chromedome

Hi, Peter! I'm a newly-minted cook and baker in Alberta, Canada (hard wheat heartland). Newly-minted in the professional sense, anyway, as I'd been cooking and baking at home for 25 years before settling on a career change. I found a copy of "Apprentice" in the library at my school and absolutely devoured it (I'm a bear for the science underlying it all...read McGee in one marathon session). Anyway... My first loaf came about when I was 15. I'd gone away to university and Mom was just too far away to keep me supplied anymore, so I decided to make my own. After all I'd watched her enough times, hadn't I? I got it pretty much right, except for shortening. I knew she put some into her bread, but I didn't know how much...so I guessed, and put in half a pound for a two-loaf batch. That bread was well and truly shortened, let me tell you! I didn't let that deter me, though, and within a month was baking acceptable bread. Over the years I've continued to expand my knowledge and try different ways of doing things (most recently your adaptation of "pain a l'ancienne," which my family just loves). What's the story of your first loaf? Second question: so far I've only read "Apprentice" and "C&C" (both great reads, btw, above and beyond the sterling information they contain). Which of your earlier books delve into your spiritual underpinnings? I am an adult convert to Christianity (late 20's), but even before that found bread-baking to be a profoundly spiritual experience. Few shared experiences are more human than breaking bread together, after all! I'd be interested to read more of how your spiritual and culinary lives shaped and enriched each other.

As a former consumer of 6-8 litres/day, I could have been their test population all by myself! My habit for some years had been to lay off for a day or two whenever my kidneys bitched at me, and drink lots of water. Back in 1994, though, when I attempted to do this, I ran into a serious withdrawal "thing." For three whole days I was erratic, incoherent, and nauseous. I couldn't phrase a complete sentence to save my life (a bad thing in a commission salesman), I suffered hot and cold flashes, blinding headaches, the whole nine yards. If it has that tight a grip on me, I reasoned, it has to go! So I went cold turkey. I stayed off coffee for two whole years, and re-introduced it very gradually (so hard to socialize in North America without coffee). Today, I generally drink about three or four coffees a day, which I feel to be entirely moderate for a person who works the hours I do. Edited to add: those three or four cups of coffee are balanced by 3-5 litres of cold water/day.

The mainstays are all pretty much the same, up here. Either turkey-with-all-the-trimmings or ham-with-all-the-trimmings, and the trimmings would all be familiar to you I'm sure. We don't get as much football with ours, mind you. The CFL season is almost over, there are just a couple of weeks left, and Labour Day is our big football holiday here anyway. You'll find a few regional variations, of course. Some of my Mennonite in-laws often make up a cake-y sort of accompaniment in place of stuffing; others make a stuffing based on ground beef or sausage. My mother's, on the other hand, was mashed potatoes with sauteed onions and summer savoury. Here on the prairies, I've also seen perogies as a side dish, though they're not considered canonical. I'm not keen on roast turkey myself, so if I do get one I'll buy a fresh turkey and break it down. I'll stuff the breasts for Thanksgiving (one savoury stuffing, one fruit stuffing) and roast those, since they're easier to keep moist than a whole bird. I keep the fillets ("tenders") for another meal; I also bone out the thighs for another meal; the wings and drums are each good for a meal; and I'll get two pots' worth of stock from the carcass. I do ham more often, though, or sometimes just a roast.

Fat softens your product. Protein toughens it. Egg whites are mostly protein, while the yolks have some protein but a lot of fat. Brown sugar also has more moisture in it than granulated white sugar, which will help.

Mimi, I work two jobs (cooking) and do some freelancing on the side, and when I get home I still cook for my family. It's not generally something that takes a long time to prepare, but it's not usually frozen or pre-processed either. I'm not dogmatic...if I can get a good deal on something non-local I'll buy it...but as and where possible I buy local (better yet, organic local). My cooking tends to follow seasonal cycles for the simple reason that I can't afford a lot that's not cheap and in season! Admittedly I'm a little more food-obsessed than most. But I do recall an impassioned article on the Slow Food website from an Italian writer who said, to paraphrase, "News Flash! Italians have jobs too!"

A quick word or two of followup, in recognition of everybody's assistance. The carrot-raisin muffin is still not ideal (I'll tweak it a little more over the coming months) but it's much better. I've reduced the cloves (they were pretty dominant) and corrected the methodology as per McDuff's advice. I'd known there was something screwy about the recipes as written, but was too tired to think it through. Today I finally arrived at a version of the oat bran muffin that I'm happy with. I've augmented the buttermilk with some plain yogurt, increased the salt, subbed a few litres of pastry flour for part of the AP flour, and added a litre of honey for a bit of sweetness, tenderness, and moisture retention. Now I have something that tastes and feels like a muffin, and I'm pretty pleased with myself. I've finally got all of my ingredients weighed, as well, and constructed an Excel spreadsheet to calculate percentages for me and scale my recipes. Now I just have the grunt work of entering everything in! We have a new guy at head office whose job is to get everybody on the same page, recipe-wise, and to standardise all of our recipes across the board. He's completely onside with what I'm doing, and my work will probably form the basis for a re-tooling of the bakery department company-wide. Should look well in my portfolio, I'm thinking...

