bobmac

I just witnessed a woman on the Food Channel emersing baby backs in beef broth (!) in which she said she was going to cook them for three hours before grilling them. I quickly turned it off.

A local brewery, Abita, makes several good beers.

Indeed, it is on Endell Street and near the Opera House.

Black specks sounds like pre-ground pepper. My wife laughs at me for carrying my own small pepper mill to restaurants that might not have one, but I add pepper because I like the taste.

My wife was disappointed on her last visit (I could not go). Has it changed or was it just having a bad day?

Lobster sashimi. It twitches.

There's a Wild Oats (similar to Whole Foods) near me where you grind your own. Just peanuts -- no salt, no sugar. It's great! Just a little but crunchy. Oil doesn't separate as with some natural peanut butter in jars. I grew up on Skippy. Now it tastes disgustingly sweet to me.

Cumberland and Lincolnshire sausages

Had my first experience with Baja Fresh this week. Seems OK for a chain but not my first choivce. Hightlight was a nicely smoky chipotle sauce.

My wife came up with something we like: bake the brie, not enclosed in anything, with toasted macadamia nuts, then pour some honey over the whole thing, let it sit awhile and spread on thin slices of a baguette (sometimes I crisp them in the oven), accopmanied by thin slices of Granny Smith apple.

Coincidentally, I was using the sourdough recipe in Rose's book and doubling it. The doubling might have been part of the problem. Great book! The bagels I made from her recipe are the only kind my wife likes now.

Underproofing might be my problem, but I've also had trouble with overproofing -- it's a sourdough and a long, slow rise. It tends to get slack if overproofed, so I guess it's a fine line. My most recent problem was with a recipe I doubled, so maybe the outside did harden too fast, given that the temperature was for a smaller loaf.

Actually, this is two questions. I've been trying to bake an Eastern European style sour rye, and even though I slash the top with a lame, the sides crack open. Why? Also most recipes I see for this kind of bread call for caramel or some other coloring agent in addition to molasses. I sometimes buy an excellent loaf that's made in Latvia (if I could get it consistently, I'd forget about trying to duplicate it), and I doubt it has anything added just for color. It seems unlikely that generations ago some peasant making bread cared about the aesthetics. Is it just more molasses?