Abra

Here's what I use for a larger batch: 20 oz King Arthur AP flour 4 oz semolina flour 3/8 tsp SAF Gold 3 1/2 tsp DC kosher salt 2 1/2 cups water I have it proofing now. Last time I made this much I did two smaller loaves, but this is going to be a big one with roasted garlic folded in.

Pontormo, try going back to 18 hours and 2 hours - your bread may just have been proofing too long. The loaf I did in enameled cast iron was 30 minutes with the (pre-heated) top on at 450, then 15 minutes with the top off. That took it to 210, and it was done. Ok, everybody, put a digital instant read thermometer on your holiday wish list right now! And right after that, a good kitchen scale. If you don't cook and bake with weight instead of volume yet, you are going to be so thrilled with the difference!

Well, but the "layered with berries" is what's worrying me. The juice from the berries is bound to bleed into your mousse and water it down.

This looks wonderful, Klary. I love everything with marzipan and almond paste. I'm no help on the puff-factor, since I can buy good puff pastry so easily that I always cheat. I wonder if the colder, fresh from the freezer pastry puffs better? If so, maybe freezing your homemade log before baking would give better results. Actually, you had a mini-version of this at my house, with store-bought all butter puff, and organic Sicilian marzipan, and I put in pain au chocolat sticks as well. And no cinnamon!

Does anyone have a solution to this bean-related problem? Since I've been cooking a lot of red beans in my (formerly) white crockpot, the insert has gradualy become pink. No amount of elbow grease removes the pink stains, not that they're hurting anything, but it makes the pot look dirty all the time. Any suggestions?

Fascinating. We never see any sort of Portuguese pastries here, or Portuguese food even, so it's very interesting to see, and the setting and costumes are wonderful.

For those who are having underdoneness problems, I really got a better loaf by taking it to 210 than only 205. A thermometer is your friend here. I'm going to try a loaf for Thanksgiving with roasted garlic folded into it. I know there's one in BBA that people use - any suggestions about adapting that to this technique?

Gosh, I don't even split the pumpkins in half! I just roast the whole thing, then it's easy to scoop out the seeds and then the fruit. I've never had a wateriness problem, so I suppose it does depend on what pumpkin you're using. Patrick, I'm looking forward to your side by side test, which I've never done. I always use fresh, and can't see any reason to use canned. I get sugar pies and long pie pumpkins from my CSA farmer, and I love their flavor and bright orange beauty.

Don't use a jack-o-lantern pumpkin, they're yucky to eat! Get a sugar pie or sugar baby pumpkin, roast it whole until it's soft, scoop out the seeds, and puree the fruit. You'll be glad you did.

Wow, Felipe, those are really gorgeous! But...no words at all? No recipes??? At least tell us what some of those beauties are!

Jack, I hope you'll still respect me in the morning, but I have to say that I think the version with the larger holes and thicker crust looks more delicious!

I haven't tried Tarbais yet, but I keep reading that they're wonderful. OnigiriFB, I have beans in Thai food - yellow beans. There's yellow bean sauce for vegetables, that split yellow bean and coconut milk dessert that I love, and I'm sure there are more I don't know about. But maybe it's only yellow beans. Milagai, too funny about the rajmah. I gues it's like saying "could I make Milk Pudding but substitite juice for the milk?" I never ate plain beans before Rancho Gordo beans came into my life, but on the site it says to try them with just a little salt, and I did, and then I got hooked on the gentleness of beans' own flavor. I like to keep them cooked plain in the fridge and add them to things. Like for lunch today I had some leftover pink hubbard roasted squash with some of those Christmas limas and some leftover lamb patty with Turkish spices and hummus. Probably it sounds gloppy, but it was really satisfying after a lot of exercise on a cool winter day.

Beautiful! And the fat is still so snowy white - great contrast.

I have made pumpkin pie many times with either Silk soy milk or Rice Dream replacing the evaporated milk or cream. I've never seen a recipe calling for sweetened condensed milk, but these wouldn't be an exact replacement for that. But you can make the recipe on a can of pumpkin and sub soy or rice milk with no problem at all.

Milagai, thanks for that rajmah link - I've never heard of it, and I think of myself as having had a lot of Indian food. I'm another one who's anti-kidney bean. My current fave is Rancho Gordo's Rio Zape - could I sub, or is it really and truly the thing that it has to be kidney beans? Eilen, right now I'm loving the Black Nightfalls even more than the red, but I am also fortunate enough to have a couple pounds of red ones. Tell me your very favorite Red Nightfall recipe, pretty please? I have a pound of flageolets too, but I'm saving them for cassoulet. I've put up the duck confit and the pork belly confit, I've got the beans....

Michael, I have a question. Today I started some maple-cured bacon with half a pork belly, and having already stolen the rind from the other half to make daube, I needed to use half a skinless belly. I made Jim Drohman's pork belly confit, and as I was pouring a bottle of wine over the meat I got to thinking about the cooked wine thing again. I'm pretty convinced that it's a good thing to cook wine before using it in marinade, but this recipe didn't call for that. Is it that the salt will get the wine into the meat, even though the acids might "cook" the surface? Or is it that the belly is at least half fat, which is not likely to be "cooked" by the wine? Or something else? The mouse of doubt is gnawing at me over this one! If anyone besides Michael wants to weigh in on this one, of course, have at it!

