Wholemeal Crank

Beautiful loaves. I make all my breads with fresh-milled flour. That includes plain hearth loaves, pain l'ancienne, pizza, foccacai, naan, quickbreads, pitas, cinnamon rolls, fruit & spice breads....anykind. I almost always am starting with white bread or mixed grain recipes and converting them to whole wheat.

I do have Laurel's Bead Book--that was my first and remains a favorite. I'll go back and look it up there. In fact, it has been quite a while since I studied it in detail. I did try the desem, and made some nice desem crackers and one loaf of not very exciting bread. I'm having more fun with pan l'ancienne (with fresh flour, of course). I do take whole grain baking seriously, because I think it's more nutritious, and my gut appreciates the fiber. I eat enough junk food when I'm away from home, so I prefer what I bake to be as good for me as it can be--within reason. I'm not willing to give that up for the ease of use of refined flour, but I my goal is to have my stuff to taste good, not to taste like it's good for you. I've too have had my fill of "wholier-than-thou" junk. Most of the people I bake for wouldn't know my pastries, cookies or cakes are made with whole grain flour unless I tell them. The refined sugars and copious use of butter help!

Thanks for the references and replies. I've sometimes added a bit of ascorbic acid to my doughs, but just as often forget it. I'll keep doing it when I remember and not worry since I like my bread.

I have a small grain mill and prepare my own whole-grain flours for baking. I remember reading once that it was ok to use fresh-milled flour immediately to bake bread, but that if it wasn't to be used in a very short period of time, it would be better to let it age first. There was something about an intermediate period when the inadequately aged flour would not be good for baking bread. But I can't remember now when it was better to let it age. Can anyone here help clarify this point?

>> Aren't peanuts not technically nuts though? That may have some bearing on it. True they are legumes, not nuts, but this is a case where allergies don't follow the botanical relationships. The important point, though, is that even if you know you're not allergic to a particular nut, it can be hard to be sure that there wasn't cross-contamination in a food processing facility at some point. For mild allergies, where you have to eat a large quantity of something to feel sick, it's not a problem, but if you anaphylax, it can be deadly. That's why these days so many manufacturers are putting warning labels on things about "this product made in a facilty that also processes [thing x, y or z]." They don't want someone allergic to thing x, y, or z to sue them because they weren't warned.

I am in the DC area now--how do I get to browse the LOC memory cooking collection?

Cooking for myself, I do big batches of soup, beans, stews on the weekends & freeze for reheating for lunch during the week. Then simple dinners at home with cheese & bread & fruit & some nice steamed asparagus or something--so little cooking daily, but still cooking 90% of what I eat.

Rice cooked directly in a pot on the stove. I can make it in my pressure cooker or in the microwave, but when just cooking rice in water on stove, it ends up soupy or burnt. Thank goodness for the pressure cooker!

Why can't she eat peanut butter? If she has a severe or life-threatening peanut allergy, I'd be very careful about trying cashews. An allergist told me once that if he has a patient who is allergic to one nut, he cautions them about eating other nuts that they aren't allergic to because often they're processed in a facility that also uses the nut they are allergic to. So if you were allergic to walnuts, but not pecans, he recommended not eating any commercially processed nuts, but it was ok to eat pecans you'd shelled yourself, since you knew they weren't contaminated with walnuts. And the way cashews grow, I don't think you can get them "unshelled" like that. At the very least, I agree that you should buy the whole cashews yourself, since you might recognize any peanuts that happened to fall into the cashews, which you can't do once they're turned into butter.

If you're going to strain out the zest anyway, why not just use lemon oil to start with, and skip the straining step?

I've found a huge difference in most spices when I mill the whole spice in with my grains rather than using powders, and on the assumption that it might work the same for vanilla, I have started doing it regularly. I also bought a lot of vanilla pods when the prices were lower a year ago, and need to do something with them.... For some recipes it has worked beautifully. But the results have seemed a little uneven and I wasn't always using the same conversion of inches of bean to volume extract. As for pod flavor vs. seed flavor, since vanillin crystals are said to sometimes coat the pod, I'd rather not toss the pod. I've nibbled on the pods and found them to have a little flavor. At worst, it just adds a little fiber to the mix, not a problem when it is milled to a very fine flour. And the problem with vanilla.com is probably specific to my campus network. It can be pretty capricious in cutting off web servers.

I just saw this thread, and didn't see anyone bring this point up: how much of the wonderfulness is from the setting: they're IN FRANCE?! The atmosphere probably adds something, hey? (said from the ignorant perspective of one who has not been there myself YET!)

2 or 3 tsp per bean sounds more like it....I'm glad you caught my mis-reading. And the vanilla.com web site sounds interesting, but I can't get it to load. It starts loading and stalls over and over. Anyone else have this problem?

So one bean is one tsp vanilla? That seems like an awful lot of vanilla bean. Thanks for the reply.

this may have already been discussed, but searching I find either hundreds of entries (like for "vanilla bean" + "vanilla extract") or none ("vanilla bean substitute" or "vanilla bean equivalent"). My apologies if I missed the relevant post. I've switched to using mostly vanilla beans in my cooking and baking, wherever possible milling the beans right in with the wheat berries for flour in baked goods. But I haven't seen a detailed discussion anyplace of how much bean is roughly equivalent to how much vanilla extract. I presume that details matter, such as whether you've got high-quality beans with the vanilla crystals on the outside (nope, mine are nice plump shiny pods without any crystal frosting) and whether you're comparing to gourmet extracts vs. standard retail brands (like the McCormick or Schilling or store brand extracts I used before starting with the beans). I tend to use about 1/2 inch of bean for each tsp of vanilla called for in the recipe. Any comments appreciated. Thanks!