Lisa Shock

Upper-middle class women. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_stove Note that he first home stove to have a separate baking unit was invented in 1850. That doesn't mean that every household suddenly owned one on that date. There were popular and competing companies started producing competitors, but it took about 20 years (what with that pesky civil war intervening with the production of metal goods) for them to become popular. They weren't considered standard household equipment until the turn of the century. You can check out a lot of memoirs of the late 1800's where people did not have an oven in their home and were subsisting on hoe cakes on the prairie. Or, store bought baked good in cities.

They didn't. Homes did not have ovens in them until the advent of the commercial stove in the mid-1800s. (although many people did not own one until the beginning of the 1900's) Baking powder is also a product of the 1800's, and, sugar was a rare and very expensive commodity that rich families kept locked in special containers. Cheap sugar is a 20th century phenomenon. Prior to that, you took your dough to the village baker to be baked off. Or, most commonly, people make hoe-cakes or baked in dutch ovens on the hearth. Baking at home as we know it is a tradition that only has a few generations of history. Most of your grandmothers did it because it was new, exciting and fashionable for young housewives to be able to bake at home instead of buy from the bakery the way their parents had. You might want to check out a PBS series from a few years back called 'Colonial House' -a reality show where they had a group of people live for six months as colonial settlers. All cooking happened over fireplace hearths. And, there was very little 'baking' going on. The invention of the scale predates the home oven by a couple of millenia.

Icing and assembly take more time and effort than making the cake batter. When I want something fast, I use bundt pan so it comes out as one layer that I can just drizzle ganache on.

And, for the record, I am sorry, I did not in any way mean to imply that you could get anything mousse-like with a whisk. I just figured that slightly bubbly, what we'd ordinarily fix as flawed, chocolate would be better than well tempered chocolate with the bubbles worked out of it. And, by lining the mold first no one would see bubbles. I was trying for the lowest-tech solution possible. Nice aerated chocolate dhardy123! Ultimately, I just don't think that solid chocolate is generally served as thick as filled bon-bons.

Most of those recipes simply aren't worth wasting your time on. Cut your losses (time wasted worrying about how to fill a measuring cup, money wasted on ingredients for things that won't turn out right, etc.) and get some decent recipes from reliable sources. You yourself say that you're a novice baker. Do you want to stay that way, following the lead of other novices and perpetuating their mistakes? A decent home-baking starting book is Baking Illustrated by the Cook's Illustrated Magazine Editors. http://www.amazon.com/Baking-Illustrated-Cooks-Magazine-Editors/dp/0936184752/ They explain why you should do things, how the chemistry of baking works, and, they give weight-based formulas. If you want to learn what beginning culinary students learn when they take basic baking, try Professional Baking by Wayne Gisslen. www.amazon.com/Professional-Baking-Wayne-Gisslen/dp/1118083741/ And, you should check out this commentary thread on The Kitchen Scale Manifesto, since part of it covers how to shop for a scale: http://forums.egullet.org/topic/129181-the-kitchen-scale-manifesto/?hl=+kitchen%20+scale%20+manifesto That said, my most used scale is a cheapo that I got at Ross (Dress for Less)for $17.99.

Has anyone done anything interesting with one of these frozen, anti-griddle style?

What is the secret to gettting a nice puffed up but crusty pretzel? BTW, I had a great one last night. That's the fourth bar that I have been to in six months selling fresh baked pretzels. They should ALL have them. Dunno that there's just one secret. Just follow the basics of bread making, scale your ingredients, scale the dough, bench rest fully, proof after final shaping, make sure your water bath has the correct ratio of additives, egg wash carefully and use the right salt.Don't pretzels (the soft ones) go through a treatment like a bagel with a water & soda boil first? I would love to experiment but fear I would consume way too many. I can get fresh ones at the the local German bakery that are quite good. On the more Ready to Eat level from packages I have a huge weakness for the chocolate or white covered ones.Yeah I mentioned the water bath having the correct ratio of additives, I wasn't trying to give full instructions, just covering places where people commonly get into trouble. You dip after proofing. Different people add different things to the water, most commonly lye, ammonia or baking soda. There are good arguments for/against each.

