devlin

A few things: both the radical shift from small to industrial farms and the fact that so few people cook in the ways people used to cook (at least in this country) has changed the landscape of food so dramatically I think the thing you're imagining hardly exists, except maybe in the artisanal food movement. And that's hard to come by. When I lived in Chicago, I could get nearly any kind of food I wanted on just about any street corner. Especially in the past ten/fifteen years. Decent produce, imported foods of all sorts. Not to mention the restaurants. Food heaven. Really fabulous strawberries and the like, of course not. Certain kinds of melon you can only find at farmers' markets. Because of my husband's job, we've since moved from one rural community to another, where his industry is able to buy land and buildings cheap and find enough folks to pay cheap wages to (I'm not talking about Wal Mart, but manufacturing ). And it's frustrating as all get out. We're surrounded by farm land, but the quality of prepared food, fresh food, is godawful. We currently live in southern Indiana, and Louisville KY is 20 miles south of us. To get good food, to find a decent restaurant, we have to go into Louisville. To find good bread,... well, I make my own in my Alan Scott bread oven in my garage. We do find fabulous produce at the local farmers' markets, but then of course only during the summer months. We have that idealized idea of the rural life too. Even still. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to find in this country. I really miss the food culture of Chicago. On the other hand, I love looking out to the ten acres behind the house to see my three horses grazing, and I really love my bread oven and the local melons which are the best melons I've ever had in my life.

I bought that book after a San Francisco chef discussed it at Alan Scott's bread oven conference last November and who then cooked a feast for the conference participants using the methods and many of the recipes. Not only were the arguments compelling and convincing, the food was fabulous. Because so much of it is like a foreign language though, and a thing that will require some time and dedication and thinking about cooking in fairly new ways, I haven't gotten to cooking from the book yet.

As one of the folks who mentioned Plugra, I'm afraid I can't help with the venues you name. I get mine at a small specialty Italian store in Louisville. I haven't noticed any at the local Whole Foods, but that may change from one Whole Foods to another.

Cool, thanks y'all.

I know this has been asked elsewhere before, but it's only recently been of interest to me because I found a source for Plugra sort of locally but still a distance enough to make it a pain in the neck to get. Can you freeze the stuff?

That's a fabulous suggestion. I was in fact wanting exactly that. Thanks a bunch.

Smacks head . Thanks Jackal. Fabulous.

I need a source for professional quality baker's linen for bread dough. Anybody here know where I can find some?

I'm with the general suggestions to maybe just give it a rest. And I too do things like just eat ice cream or popsicles, or maybe grapes, or maybe nothing at all.

I'd like to second the suggestion in the linked-to thread to add roquefort or some sort of blue cheese to the walnut bread. Fabulous.

I've made scones with bread flour and with all-purpose flour. The scones with bread flour tend to be more substantial, for lack of a better word, or as someone else noted, had more "body." Not flaky at all. In fact, the all-purpose always make more what I'd term a flaky scone.

Yes, I've worked with it quite a lot, and I'd agree you might want a much wetter dough. But I was wondering what sort of flour you're using as well. Another point is handling, perhaps. It should be handled very little, very gently.

I've tried the artisan.net link, but end up getting forwarded to a page called turbide.net. Any better info for the actual site? ← devlin, its actually theartisan.net ← Got it! Thanks so much.

I've tried the artisan.net link, but end up getting forwarded to a page called turbide.net. Any better info for the actual site?

I used to watch my dad in his restaurant make what I thought was the best fried chicken in the world til I had Popeye's and wondered how in the world they could be so similar. The posted recipe sounds like what I vaguely remember. He used a professional frier, of course, so I'm not thinking I'm gonna replicate it exactly any time soon. But I just got Paul Bertolli's Cooking by Hand, and because I had 5 pounds of chicken thawed and ready to cook, I tried his pan-roasted chicken, from his "Bottom-Up Cooking" chapter, and thought it exceptional. The chicken isn't dredged in anything, just salted and peppered before going into a deep pan, skin side down, and then sprinkled with leaves of a sprig of rosemary and browned at roughly medium to medium high for about 40 minutes ("parking" the breasts on the other meat for some of that time because they finish quicker) and then cooked on the other side for another 20 minutes or so. The surprising thing to me was you don't use any oil or fat to cook. You heat the pan (or pans,... I used a large and a medium pan) and put the chicken in dry. They then cook in their own fat from the skin. And then you deglaze with a cup of water. Really fabulous. I'm thinking maybe I should rub a little salt underneath the skin next time. Is there any reason not to I should know about? Dunno. [edited for clarity, or grammatical screwups, or whatever]

Thanks Ron, I was hoping you'd thing so. It's all part of the whole bread thing. I love this place. It's helped me immeasurably. I wanted to note too that when I say I shaped baguettes, I did it in the traditional way, patting out the dough and then folding and sealing, three times. Maybe that's the problem?

