Wholemeal Crank

They do have a subtle nuttiness that reminds me of chestnuts, distinct from commodity limas.

I have been trying to get more protein into my breakfasts (HgbA1c made me do it), and I dusted off my copy of The Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley Cookbook by Edith Cottrell. It's a quirky volume of recipes designed by a vegan nutritionist, and few of the recipe are really inspiring at first glance. But I remembered her bean-grain waffles fondly, and decided to give them a go again. I gave away my waffle iron ages ago--it took a lot of space and was never reliable, and most of the time pancakes are perfectly satisfying. I bought the almost toy-sized Dash mini waffle iron, which had enough positive reviews for me to be reassured that it would be more functional than an easy-bake oven; since I mostly am cooking for one, a little one seemed like a reasonable way to go. This morning I made a batch of corn-pecan waffles, with fresh coarsely ground cornmeal, a bit more pecans than she called for, and butter instead of oil, followed her timings and instructions to the letter (if it doesn't release right away, bake it longer).....and wow, they were delicious, with just a bit of butter, or with yogurt and berries. Corn-pecan waffles 3/4 cup coarsely ground cornmeal 3/8 cup boiling water Zap a few seconds in food processor and let stand to thicken 1/2 cup warm water Not quite 1/3 cup raw pecans 1 tablespoon butter Pinch salt 1 teaspoon sugar (turbinado/raw/coarse) Zapped for a minute or two again, to be sure the pecans are finely chopped. The batter thickened wonderfully on standing as she suggested. 1/4 cup filled the tiny waffle iron well. Heated the dash until the light turned off; after 9 minutes, it was not quite read; at 10 minutes, it was a LOVELY waffle. It was another lesson in coarser flour/meal sometimes being the shortcut to lighter texture in the finished product, bringing to mind some corn muffins I made ages ago by whirling popcorn in a blender to get a coarse meal, when I was away from home and the Kitchenetics mill. I've now got a second mill (Mockmill) that really does have variable grind capability, unlike the Kitchenetics impact mills that just make fine or ultra fine flours. Today's waffles were grain/bean combo, and I played with the base recipe quite a bit. They're barley/buckwheat & chestnut limas, and a pinch of cinnamon because cinnamon and buckwheat are so good together. The coarse flour is definitely helping. The texture is decent, but the flavor is good but not quite as good. I think next trial should be with some nuts added to the mix for flavor and texture. 125 grams barley 50 grams buckwheat Coarsely milled in the mock mill 2 1/4 cups water 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup dry Christmas lima beans, soaked overnight 1/2 teaspoon salt Pinch cinnamon These took 11 minutes for a quarter cup waffle, because beans, barley and buckwheat all need longer cooking than corn & pecans. But this is a fun exploration, and they are quite a bit better than those I remember from the past, when I was using an unreliable second hand waffle iron and not really understanding what I was doing with the recipes. I can see adding these to the weekend routine, with one batch taking quite a while to get all the way through, but while doing other things in the kitchen, prepping a whole batch to have a several meals later in the week will be easy enough. Very glad I resisted discarding this odd little book--I considered it so many times over the years but memory of the waffles kept it on the shelf through purge after purge when I needed to make room for new books on the cookbook shelves.

According to their ingredients list, their 70% cacao bar includes 'cacao fruit sugar' but does not specifically say 'cacao fruit': now wondering how they process that fruit. The Dick Taylor cacao fruit bar is fabulous, so it clearly can be included without degrading the chocolate as a whole. This was my tasting note about it: 'Dick Taylor microbatch 'Tropical Cacao Fruit', made with the same beans as their Belize (Maya Mountain/Toledo) 72% bar, and their tasting notes for that one are 'dried plum, tart cherry, and jasmine'; I find it deep, earthy, fudgy, with a delicate and the fruitiness is very subtle. The Tropical Cacao Fruit version is 70% cacao, and it is overtly fruity from the first moment as it starts to melt in the mouth, tart cherries and raspberries to the fore over that deep fudgy chocolate, and a floral element, a bit like a fine Santa Rosa plum, above it. Not quite as silky a mouthfeel as the the 72% cacao from the same beans....but not in the least coarse or unpleasant. I love, love, love this fruit-forward version.'