Last night I opened a package of the most beautiful beans. These are Christmas Lima beans from Rancho Gordo. Let me say here and now that I have no connection to Rancho Gordo except an intense love for their beans. I mean, that's a strong connection, but it's not an official one. So before going to bed last night I put them in the crockpot with some water, nothing else, and put it on Low. When I got up this morning they were done perfectly, and still as beautiful as ever. So I ate them for breakfast, with a sprinkle of salt and a tiny splash of hot sauce. It's not every day I eat beans for breakfast, and it's not every bean I would even consider eating for breakfast, but really, these were too beautiful to resist. The beans made me do it! I think beans are one of the best foods at this time of year, and I look with a primal satisfaction at the stack of beautiful beans, all different kinds, in my pantry right now. With these beans on hand, I feel ready to dig in for the winter. Who else loves beans, and what do you like to do with them?

Well, no, I've never gotten the same results using an oven and a stone. First, I've never made any other no-knead bread, so I can't speak to that part. I've made a lot of cold-fermented several-day-rising bread in an oven with a stone. For one thing, you have to add some steam, which is somewhat iffy at home. I've been throwing water on the bottom of my oven, but I cringe a bit each time. I've never been able to keep the inside of the oven moist for very long, and the crust is definitely thicker all over when baked this way than what I've gotten on the stone. And I'm talking about slack dough plopped right on the stone on a piece of parchment. I've made a lot of quite good bread that way, but it's not exactly like what I get with this method.

Ann, will you tell us more about how you boned and stuffed the legs? I love that idea, stuffing a leg.

Hey, Erik, a surprise blog. Cool. I was born in San Francisco and haven't been back in a long time, so this will be nostalgic for me.

Now that I've got your attention, I just want to do a little report on my recent loaves. As promised, I made the dough a little wetter, a little saltier, and I used 20% semolina flour. I made part of the batch in a Le Creuset terrine pan. This time I cooked it to 210 instead of 205. I made 1 1/2 times the recipe, with some little tweaks. What I used was 20 oz King Arthur AP flour 4 oz semolina flour 3/8 tsp SAF Gold 3 1/2 tsp DC kosher salt 2 1/2 cups water the terrine produced a cute and very crunchy little loaf the boule, because the dough was slacker, was flatter than my first one. The flavor was a lot better. The semolina, and additional salt, really did a lot for me. The crust was quite a bit crunchier from the wetter dough. The boule didn't look as pretty as with a drier dough, but it tasted considerably better. Hey, you're gonna cut it up anyway! The bread tasted just like it looks in that first picture.

I haven't been making desserts, but today for a party I made Emily Luchetti's Pumpkin Upside-Down Cake with Cranberries and Pecan Topping. I used fresh pumpkin, and the sweet-tart balance with the fresh cranberries and the caramel was just right. I did think the cake itself could have been spiced a little more. It only has cinnamon, and I wanted a bit of clove and nutmeg in there too. It's a great holiday cake. Partick, Dejaq, Franci, I'm trying not to eat desserts, but you're making it so hard!

I made the incredible Daube of Beef in the Style of Gascony and posted about it in the daube cook-off.

Today I served the Daube of Beef in the Style of Gascony, from Cooking of Southwest France. I don't have a picture because my guests, at what was ostensibly a ladies' luncheon, devoured it like locusts. That, and it's very, very brown. I changed the method of marination so that I cooked the aromatics, in this case carrots, onions, garlic, and celery root, in a bottle and a half of Cotes du Rhone until I felt that the alcohol had burned off. I didn't flame it, I just went by taste and smell. After the marinade was cool I added the meat. It marinated from Saturday to Monday, a bit less than the book recommends. The meats were chuck roast, bottom round, flanken ribs, and marrow bones. The pan is lined with a sheet of pork rind, which later gets finely diced into the dish. The meat and aromatics are browned in duck fat. I cooked the daube for 6 hours, chilled it overnight, reheated it until hot, chilled it again, and then heated it again to serve. Did I mention that this was a ladies' luncheon? Seems like an odd menu choice, a big pile of beef, served with creamy garlic grits and slices of roasted butternut squash. But the purring that ensued was amazing. Noticing lots of empty bowls, I suggested that people have seconds. The "oh no, I couldn't, I'm saving room for dessert" chorus ensued. Then one person said she could maybe have another bite or two, and then "another bite or two" because the watchword, and that daube vanished. The most frequent question was "why is this so good?' It's incredibly rich and concentrated in flavor, the deepest brown you can imagine, with the subtle notes of the wines, the quatre epices, the pork rind, the duck fat, the celery root. The vegetables and marrow get pureed and added into the sauce, making it velvety. If you have a few days to work on it, try this daube. It's fabulous.

I'll be putting my latest batch into the oven in an hour or so. I used 20% semolina flour, and I'll be trying part of the batch in my LC terrine, to see how a rectangular loaf does. Second the motion on the toast, it's quite lovely, especially with an aged Gouda, my breakfast this morning.