MelissaH

Over Thanksgiving, we did a fair amount of cooking at my in-laws' house. And although we had a good holiday, it made me very thankful for my own kitchen. Among the things I've gotten used to, very quickly: A large sink basin, big enough to hold anything we own Lots and lots of counter space Somewhere to clamp a pasta machine, since we made ravioli A floor that's easy to keep clean Landing space on both sides of the range Six gas burners, since we had three electric burners going concurrently and it got just a little cozy at times Electrical outlets galore Knowing where everything is! I believe we accomplished our goals in our reno: making a kitchen that multiple people could work in at the same time, fits our cooking style and our lifestyle, reflects our personality, and in general makes us happy. It's spoiled us. We still have some minor cosmetic details, such as painting around the side doorway, but that will come in good time. Having said that, I'm off to cook dinner. Tonight's offering: spaghetti squash, baked and scraped out, with tomato sauce. MelissaH

Yesterday, my husband and I were on our way to a meeting, listening to All Things Considered on the car radio. Along the way, we heard a teaser with a woman talking about making pumpkin marshmallows. I had a suspicion who it probably was, but unfortunately we got where we were going and I couldn't very well bring a radio with me. So this morning I checked NPR's Web site to see what I'd missed, and found this: Dorie Greenspan talking about her new book and some of the goodies within. If you can spare eight minutes or so, it's worth a listen. MelissaH

When it comes to non-canned pumpkin, I've always had much better luck using butternut squash. I cut it in half, scrape out the seeds, roast it till it's soft, scrape out the flesh, puree it, and then put it into a coffee filter-lined sieve to drip for a bit. Then I remember every year why canned goods can sometimes be nicer. MelissaH

I thought about it with oranges...but decided to take a detour instead. And I remember making a recipe once that was absolutely delicious that called for a whole bunch of stuff, including toffee bits and SWEETENED CONDENSED MILK.

How many of you have sucked the juice out of an orange with a... peppermint stick??? MelissaH

I've got another batch of dough going. Last night shortly before 9:30 I mixed together 400 g KA AP flour, 75 g KA WW flour, 1/4 tsp SAF instant yeast, 9 g salt, and (this is the different part) half a teaspoon, which registered as 1 g on my scale, of diastatic malt powder. I mixed these together with my hand, and then added 370 grams of room temperature water. (My room was at 64 degrees F.) It's been sitting since then, and in about another hour I'll be turning it onto a rice floured towel on my peel, in preparation for baking this afternoon in my usual 4.5 quart LC oval pot. I think I will try taking the lid off sooner than 30 minutes in, because my crust has been very thick, almost tough. Unfortunately, there probably won't be any of this loaf for me to eat---it's going to be sent with my husband for his small class tomorrow morning. MelissaH eta: aaagh! What I've thought was rice flour for these batches of bread is really potato starch! Whatever it is, though, it seems to work fine to keep wet bread dough from gunking up a towel. I will, however, be acquiring some rice flour from rice (not potatoes ) when I'm shopping next.

Change of plans here too. We've acquired a loaf of mandarin orange–cranberry swirl bread, which is now destined for a bread pudding. Saves me the trouble of rolling out pie crust in a kitchen not my own. MelissaH

Anne, I think you're giving me too much credit. I'll be making another batch tonight, to be baked tomorrow evening. (It's going to be sent in with my husband, to be shared with his little class on Tuesday. Ideally I'd bake Tuesday morning, but there's enough going on that I won't have time, so Monday night it is.) I'm planning to use some WW flour in it, but I'm also going to try pulling the lid sooner rather than later, to see what that does to the crust. MelissaH

Andie, are you thinking of one of the episodes of Baking with Julia, possibly the one with Steve Sullivan? MelissaH

My part-WW loaf from yesterday was definitely an improvement. Even at "only" 475 degrees F in the oven, it was turning deep brown on top after only 15 minutes with the lid off, so I pulled it off, stuck my Thermapen inside, and got 208 degrees. It talked nicely for quite a while. I gave it about 25 minutes to cool. Then everyone else in the house decided they'd waited long enough, thank you very much, and took the knife to the loaf. My first tasting impression was: Yuck! It tasted wheatier than my first, all-white-flour, attempt, but that was IT. No other flavor whatsoever, and the inside seemed almost gummy, to the point where I wondered if it had actually baked long enough. I was disappointed, and wondered what I needed to do to get flavor into this stuff! Then I waited another half hour and tried another hunk. What a difference! This time, the salt flavor came through. Then the bread flavor came through. Lesson learned: Even if those around you have the knife, wait till the bread is cool. I'll be using some of my starter next time, once I get it fed. MelissaH