What is the secret to gettting a nice puffed up but crusty pretzel? BTW, I had a great one last night. That's the fourth bar that I have been to in six months selling fresh baked pretzels. They should ALL have them. Dunno that there's just one secret. Just follow the basics of bread making, scale your ingredients, scale the dough, bench rest fully, proof after final shaping, make sure your water bath has the correct ratio of additives, egg wash carefully and use the right salt.

Another secret is to develop speedy service, especially for carryout. Most places have policies whereby a customer should be able to place their order within a minute or two and get their food/drink in another minute or two.

I make a lot of pizza, I am about to purchase one. In the meantime, I too am curious about how it's working out for people.

My Grandmothers were both from Europe, where weight based recipes and cookbooks became the norm in the early 1900s, and they used scales long before I started cooking in the early 60's. The US is really behind in adopting this technology which became commonplace in Mexico, India, Europe, Canada, Australia, the Middle East and Africa around the time of the Teddy Roosevelt administration. Yes, people muddle by, hit-or-miss dinner gets on the table somehow, with volumetric measurement of dry ingredients. But, they don't see consistently excellent results, and, more importantly, consistently replicable results from cookbooks. (edited for spelling error)

I hate tea bags. I can taste them. I also hate the empty bags you perch on a stirrer that tea shops use to brew one cup of whatever, once again, I can taste them. My main issues with Starbucks is that they give you hot water and a teabag (or two depending on size) of their own proprietary blended tea. So, then I wait for the tea to steep and get to drink it 4-7 minutes later. (while coffee people can drink their brew immediately) And, it's ok, in a supermarket type tea way, but it's not seriously good tea. Kind of funny in comparison to the way they treat coffee... Oh and, honestly, I love Twinings' Earl Grey and find most other EG's too perfume-y. That's my only supermarket tea brand prejudice. If I had a tea shop, I would definitely offer Twinings' EG, perhaps not as the only, one but prominently. If I had a tea shop, I guess if I wanted to stock a huge variety, I'd have to use the empty bags. But, that said, I'd look into brewing without paper filters/bags and having some sort of vacuum pot setup to store/serve 4-5 of the top types of tea prebrewed and ready to go. This might be nice for customers in a hurry, since it's ready to drink. They won't have to wait for steeping. With all of the effort going into coffee machines, you'd think we'd have better tea machines as well.

No matter what you do, you'll always have differing amounts of flour in your cup. And, your cup probably differs from the recipe author's cup. Find a weight based formula. You should also read this site's Kitchen Scale Manifesto: http://forums.egullet.org/topic/85172-the-kitchen-scale-manifesto/ On day one of my classes I have every student measure a cup of flour however they usually do, then weight it. Then, I have them do it again. No one ever gets the same weight twice. No one ever gets the same weight as anyone else. And, no one ever gets 8 ounces. Sugar is more consistent, but, its crystals are more uniform, flow and pack well. -As long as you repeatedly use the same cup. There is no national or state-level set of standards that home-user measuring devices have to pass to be sold. So, since the industry is unregulated, most measuring cups, measuring spoons, etc. have different volumes from manufacturer to manufacturer. Easy test: you can go to a kitchen store today and buy three types of cup measures and each of the three will hold slightly different amounts of water. Most professional measuring devices are pretty accurate because people making wholesale goods have to submit their goods to a state weights & measures authority. (a cookie labelled 3oz had better weigh 3oz) A kitchen scale is the only way to bake with any sort of accuracy and be able to repeat results.

One trick is to make a thinner shape. More sugar will make it less 'snappy' and a bit more grainy. Another thing you can do is treat your chocolates as if they were going to be filled but just temper two batches of the same chocolate. One gets the usual treatment, and you make the outer shells with it. The other you whip lightly with a hand whisk to incorporate air bubbles and carefully fill the molded shells with it. This way, your center has tiny air bubbles, which are usually a flaw, but in this case will help make them easier to eat. You could try doing a variation on aerated chocolate with a vacuum sealer, but, that's really hard to control precisely.

I see that each has a different model number and ASIN number. No idea what the differences are, though.

