glennbech

+ 1 from me on this one. If you render fat from the duck carcas yourself, there should be enough for one or two pouches. When I have made duck confit the traditional way, I have always have to purchase extra fat.

Hi, Pork belly sells for just $3 a kilogram around christmas in Norway, so I tend to buy a lot a make all kinds of dishes from it. I recently made bacon; and in the process i vacuumed some pieces that I squared off with some dry cure. Today I browned the pieces off in a cast iron pan and braised them fork tender in red wine. The stock is awesome, but the pieces of meat are still fatty, I had hoped for a complete render of the fat. Both me and the rest of the family are not fans of chunks of visible fat. I preserved the pieces in the stock for now, and was actually thinking of pureeing the meat with some of the gelatinous stock to make some kind of patê. Would that work? Other ideas, maybe how to use this as a starter for my upcoming new years eve dinner? Here is an image pre-braising.

Hi, I have tried the bacon recipe from the Charcuterie book a couple of times now; and find the 7 day salting to produce a too salty product. Have anyone else experienced this. I guess the correct timing depends on thickness of the belly and temperature? How do you know when to stop the process?

Hi, So much nice to look at here, I am impressed. Yesterday I prepared a quick dinner for today. Some regular store bought mushrooms and some hand picked winter chanterelles turned into a lovely soup. The winter chanterelles were dried earlier this year, re-hydrated and added to the soup together with the "stock". I also infused some olive oil with thyme, garlic and chilli and sprinkled over. I love to eat toast with gorgonzola or roquefort with mushroom soup.

Hi, I have no idea what this is called; But when you buy bacon, ham etc in stores, it is often vacuumed on a sheet of cardboard with a non-stick surface. This material would be very helpful to have at home, to preserve food. Does anyone know what this material is called, and if it is possible to order on line?

Hi, I did one of my first attemts at sausage making yesterday; and had a rather frustrating experience with my Kenwood Chef sausage filler attachment. I had to press really hard to get anything to come out of the nozzle, and the "plastic stuffer" was hard to get up again, because of the vacum beeing produced. The meat was gooy and a mashy when it finally got into the casings. Is this attachment any good at all, or did I do something wrong, like pressing down to hard? I sure was hard work, I got a real good workout. I sous vided the sausages to 61.5c and shock-chilled. I have not tasted them yet; but they look almost like emulsified sausages (not intended!) - I am hoping for great taste and sub-par texture :-)

I am experimenting with adding pure gluten powder to my doughs, to be able to use higher percentages of whole-grains. The recipe of the day is ; Poolish 300g (100%) Whole Grain Wheat 330g (110%) Water 5g dry yeast Dough 600g Poolish 400g Whole Grain finely ground wheat flour 300g White "AP" wheat flour 310g Water 60g Pure gluten powder 30g Olive Oil 20g salt This gives 70% whole grain loaves. (64% water bp.)The "plan" is that the gluten will counter the "compactness" one usually gets with such high levels of whole grain. I am experimenting with shortening and fats to counter the "spongyness" the gluten can give. Have anyone else tried this, any thoughts?

First of all; thanks a lot for spending time with the application. I am sorry to say that "Eggplant Roasted" is not in the database :-) I will fix the spellings & kcal->calories for the next release. I see that it is confusing to list the "total" in calories and the breakdown in kcal. On the 10" there is some stretching of the images that I do not like, So I plan on making a special layout for the larger tablets. I test it on my samsung galaxy tab 10, just to check. The USDA has a special database for retention values that shows how nutrients if different foods are affected by boiling, fryinig etc.I was tempted to include the data, but the application would have become even larger, I also think the data is very "special interest" :-) Again; thanks for using it, just post a message in this thread with any suggestions.

By the way; A few questions from the developer; Answers very welcome. 1) How well is the metric system integrated into US cooking/nutrition labelling nowdays? Since I'm from Europe, and was unsure, I added values in ounces just to be sure. 2) The data source, from the USDA, is very very detailed. As an example; it lists 10+ items for Beef Brisket, with abbreviations like "Beef, brisket, flat half,ln & Fat, 1/8" Fat, sel, ckd, brsd." Is this something that people would normally understand?