I had pretty good luck keeping the bread for a day and a half by simply turning it so the cut side was facing down on my cutting board. Any more than that, and I'd wrap it well and stick it in the freezer. I'll be interested to hear if anyone using either a starter or a piece of old dough has better luck in keeping the bread from going rock-hard. Or is that not a problem in your houses? MelissaH

I mixed up another batch of dough yesterday. Here's what I did: I measured out three cups of KA AP flour into a 5-quart stainless steel bowl sitting on top of my kitchen scale. I used my one-cup measure, dipping it into my flour container, and shaking the cup slightly to level the top. Measured this way, three cups of flour was 473 grams. (RLB's measurement is within 5 grams of mine.) Then, because I wanted to use part whole-wheat flour, I took out a cup or so of flour. This brought the mass of flour down to 337 g. I then added KA regular WW flour to bring the mass back up to 473 grams. Then I pressed the tare button on the scale. To the flours in the bowl, I added a quarter teaspoon of SAF regular yeast from the red, white, and blue bag. This wasn't enough mass to register on my scale, but I re-tared it again anyway. I also added 2 teaspoons of Diamond Crystal kosher salt, which had a mass of 9 grams. I gave the whole thing a bit of a mix. For my water, I used some plain old west-side-of-Oswego tap water from a pitcher that's been sitting on my counter for a couple of days. West side water tends to taste more chlorinated than water from the east side of town, but I've had good results by letting it stand on the counter. I used the same old one-cup dry measure and added a full cup, and then a smidge more than half a cup. This totaled 353 grams. As I mixed it together, it felt dry. I don't know if this is because of the WW flour, or because I wasn't measuring the same amount of water I used the first time around. In any case, the dough wasn't gloppy enough, so I added another splash (24 g), which brought the texture around to match the video. For those of you keeping track, this is a total of 377 g of water, to go with the 473 g of flour. 377 g divided by 473 g is 0.797---or about 80%. I'm now ready to turn out the dough onto a rice-floured towel. This time, though, I'll remember to put it on my peel so I can move it across the aisle of my kitchen to the oven easily! I'm also going to see if I can hunt up one of my hubby's cast-iron dutch ovens to bake in. For next time: sourdough starter, here I come! MelissaH

We're toying with the idea of apple pie with gingerbread ice cream. But we won't be doing turkey; just cornish hens. MelissaH

But if you're looking to fast-freeze a sorbet, you'd be much better off using liquid nitrogen than dry ice. Carbon dioxide dissolves in water to make carbonic acid, which will change the taste of your sorbet mix. MelissaH

Klary, I'd walk through a market with you again any day! MelissaH

To be honest, I didn't plan to keep them quite that long. In fact, I don't know how that happened! Usually, sweet stuff either gets eaten or given away long before getting old enough to grow fuzzy. This one cake somehow managed to get buried on the countertop in a corner, under a couple of printouts of other recipes. I unearthed it yesterday, decided that it looked non-toxic, and then had to make sure. I'm still here, so it must be fine, right? It definitely won't last another ten days! MelissaH

On November 5 I made a batch of the Rum-Soaked Vanilla Cakes (using cream, the way the recipe was written, and soaking the cakes with the rum syrup after baking and depanning). We ate one of the cakes. The other, I wrapped in a double layer of plastic wrap and left on the counter. Until yesterday. The second cake, now a week and a half old, is still quite delicious. It doesn't taste stale in the least, and it's certainly not getting fuzzy or blue. It slices well without crumbling, either thickly or thinly, and this morning it made a terrific breakfast. If you're looking for a good keeper that doesn't necessarily need to be frozen, possibly something that would be suitable for mailing if you wrapped and padded it appropriately, this is one cake to keep in mind. MelissaH

Whose AP flour? It seems to make a difference in this recipe.

