat.com/fooddb/food/vinegar2.htm -jason. ← wouldn't surprise me at all if a bernaise mix contained some kind of modified food starch that gelled when heated. It may or may not have gluten. I have customers who want wheat free, gluten free, soy free, egg free, corn free cakes. And I actually figured out how to make one, and if you hadn't had any cake for a while, you'd be very happy with it.

Whole Foods for one. I saw it today as I was helping a customer look for organic gluten free bernaise sauce mix.

I adapted the formula in maggie glezer's book and it's 65% water, not as dry as a bagel, but not as wet as ciabatta. Her description of the mixing method was in a horizontal machine that beat the hell out of the dough. I find it tolerates that amount of time very will in a planetary, and the guys at the country club, 90% Jewish and very very well-traveled, said mine were as good as any.

It wouldn't be the only mistake in that book. Go to page 324-325, the Levy Rye, and try to make sense out of that recipe. I even emailed her about it, and she admitted it was wrong. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the grey was metal rubbing on metal. I'd also bet that 20 minutes in a kitchen aid is not long enough to cause the dough to let down. I mix bialy dough in a 20 qt on 2nd speed for 20 minutes and it doesn't break down. And it has less water in it than focaccia. Words of wisdom from Victor Calise...90% of failures in baking come from improper measurement.

The Pursuit of Love, one of my favorite books. A dog-eared paperback is a permanent resident of my bedside table.

They bought a chocolate fountain at the earthy crunchy groceria and while I'm sure it comes with instructions, it might to too late to do anything about getting the right stuff to put into it for friday night. We can choose from literally any chocolate available, but what normally do people use? Couverture, plain old chocolate, ganache, what's the deal?