I find this very intriguing. I have enjoyed a frozen cacao fruit bar and had cacao-fruit infused chocolate (thank you, DIck Taylor Chocolate!) and eaten and cooked with dried cacao fruit (thanks to Blue Stripes) and the cacao fruit is deliciously fruity and floral. That said, I also remember another intriguing paper that suggested that the role of the cacao fruit might be less about infusing flavor molecules from fruit to beans as they ferment, and more about achieving appropriate temperature and humidity: https://www.acs.org/pressroom/presspacs/2022/acs-presspac-april-27-2022/new-cocoa-processing-method-produces-fruitier-more-flowery-dark-chocolate.html It makes perfect sense to me that the authors might be inclined to overstate the benefits of a process that might most benefit those able to build large-scale fermentation facilities to control temperature and humidity, and I've had plenty of terrible versions of chocolate produced by companies more concerned social benefits or guilt-free marketing than taste. And I agree that sugar is sugar, from fruit or from beets or from sugar cane, as far as the nutrition goes. But if these processes can be tweaked to make chocolate that is silky smooth *and* tastes terrific *and* is less wasteful....and is accessible to more than giant food conglomerates....lots of ifss!....it is intriguing.

I did just order as much as the budget could afford and then some from Harry and David. What I remember from that very first Scharffenberger factory tour is that they use the same bean blend with the same fruity flavor profile for the 70% and the 99% cacao bars. They use a different blend that has less fruitiness and a little less bitterness because it is made with milder manor beans for both the 62% and the 82%. And it's that 70% flavor profile that I crave when I use the 99% for Baking. and the baking bars are the same ingredients as the bars to eat out of hand, again if I recall correctly, without alterations in proportion of cocoa butter etc. that you find a lot of other brands of bulk chocolate sold as coverture. I just never trusted the gigantic blocks they used to break up and sell at Whole Foods after they quit caring the Scharffenberger in bulk. I know at least once or twice I purchased one of those mystery chunks of chocolate and was disappointed, but I don't know if it was Valhrona or Callebaut or something else.

no offers at all for the 99%

thanks, that helps. It's strongly suggest that the baking bars are going to be the most marginal aspect of the business going forward unless they really change course, and that I should be stocking up on every last one I can afford and have space for because they are not likely to continue much longer if they're not already permanently discontinued.

I have been using Scharffenberger chocolate for my daily hot chocolate and for baking/cooking for 20 years, through the Hershey's buyout and back to private hands, but recently my local grocery ran out of the 99% baking bars, and because I'm homebound after surgery, I can't do what I did when they switched over from larger baking bars (cheaper by the pound) to the smaller (more expensive) versions, and drive from shop to shop in the LA area and grab all the bars I can. So I checked online, and <scharffenberger.com> redirects to Harry and David's, where indeed they offer the bars I use for cooking. I'm wondering: does this mean Scharffenberger was purchased by Harry and David's? Or has the company gone out of business entirely, and there will be no more after wholesalers and retailers have exhausted their current stock? I'm seeing zero news articles by googling that suggest a bankruptcy, and they were spun off from Hershey's 4 years ago, but no mention of change of ownership since then. And their facebook page has no updates since June. Has anyone here heard something about SB going out of business? Where else should I look for updates on what's happened to them?

Waking up this dormant topic because I've got a question about homemade natto vs prepared frozen natto: The diabetes educator was very pleased when I mentioned that I'd enjoyed natto as part of a more savory breakfast on travel to Japan (she notes that starting meals with a protein by itself is better for blood sugar levels), so I decided to get some prepared versions to get a sense of what I should be aiming for when my spores arrive next week. I went to Nijiya market in Japantown, but was disappointed to only find frozen versions already portioned out in quite remarkably wasteful packaging. I checked the miso and tofu shelves 3 times, and I'm pretty sure I didn't miss anything there. The labels were naturally rather opaque being largely in Japanese; the ingredients were all similar (natto, little packets of soy sauce and mustard); so I rather randomly picked two versions. I let them thaw overnight in the refrigerator, and tried one of each today. And....I didn't like either of them. The point of making my own would be to start some meals with a spoonful or two of it by itself, then waiting 10 minutes to start on the carbs etc, so diluting it by putting it over cereal for reasons of flavor sort of defeats the purpose. Remembering now how much I disliked matcha based on the sad matcha I was preparing from supermarket offerings before I went to Japan and learned how much I could like it when prepared properly from fine matcha....is this going to be like that? Is it that the prepared versions are stronger flavored than the version offered at the hotel's buffet.....or was it because that was seasoned already.....or was it just that I was eating it with rice and so the strong flavor was diluted....or are they just not very good versions?