Sorry for the delay. Here is what the inside of my loaf looked like: I did get some nice big holes. The flavor was good, and the crust was wonderful. The bottom was maybe a smidge too black, so next time I'd probably take the heat down a bit, to 475 or so. The interior texture was a bit elastic, but still moist. This was a gutsy bread, to my tongue one that cried out for some WW flour next time, and also some cheese and cornichons alongside. I, too, thought it needed more salt. (I'd used a teaspoon and a bit more of Diamond Crystal kosher salt, but if the original recipe meant a teaspoon and a quarter of table salt, I'd be way low.) The second day, the bread was still quite edible. I'd simply turned it cut-side down on the cutting board, and left it there overnight. The third day, the bread was starting to suffer, but my husband ate a slice without complaining. Today is the fourth day. I think it's time to make bread crumbs. I'll be starting another batch tomorrow afternoon, to be baked on Wednesday. My plan is to measure the flour as the video showed, weigh it out, and then remove some of the white flour and replace it with an equal mass of WW flour. I'll also weigh the water, although the WW flour may need a little more water than just the white flour did. Has anyone tried this in plain old cast iron yet? I think I'm going to need my LC pot for something else, and I'd like to know if anyone's had a problem with stickage (and the accompanying horror of seasoning destroyal) in cast iron. Not to mention the LC knob/hot oven issue.... Oh---the flour I'd used was King Arthur All Purpose. MelissaH

Mine's much more recent, like within the last three years. MelissaH

On my oval LC pot, the handles are metal loops integral to the pot itself. The lid has a black knob on top. Both went into my blazingly hot oven. The only possible effect I noticed was that the screw holding the lid on loosened up a bit, but not to the point where it caused problems. And for all I know, this might have happened even before the pot went in the oven. If the lid turns out to be a real problem, I'll probably find a metal shop to replace the knob with a metal one. Leather elbow-length welding gloves are good to have in the kitchen. MelissaH

I, too, noticed that the printed recipe said one and five eighths, whereas the video specified one and a half. For this first go-round, I pretty much followed suit from the video. But I didn't feel like getting out a half-cup measure, so I just eyeballed the five-eighths part as a little more than halfway full of my one-cup. The dough was plenty gloppy, but definitely foldable this morning. In my photos above, you can sort of see where the loaf split on its own. The split seems to be more or less along a fold (remember, it rises on the towel seam down, but goes into the pot seam up). Ooh, rye flour. Possibly with some sourdough added? Or...I could get some cornmeal that isn't blue, and use that in the loaf! All kinds of possible variations to try, and I bet among eG we'll try most of them. MelissaH

I have a Le Creuset manual from a new pot and it says do not exceed 200C (which would be 392F). Jamie ← Hmm. I just used mine to make Bittman's bread in my oven at 500 degrees without an apparent problem. And all I could smell was the bread baking. MelissaH

The loaf is cool. The crust has cracked a touch, but that doesn't bother me. However, I'm not going to cut it open for a couple more hours. We're hosting a pre-game dinner tonight with a few friends, and I'm keeping the bread whole for the "oooh" factor. (It's going with meat loaf, spaghetti squash, and broccoli.) I will, however, take pictures when I slice into it. Sorry to keep you all hanging. I should add that the bread was really easy to make, and involved less hands-on time than many other recipes I've tried. My house is also at about 65 +/- 1 degree F, so it's a little cooler than the recipe specified, but I didn't run into a problem with this particular dough. As far as the weight, if you watch the video, you can see exactly how the flour was measured by the baker. In this case, he scoops out the flour from a large bowl and then seems to shake the measuring cup to level the top (which would of course pack more flour into the cup). He's presumably using a one-cup dry measuring cup to do the flour. The water also got scooped out of a bowl with a DRY measuring cup. The video's not quite as clear about how the water is measured, but there are clearly two different measuring cups on the bench, so it's logical to assume that the other is a half-cup measure. Next time I try this, I'll measure it as the video does, but add it to a bowl on my scale to get proper mass measurements for easy duplication. I'm curious to hear how the bread does in a dark cast-iron pan. (Maybe that's an experiment I'll have to do myself in the same oven, to get the direct comparison.) MelissaH

My bread just came out of the oven. When I took the lid off, I set a timer for 15 minutes. When that beeped, I took a peek. Since there were a few little bits up on the top that were turning a very very dark color, I decided it was time to pull the loaf out of the oven. The bread came out of the pot without a problem. I don't even think I'll need to wash the pot, other than maybe a quick swipe with a damp cloth to get a little bit of stray rice flour from my towel dusting. The internal temperature was 208 degrees F right when it came out, and within half a minute, it started making the most delightful crackling sounds. The loaf is oval-shaped, because my pot was oval. It measures about 3 inches high in the middle. And it looks like this: (In the first photo, you can see a bit of the white rice flour I'd used to keep the dough from sticking to the towel. And in the second photo, taken from a different angle, you can see that the top got quite browned.) It's still too hot to cut. MelissaH