There were a bunch of franchise businesses with that business model. Here's a list of some, before the economic downturn there were a lot of these places out there. Well, there were 5 of them within a mile of my house. There were definitely more franchises than this site lists: http://www.easymealprep.com/main/direct02.php Overall, it's not a bad concept. You just need to have a big customer base and retain them by having good menus and variety. I recall one such place getting scathing reviews because they were provisioned with the cheapest possible Sysco foods.

There's a dim sum place called C-Fu Gourmet at 2051 W Warner Rd #13 Chandler, AZ 85224. A large pan-Asian supermarket called Lee-Lee is diagonally across the street from it. I've been there, but as a vegetarian there was very little for me to eat. That said, they did serve chicken feet, tripe and congee. Apparently there is a bigger selection on weekends. They also have a menu you can order from. A new noodle shop just opened up in the same shopping center as Lee-Lee, but I haven't been able to try that yet.

Is it related to specific flavors, or does it happen to all of them?

I'd leave the sweeteners out all together and make lightly lemon water flavored cubes. You can use other fruit as well. I'd just make a puree of real fruits and freeze it. Younger kids are able to regulate their caloric intake on their own, for most fake sweeteners are not recommended. (A lot of the stevia out there is far more processed than people realize -the fresh, green herb normally has a bitter aftertaste. Some of the powdered stevia sweeteners contain MSG.) Sweeteners give people a 'taste' for foods that are sweeter than produced in nature, and then they overeat naturally sweet items that contain real sugars. http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/09/research-artificial-sweetners-no-silver-bullet-for-losing-weight/ If it were my child, I'd rather have him acclimated to the sweetness levels of real foods like peaches and apples and pears and grapes. Or, try giving him actual real, unprocessed fruit. Ultimately, kids will be drawn to sweets whether those sweets are candies, ice creams, soda pop, or real fruits. The trick to setting them on a good path for the future is acclimating them to eating a sensible diet which should include real, unadulterated fruits and vegetables. If all they ever get is sweetened fruits, they won't ever think that it has a good/normal flavor. I knew an adult whose benchmark for 'good' fruit was cherry Kool-Aid. He hated real cherries and most fruit because it never tasted 'right.'

Alcohol is a solvent, and it is used in extracting essential flavor oils from their original source -in this case, lemon peels. The higher the concentration of alcohol, and therefore lower the amount of water, the better the extract. You can't really buy 100% pure alcohol. That said, the balance of the % of ingredients on your label will me mostly water. The flavor components are relatively tiny, even in the best extracts. I make all sorts of extracts at home and know for a fact that Everclear outperforms vodka in both speed and efficiency.

One important tip is to use the type of blueberries that are best for baking: tiny wild ones. The cultivated marble-sized ones at most supermarket are too watery to bake well. Also, the skin is where the flavor is. So, the smaller the sphere the more surface area it has -thus smaller berries have more skin and more flavor. Many times these can only be gotten frozen, since they have a very brief season fresh. (two weeks?) That said, the fresh berries are less likely to disintegrate. On the flip side, depending on where you've been eating muffins, some commercial purveyors actually use colored apple chunks in their blueberry muffins which remain much more intact and solid than is possible for a real blueberry. If you're used to eating those, and, here in Phoenix, even one of the best hotels in the world serves them, you're never going to duplicate that texture with any berry, ever. Cook's Illustrated 'Classic Blueberry Muffins' from 2001 is a very good formula, I have used it extensively at work and customers really like it. (I add a dash of nutmeg.) http://www.cooksillustrated.com/recipes/detail.asp?docid=5091 (The formula that uses sour cream.)

Yeah, actually, I've had it up to my eyeballs with kale and those who worship it.

The pink stuff shows up here in Phoenix in September at the LeeLee Market in Phoenix. Don't know if that's just when they order it or if it's a seasonal issue.

Sifting does aerate the flour and add lift. This was the subject of Rose Levy Beranbaum's master's degree thesis which I have a downloaded copy of. She had it available on her blog, but, I cannot find it again. Try heating your oven 25 degrees hotter in the preheat, then drop the temp. Also, make sure you're baking it long enough. Could be too much liquid or sugar, but, I am guessing you're using a tested recipe. How's the humidity at your place right now?

I have powdered tomato I got from someone on amazon, originally for making brad showpieces. It's very tomato-y tasting. You could easily add that to a shortbread cookie, or other things.