I've been following the bread threads with particular interest, and have found the sourdough thread and the turning thread very helpful, especially Jackal's ten step sourdough lesson. I used that process over the past couple of days to practice producing large batches (this one was 20 loaves) of bread in my wood-fired, Alan Scott oven. Because I was focussing on the process itself, using a big plastic bin to mix and turn the dough, I wasn't too worried about the form the bread would take, although that's part of own learning process right now as well. What I ended up doing was shaping them ala Peter Reinhart's "ancient bread," the simple stretched sort of bread stick, and also a few baguettes. The unshaped bread stick was beautiful, the interior the most gorgeous I've produced yet (the dough was as wet as Reinhart's), that sort of web or pane-like texture, large and small holes very consistently throughout the loaves. I was frankly a little stunned by how beautiful they were, even though I've done these before. I'm not sure whether it was the slightly different formula or the bulk fermentation/turning by hand process. It's the first time I've not used an electric mixer, doing the entire thing by hand. I was nervous at the start, but as the day progressed, and with each subsequent turn, I was more than heartened, and even excited by the transformation of the dough as I went along. I'm totally sold on the process. For the past year, my husband and I have had conversations about what seemed like the inevitable purchase of a large mixer, and I've been putting it off. Right now, or anyway for the time being, it seems entirely superfluous. But here's the question. The loaves I shaped, the traditionally-shaped baguette loaves, didn't have quite the gorgeous interior of the simple bread stick form, even though they were both the same basic shape and size. Any suggestions as to why that might be? Or is that normal? Should I do something differently in shaping or proofing to get the same stunning exterior as the bread sticks? I'm hoping I haven't hijacked this thread, but I'm thinking any of the answers/discussion might also benefit Ron as well. And I'm wondering whether Ron might find the notion of handmixing and the notes over on the turning thread beneficial as well.

The only thing I know about chocolate is from the consumer end. But I will say that I am often disappointed by a lot of highly-designed, beautiful looking chocolate (and I can't even tell you what it is). For me, a roughly-made thing that tastes fabulous wins every time over the high gloss chocolates with artistic patterns and color and all kinds of designs that frankly don't move me. I want flavor and texture. I really don't care what it looks like (within reason, of course). This thread, though, is reminiscent of conversations I have with my husband and a few friends about breads. We're all of us routinely drawn to places (you all know them, the chain bread stores) that have gorgeous looking breads of all shapes and types and sizes in their windows and display cases. And every time, with hardly an exception, we're disappointed. The breads are showy, but they're not good. Some are flat out bad. Over-yeasted, and really nothing without a lot of added stuff that masks the flavor of the actual dough to a large extent, except that overwhelming yeastiness that so many people thing is the mark of all bread, they're so used to it. It's awful. But we get suckered by the look again and again, even though we know better.

Thanks folks. Those are all great suggestions. And because I decided it was time to just come right out and say something, I had a conversation with my husband last night, a complaint, more than a conversation, about the whole "cooking" thing and he's allowed that I'm right, that if he's gonna cook something he needs to learn more about food first. He doesn't even know the basic spices for pete's sake. I've been teaching myself to cook for the past several years, in addition to teaching myself the methods of "artisanal" breads (we've built a monstrous wood-burning bread oven recently), and we're both very interested in food, but he's left the work of it to me. And I've been working and reading and experimenting and cooking and paying attention. When I want to feed people, I go out of my way to make sure it's good. But he's always figured he can just wing it and if it turns out okay, well good, but if it doesn't, no big deal, *he'll* eat it anyway. But that probably means nobody else is having a good time. Anyway, both the suggestions here and the act of finally putting this annoyance up in print and addressing it has finally, apparently, made a difference. So, useful all around. many thanks, Devlin

My husband now and again gets a wild hair and decides he has to make pasta salad. He's not a cook. His repertoire is pretty much limited to pastas and grilled cheese sandwiches, but he likes to think he can cook. The other problem is he refuses to follow a recipe. The result, as you might imagine, is that nearly anything he does is generally bland, not good. And he knows it too. But still, he insists on trying it again, and again without a recipe. So, I know you can't help me with THAT, but can you help me out with a decent pasta salad? Something I might be able to do that would salvage the thing he ends up with? No meats here, just pasta, veggies and the seasonings.

Sweet, pickled bell peppers! That's a wonderful idea.

Yeah, I dunno. Although I agree the dish won't be precisely the same without the tomatoes, and I sat here for a long time thinking about it, I think there's got to be a way to still do the thing but with another ingredient. Yes, it'll change the flavors and textures, but I think it can be done. And the more I thought, the more interesting it seemed, to try something other than the standard tomatoes. Pan, I thought of plums as well, and started thinking of fruit substitutions like plums or maybe a melon, added late. JS, apricot is actually an interesting notion, or maybe nectarines. What I finally came up with and suggested was red, yellow and orange bell peppers, or some variety of melon. Maybe rhubarb? The recipe is dark chicken, garlic, onion, fresh rosemary, fresh basil, black olives, a dry white wine, chicken stock, salt, pepper, olive oil. And of course the tomatoes, crushed. I'm thinking some variety of plum or the like would work. I'm wondering now whether adding a small amount of dates might not be nice too. I mean in addition to the other substitution, like plums. Thanks, folks.

I've got a really nice braised chicken recipe that calls for a fair amount of crushed tomatoes. A friend expressed interest in the recipe, but her husband is allergic to tomatoes. Is there a suitable substitution?

What about corn meal? Or does it behave differently from rice flour?

I could have sworn I was including somebody else's quote up there and not my own previous message. Anyway, the responses address most of my concerns. A couple of the cookies are chewy, and so drying's an issue. But a couple are types of biscotti, definitely not a thing I want to turn soft and chewy during travel. I do have one of those food wrap machines that sucks the air out of plastic storage bags, but because I just got it and didn't want to risk screwing this up, I didn't use it. I ended up wrapping each separately in plastic and putting them all in a big box surrounded by bubble wrap. None of my tins was large enough to accommodate them all (and I have some really big tins). So, I'll wait for feedback and hope it worked. If anybody else has more wisdom, I'd be grateful. This isn't the last time I'll be doing this.