@Rancho - Thanks for testing it out . I tested it on the 7" Kindle fire during development, so that screen size should be covered. I does not look good on the 10" though. (yet). @minas; Interesting. There seems to be carbs missing. 60g of carbs, 0g sugar and 4,5g of fiber. Have to look into that. I isn't by any means alcohol in it?

Thanks LynnFoodies. I'm planning to upgrade the user experience on 10" tablets, but have iPhone version in the making. Just let me know if there is anything not working; or something that should work better.

Nothing is better than to pull a "little gem" out of the fridge for a quick meal. I had a home-cured hickory duck breast lying around and decided to make a quick salad of it. This is "duck ham" from "charcuterie the art of salting smoking and curing". I toasted some almonds, made a vinaigrette and threw in some deep fried chevre. The shallow fried cheese turned out great, but it was not really needed for the dish. Nor did it bring anything extra "to the table" so to speak :-) But, it was an interesting experiment. (I wrapped pieces in a thin spring roll sheet). I am not very happy about the skin of my hot smoked breasts. It's black and hard. I think I might remove it before serving next time around. The texture of the duck is absolutely amazing. Love it on sandwiches as well. Yummy

Sorry Andrew, I only know Android development. Maybe in the very far future :-)

Hi, @Lesliec. Thanks. I am planning to use it to compute some totals for family "healthy" recipes. I am thinking of building a "meal planner" into it, where you can see the combined nutrients for a meal, and save favorites. I guess it's right now, more useful for people on diets than foodies :-) @ChrisZ. I'd love to include Allergy info. I have actually tried to search around a bit for sources with data in a suitable format. I guess I'd need a link between some allergy info and the food #id from the USDA database.

Hi, I've written an Android application that can be used to look up nutrition info for about 7k food products. The data is from the U.S. Department of Agriculture It's absolutely free. It can be downloaded here; https://play.google....nnbech.nutrinfo You can also just search for "food facts" in the market application on your phone. (Oh, and the image on the Google Play! store includes a slab of my home cured bacon :-) I'd love feedback, and suggestions for improvement or new features on the app. It's definitely still under development. I have attached a couple of screenshots. Regards, Glenn

Agreed. Lobsters on the other had, I'll take my chances with :-)

Hi! Thanks for all the Advice! I really like the Idea of Cold lobster salad. I ordered a couple of Norwegian ones (native) yesterday. I can serve the salad in the shell of the lobsters, which I think will be spectacular. I think this, served "DIY style" with bruschetta will start the evening off quite well! I also liked the Idea of Duck two ways. Since I bought the ducks frozen, I can't re-freeze the breasts. I was wondering what to do with them. I wonder if I can use cherries from my in-laws garden from this summer for a sauce? I'll probably play it safe with the veal, Since I now have to cope with live lobsters (never done it). Workflow wise, I'll also need the sides for the veal ready to go, or ready enough to be prepared while the meat rests. Thanks again for all the input.

This is family only yes, so no worries if things do not go as planned. That said, I know how to to cook meat and confit a duck, so I am ready for a challenge on the sides. @Panderia: That said, Yorkshire pudding is not something I'd dare, since I have never eaten it, and have no idea what it is supposed to taste like :-) But, thanks for the tip! I might look for the tomatoes though, I have seen them in some well stocked stores, but not in a while. Feel free to share your best veal recipes. I've also used the dinner thread for some inspiration this evening.

