rickster

I have often used lepicerie.com. It looks like their price per oz on Manjari runs from about $.66 if you buy 3 kg to about $.81 for 8 oz. They have other brands as well and say they have free shipping in NYC if you spend over $75.

Perfect Pastry was one of the first baking books I owned and I also learned a lot from it. I'd also recommend Bernabaum's Pie and Pastry Bible, which covers puff pastry, croissants, danish and I think choux dough as well as tart and pie doughs.

You can substitute hazelnuts, but pinenuts have a very distinctive taste so the overall taste profile will be quite different I suspect. Pinenuts seem to be to be moister/oilier than hazelnuts so I don't know if there will need to be an adjustment in proportions. Don't know if there are Costcos in Canada, but their Kirkland pinenuts are relatively reasonable.

Funny! I bought mine at Oak Mill Bakery on Rand Road in either Mount Prospect or Arlington Heights (not too familiar with the area). Great selection of fillings, but a few of the selections seemed to be on the edge of staleness. The best was actually a lemon one which was the freshest. Most interesting was the avocaat, which was a highly alcoholic custard

When I lived in Connecticut, in recent years the supermarket chains grabbed on the the paczki idea as a marketing ploy and were pretty much slapping the label on your standard, maybe slightly puffier jelly doughnut. So what you're seeing in the supermarket very well may be a jelly doughnut. I had some "authentic" ones last week for the first time from a Polish bakery here in Chicago and what distinguished them to me was the unusual fillings, among them prune, avocaat cream, rosehip jam. The dough itself seemed like a puffy jelly doughnut, not noticeably richer.

This is exactly right. A lot of people love the Herme recipe, for example. I personally am more in the curd camp and found the Herme filling akin to eating lemony butter. The Keller recipe struck me as similar, but not to the same extreme.

I hope you have better luck than I did!

Note that The Handmade Loaf is not available directly from Amazon in the US, but from one of their associated sellers. I tried to order this last month and found my order mysteriously cancelled and refunded with no explanation after waiting for about 3 weeks.

I'd guess the dough was too dry or it was overworked.

It seems there are two approaches to steam in home bread baking. One is to mist the oven when the loaf is inserted and maybe once or twice shortly after. The other approach is to put a pan of water in the oven throughout the baking process. Is there a difference in the oven spring or overall quality of the crust/loaf between the two methods?

The mildest honey to me is acacia, but that is probably not a cost effective option if you are trying to do commercial production.

When I make cream puff (choux) paste, I beat the eggs in with a wooden spoon.

Interesting. Thanks. The culture had been going for 3-4 weeks before I refrigerated it. Didn't realize it would need to go longer.

I've been having a somewhat similar problem to Shalmanese. I made a firm sourdough starter before Christmas from Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking book. Had no problem making several loaves of bread. I then refrigerated the starter for a few weeks and have attempted to revive it 3 times. Once it worked and the other 2 times it died (or virtually died). In all 3 cases the starter initially responded to feeding but in 2 cases it died after about 48-60 hours. The process suggested for reviving the starter suggests combining 10g starter with 25g warm water and about 45g flour and repeating every 12 hours for several days. I've tried reviving it on a Wednesday intending to bake on the weekend. Any ideas on what might be the problem?

Whenever I've seen it, tuile is a very thin crispy cookie. Joconde is a very thin sponge cake usually used to wrap around a mousse/bavarian cream tye of filling to create a cake. Both can be colored/decorated/striped. I think somewhere on the site is a demo by Wendy showing how to do decorative joconde.

Probably joconde.

Given that Cold Stone Creamery has 10 stores open or opening in the Philadelphia area, I'd guess the chances are low, unless they trademarked this for an ice cream they're no longer interested in selling.

I think this was the present queen's mother

I'm in the northern suburbs not too far from Lake Bluff and don't have any problems finding it. You might have to look in places other than Jewel/Dominicks though. Whole Foods carries it and I think Sunset Foods too. But I wouldn't get overly hung up on the flour for basic bread. Pillsbury and Gold Medal bread flour should be OK too.

Hard dull looking bread sounds like a yeast problem, not a flour problem. AP flour can be OK for breads-it depends on the protein content, which varies between brands. For example, King Arthur flour AP is higher in protein (which is good for bread) than many other brands. But using bread flour is a safe choice too. I'd agree with the Hensperger and Reinhart recommendations

I think a lot of pizzerias use a low moisture mozzarella. Not sure where you could buy it in a grocery, you might want to ask the pizzeria for advice. Shredded works better than the blocks because it is a bit drier in order to keep it from clumping in the package. Supermarket pizza cheese usually refers to a blend of mozzarella and provolone, sometimes with other flavorings.

I used to own the 4 1/2 quart and then got the 6 qt as a gift. Honestly, I preferred the smaller model with the narrower bowl, which I thought did a better job mixing the quantities I normally made. The only times I ran into trouble with the small one was in mixing some bread dough recipes where there was just too much dough for the mixer to handle. I would think carefully about what you intend to use it for and think about saving some money and going with a 5 qt.

I've re-frozen it, very tightly wrapped in layers of plastic wrap and re used it (only done this once). It will dry out and be more prone to cracking, so a lot depends on what you were planning to use it for.

Except for the chocolate enrobing, it sounds like a version of panforte. Did it have nuts?

The Last Course recipe is the one with 1 cup total sugar (1/2 brown, 1/2 granulated white) per the first Epicurious link on this thread. The higher sugar recipe might offset the bitterness.