I use one of those at home, but my deck ovens at work are inconveniently large for that...

I'm a longtime home cook and baker myself (career-changer and new cooking-school grad at age 40). I have to say, that even on the days when I arrive home in a near-coma, I've had a great deal of fun with what I do. During inventory I found all kinds of interesting things including feuilletine, gianduja paste (just add it to melted couverture), sliced hazelnuts, and some sort of bizarre orange "white-chocolate" stuff. I'm not one to let things go to waste, so I'm going to enjoy finding ways to use up all this stuff!

...and to make a point that no-one's touched on yet...soy just plain tastes *good* with most meats. So, once you've gotten over thinking of it as an exclusively "Asian" ingredient, why not put it in wherever it works?

<sigh> Yep, hot spots. The technician dude who came out and calibrated my ovens told me that my whole oven deck should be the same temperature, and I didn't believe him until I put it to the test. I guess the primary reason that the back corners bake things faster is simply that the door is in the front; but I suspect there may be something to the airflow as well. I have one large convection deck that's used for pizzas during the day and cookies at night, and three stacked ovens with a proofer underneath which are used for muffins, scones, coffee cakes, etc. I'm thinking I might have my night girls (not being parochial, here, they're quite young) double-pan the sheets on either side; the middle is not usually an issue. When I first move into a new house I always bake a sheet of flour or barley or couscous or something just to see visually where the hot spots are in my new oven. I may have to do that at work, too...though I guess with the convection oven I might have to use barley. I can't say I enjoy the thought of burnt flour blowing around the place. Of course a large part of the problem, too, is that they simply haven't been baking long enough to know when a cookie is done vs. underdone vs. overdone on a consistent basis. Their background is in the Tim Horton's chain, where they scooped with a particular scoop and baked for a hard-and-fast time in an oven that never had its temperature changed. Variables are not something they've had to cope with, previously. They're good kids, and they're working hard and giving it an honest effort, but time is becoming an issue. By November, we're going to be running our asses off to keep up with the catering orders (and in a week or so we're launching my new line of pastries in conjunction with the revamped coffee bar, so there's a whole 'nother product to incorporate into the routine...), so I really neeeeeeeeed to get them up to speed over the next 3-4 weeks. Unfortunately I can only pull one night shift with them per week, because of my other responsibilities in the store. Gonna be a bit of a struggle, I think. Sorry, Soba, I've pulled us a bit OT. For what it's worth, Wayne Gisslen's "Professional Baking" gives three key points for chewy cookies: High sugar and liquid content, but low fat High proportion of eggs Use stronger flour, or mix longer after the addition of the flour to develop gluten

I'm no lover of sushi, but that's friggin' crazy. I mean, c'mon...there've been cases of e. coli and other food-borne illness being carried by salad greens and scallions. Are they going to demand that we blanch our lettuces?

You can use fructose in most of the same ways you would use regular sugar. The complications is that fructose is considerably sweeter than conventional sugar. In a cookie, for instance, you would end up with a much sweeter result. On the other hand if you cut back on the sugar to compensate, you'll have a different texture. Adapt your recipes, then, with caution. Where fructose can be very handy is things like whipped cream, custards, lemon curd, etc since you don't need to use as much. Furthermore, fructose can be used in reasonable quantities by most diabetics. When my parents had their bakery they made many of their pies and meringues with fructose for that very reason.

Cookies are driving me crazy at work right now. I checked my oven tonight with a pair of thermometers. All four corners of the oven, apparently, are the same temperature. So how (he asks rhetorically), can a cookie in one corner of the sheet be underbaked while the other corner is overbaked? I wish I had more hair, just for the catharsis of pulling it out. Ugh.

...a bunch of orange grease bubbles out when you cook it. (Sorry, couldn't resist) Seriously, you can still use it in a soup (maybe not caldo verde) if you pre-cook it and drain off the grease. Depending on my mood, and how well-flavoured the sausage is, I'll even save some of the technicolour grease to fry potatoes 'n' stuff in. Sometimes it's pretty cool. After all the grease itself is just pork fat, and in a good sausage it's just the peppers that give it the orange colour. What's not to like?

Cortlands are my favourite general-purpose baking apple. For adding tartness I prefer Gravensteins to Granny Smiths, as I find that Grannys have tartness and texture but no flavour to speak of. Mind you, good Gravensteins can be hard to find and Grannies are ubiquitous, so you do what you gotta... I don't like Macs for apple pies 'cuz I find them too soft and mushy. By the time the crust is nicely browned I've got applesauce pie. Not that that's all bad, but it's not what I'm shooting for. I use them for applesauce, but nothing else really. Don't care for 'em as an eating apple. Red Delicious I find utterly useless. Golden D are a decent eating apple, a little bland for pies but good in cakes. Fuji, when they're good, are a solid all-round apple; Galas I don't find hold up as well when cooked. JonaGold is one of my favourites for all-round eating. When I was a kid, I had a book that centred around a young girl and her Winesap tree that she brought West with her as a sapling. Ever since then I've kept my eyes open for Winesaps, but I've yet to see one in a store in Canada. Oh well.