Hi, I am planning a four/five course dinner for this new year's eve dinner. I am planning an apatetizer, two "main" courses, chesse and dessert. My Ingredients so far are two large ducks and veal loin with fat/skin. My girlfriend is handling the dessert, I am baking walnut bread and making marmelade for the cheeses. For the apetizer I am thinking seafood, maybe oysters. A local store has many different types to chose from. I am thinking of slow roasting the veal, making duck confit of the legs with rendered fats from the ducks. I know the confit won't have too much time in the fat, but I am sure it will be good anyways :-) We will be four adults eating, and I want to push my cooking a bit and try something new. For the duck legs I may just want to serve a salad to highlight the "hero" of the dish, but for the veal I don't want to serve just potatoes, sauce and greens. I have done that a lot of times. I am also considering killing a lobster (never done that) for the appetizer. I would be very happy for inspirations, suggestions and ideas around my ingredients and menu!

Hi, It's been a while since my last visit here, but I still bake all the bread we eat (and has since 2005) The batch for the next week. Our small family of four need about 4 big loaves to get by. I mostly bake pre-fermented doughs with instant yeast nowdays. As you probably see slightly under proven and broke during oven spring. Poolish pre-ferment 300g Rye whole grain 300g Barley whole grain 640ish g of water 1 tsp instant yeast The rest; 40g salt 1400g White AP wheat flour 700g water (65% hydration total) Yummy!

I totally agree with you on the flour issue. I usually start of with a wetter dough than the recipe states and add until I am happy. I do find Baker's percentage formula great for comparing recipes, getting a quick overview of them (firm/rustic, lean/rich etc), and for scaling. Hence the tool. Initial feedback suggests that I should include some basic recipes. Probably a good idea :-) Probably because it quickly dissolves into "fluid state" from its crystalized form when it is incorporated into the dough.

Hi Norm, Thanks for the feedback. Do you mean different flour types (rye/wheat) or different kinds of wheat? (Strong/weak) I see a variation even within the same brand of the AP flour that I use. I usually mix in up to 35% of a non-wheat flour in my bread, usually rye/barley. The 65 baker's percentage of water holds up "pretty good" for such recipes. I will implement different flour types, and other "dry stuffs" like sugar later. I also have to add support for other liquids like milk, buttermilk and eggs as well. I also want to add support for saving your own recipes, and also think that I will bundle some recipes with the application. Those recipes will of course account for the different kinds of flour and their reaction to water.

Hi, I have been baking bread for some years now and often bake with indirect doughs with large pre-ferments that I keep over night. More often than I want to admit I have no time for recipes and use what I have available within reasonable bounds of course. This led me to the development of an Android Smart phone application that calculate a recipe based on a baker's percentages formula. For those not familiar with the term, baker's percentages are recipes where all ingredients are given against the total flour weight. This notation makes for recipes that are very easy to scale, and you can easily see if a recipe will give a sticky/rustic or stiff/bagelish dough. With the app, I just enter the flour weight I want, and it calculates the pre-ferment size (and ingredients) for me. It also calculates the contents of the rest of the dough that will be mixed in later. The application suggests reasonable numbers for all ingredients and starts off with a "standard" recipe (65% water, 1% yeast, 5% fat, 2% salt) It is n a very early development stage, and I was hoping for feedback from bread enthusiasts (that I know I can find here!) before I develop the application further. So, if anyone would like to download the Smart phone application for Android phones, it can be found here; https://market.android.com/details?id=com.glennbech.prefermentz&feature=search_result I am also attaching some screenshots so that "non android" users can have a look. Feedback & feature wishes wanted! :-)

Hello friends, It's been a while, I think maybe years since I posted. I was very active some years back, and I probably have hundreds of posts on Sourdough baking :-) Now I am catering for 12 people for a celebration of our national day. I have decided on a buffet for simplicity and logistics. The traditional Norwegian buffet usually contains foods like - Scrambled Eggs - Chicken - Roast-beef - Burgers on bread with browned onions. - Smoked salmon - Fish . And so on I really, really want to make a twist on this, and I am now seeking inspiration for amazing buffet food. I also want to challenge myself on this and use it as an occasion to learn something new. I also want to pick a “theme” so that the tastes are more or less coherent. No Tacos, Shusi & Pasta buffet  Ideas?

Nice! I love the bubbles, it's proof of a long night in the fridge :-)