I was absolutely enchanted with the first batch of Kernza I tried, where there was a remarkable floral note like wheat crossed with vanilla orchid, but the bulk batch I bought after the smaller quantities were gone has been merely very tasty and not extraordinary. Because of that floral note, I first used it mostly in sweet or sweetish cookies, cakes, or breakfast breads. I've used my bulk purchase more in breads and crackers but not usually as the sole flour, because the high proportion of bran and distinctive gluten properties don't lend themselves to light sandwich loaves. I think it was most successful as very wet, soft dough baked in muffin tins for support or as flatbreads when not cut with modern high-protein wheat berries for yeasted breads.

My apologies if this is not the right place to ask this question and surprisingly, I don't see that we have a topic to help figure out where to ask things or discuss things. So this might be a bit off topic.... I have seen a lot of recipes for from scratch spice blends that include toasted and ground peeled/split dals of various kinds. What got me thinking are some recipes and ask for lentil dal and chana dal or urad dal. How important do you think it is to use that precise type of dal when making a spice mix that's going to be blended into a stew or pot of beans or rubbed on the vegetables? Are there substitutions you feel comfortable making when you don't have the specified dal on hand? I have many legumes in my pantry and am often reluctant to buy a pint of another variety when I only need a tablespoon here and a quarter cup there.

Probably time to buckle down and experiment with both salt-preserved and sugar preserved lemons, since I've got plenty to play with this year.

Waking this up after a long time, because of a marvelously mellow tea that ended a terrific meal at MoMed in Los Angeles. It was lemon-fennel tea, with a larger than I'd have dared use quantity of fennel, and a bit of lemon that I could just see as a rounded slightly orange-yellow bit of rather irregular (like it had been dried/shrunken) floating mostly underneath the fennel. Our server said something I didn't quite catch about it being made with a preserved or fermented lemon, wish I'd paid more attention at that moment. And it was deliciously fennel with strong sweet licorice/anise notes but also just enough that was distinctly fennel to confirm that it was not made with anise. And the lemon was remarkably subtle. It was not sour, hardly even tart, and certainly did not seem salty enough to have been made with a typically salt-preserved lemon, or sweet like the lemon had been candied or preserved in syrup. It was simply tamed enough to not need any more sweetness than provided by the fennel in order to be wonderful. And there was zero of the bitterness that creeps into my own lemon-infused teas where I slice some of my home-grown eurekas into the teapot, when I let it steep long enough for that to be extracted from the pith of the peel. How might that lemon--probably a meyer lemon--have been preserved/dried/prepared?

forgot to mention, I've been to Friends and Family--it's not far from me, and a pleasant place to wait for my car to be serviced nearby. The baked items are delicious, and feel a lot more....substantial....than those at conventional bakeries. But I have to be careful when I say substantial, because it's more about flavor and mouthfeel of the whole grain contribution, and not about *density*. They are not heavy at all. But they do feel like I'm eating something more than a bit of floury sugary fluff.

That's a good tip, and a useful book. I found the book useful for tips, but a little frustrating for lots of recipes using the heritage grains as additions to white flours instead of 100% whole grains. But after my first attempt using 50:50 barley:einkorn flour, a ratio that I plucked from thin air, which came out very heavy and gummy despite baking to an internal temperature of 210°C in the romertopf, what I was doing was clearly not the best approach. The crust was delicious, and if it is cut thin and heavily toasted, it's definitely edible. I'll keep playing with this sourdough--the starter seems nice and zippy--but with different flour blends. And my next attempt will be flatbreads because they are so much more forgiving than loaves meant to be loftier!