I see them more in the spring than the fall, generally. They're more common in the farm eggs I get from a neighbour as opposed to the Safeway kind, but I get them a lot from the supermarkets as well. When we raised our own chickens, years ago in Newfoundland, about 1/3 of our flock laid double-yolkers on a regular basis.

Printed, and magnetted to the fridge awaiting a day off. Mooohooohoohawwwhawwhaww......

That's probably your culprit, right there. You're right that you should get less carryover cooking with a smaller roast; it's got less mass and therefore holds less heat (basic physics). Cranking your oven right at the end would change the heat distribution, though, and probably put you a little further along than you'd like. A better bet, next time, would be to brown up the roast before putting it in the oven. Sear it on all sides in a skillet to make it nice and brown and crusty; then deglaze the skillet with water or wine or whatever and pour the drippings over the roast. It surely doesn't "seal in the juices," but it does give you a nice flavour. Especially if your roast still has a bit of a fat cap on it.

We used the stuff out of our alcohol burners. Don't remember what it was. Doesn't matter about it being potable, since it's only going to evaporate.

In school we made bubble sugar with regular sugar, all the time. Melt the sugar as you would for any other purpose (ie caramel), but don't let it get hot enough to discolour. On your work surface, lay down a sheet of parchment paper. Wipe it with a cloth soaked with strong alcohol; or spritz it with a spray bottle. Quickly, before the alcohol evaporates, pour the sugar onto the parchment about 1/3 of the way down. Lift up the end of the parchment and let the sugar slide toward the bottom. Then pick up the other end and let the sugar slide back. Wherever there is alcohol the sugar won't stick, creating a pattern very much like the two-silpats method Sinclair discusses. Leave it sit on a flat surface until cooled and hardened, then break it up and use as desired. We used about 1 1/2-2 cups of molten sugar for a full-sized sheet of parchment; this made a nice thin sheet. The sugar can be tinted with food colouring before pouring, which makes a nice colour accent on your plates. We used this a lot at school. We also occasionally used the two-silpats method, though IIRC the instructor had a different name for that. I'd have sworn we used regular sugar, too, rather than isomalt, but I could be wrong about that.

The same principle applies to many other products. In my home province of Nova Scotia, the bulk of the best apples (we're a major apple grower) get shipped to the eastern seaboard of the US. To get the good ones, you pretty much have to drive down to the Annapolis Valley and pick your own. A former co-worker from New Zealand tells me that it's the same there, with lamb.

I haven't tried Oculus either, not having the budget for that, but everything I've read about it has been good. The only quibble I've heard is that for the retail price, international wines of similar quality can be had for significantly less. As for Natalie, I've read her columns several times and found them to be generally informative. Recently, though, she's been criticised for inflating her scores.

Just a few additional points... Use heavy sauces. Anything bechamel-based helps a lot; or anything derived from a puree of peas, beans, etc. Serve things over a big ol' slab of starch. Yorkshire puddings are great for that (that's what they were designed for). Wrap things in pastry, whether made or bought. Having roast beef and gravy? Make it hot roast beef sandwiches. Serve biscuits, or milk. Buy clearance bread from the local bakery's clearance outlet, and make savoury bread puddings and strata (or sweet ones, for that matter). Corn breads and suchlike are a great thing. The cornmeal will still expand in their bellies, and will keep them full longer. Serve a bowl of home-made soup at every meal. As the first course. Don't serve the entree until the soup is cleared. Serve lots of bread and rolls with the soup. Leftover mashed potatoes in the fridge are a fast and filling snack. So are leftover potatoes diced up for panfries/hash browns, and then the young 'uns can take responsibility for making their own. A decent parm or asiago cheese is more expensive than the regular cheddar-style product, but it takes relatively little to put an emphatic cheese flavour onto any dish. Wanna be really sneaky? Use a small amount of parm to "spike" your dish, and you can cut back quite a bit on the cheddar...use it more for top-dressing. Use less but display it more, kind of a thing. Home-made noodles are great, especially if you make them with pumpkin or buckwheat. In fact, use a bit of buckwheat in any pancakes or biscuits you make and they'll be more filling. And sweet potato pie is one heck of a substantial dessert. My son has grown three inches in the last few months, and filled out to the tune of 25 pounds. He's not what you'd call a light eater.

Well, Chris, at my night job such requests are met with a crisp "Tell 'em to order something else!" from the chef/owner. And our game entrees will not be cooked past a certain point...the bison will not be cooked past medium, and the muskox and caribou will not be cooked past medium-rare. They just don't work anymore after that, and we simply won't serve them.

At school we always popped 'em into the freezer for 20-30 minutes before baking. That worked well.