abooja

Is that peanut butter ripple chocolate ice cream with a peanut butter ripple? Their website doesn't even list it as a flavor. I'd like to try making it myself.

Drop a metal & paper twist tie into a bowl of chocolate before microwaving. Five seconds on level 4, and a spark and poof of flame inside the plastic bowl was enough to ruin five ounces of frozen bittersweet chocolate. No matter how much I scraped the exposed sides of charcoal residue, the chocolate still smelled of fire. I'm just glad I was in the room when this happened.

I made this brownie recipe last night for the first time in years, substituting one ounce of cocoa powder for one ounce of the flour, and about half the called-for semisweet with bittersweet chocolate. I hated them. They were way too dry, despite baking them for a full five minutes less than the minimum baking time. Perhaps it was my new Goldtouch pan that was the culprit, as I used to bake the hell out of these when I was a kid, and they always turned out fudgy and perfect. Good thing they're being served à la mode all week long. Has anyone ever tried baking the KAF On-the-Fence Brownies without the teaspoon of baking powder? I've made the original recipe dozens of times and, while I like the flavor well enough, they just were never chewy enough for me. Perhaps I'll reduce the baking powder to 1/2 teaspoon, at first. They've got the shiny top. They're certainly chocolaty enough, especially when I've used KAF's Double Dutch Dark cocoa. I just wish they were chewier. I'll give this a shot when I receive my Valrhona cocoa powder from Chocosphere.

Also, do you know of any decent markets in the 'burbs? I'm in Exton, but anything in the general vicinity will do.

Arthur Treacher's used to do fish & chips well enough to my liking, but that was when I was, maybe, ten years old. I rarely see them anymore, and certainly haven't eaten there in years. Besides, I believe it's strictly an east coast phenomenon.

That's a really good idea. It has the added benefit of using up less freezer space. Think I'll try that next time. Thanks!

How about freezing the proofed rolls for future baking? I tried this with challah just last week, and was less than successful. I didn't want it to overproof, so after shaping, I let it proof at room temperature for 1/2 hour, then stuck it in the fridge. Might have been directly into the freezer, on a sheet pan, but I can't recall exactly. I then vacuum sealed it and froze it for a couple of weeks. After one hour at room temperature, I baked it. It didn't rise much and was quite dense. I suppose that's the fault of sticking it directly into the freezer after just a 1/2 hour rise, or is freezing unbaked dough not a good idea in general? If I can get this straight, this will save me a lot of last-minute baking time in the future. (Edited to add missing word.)

I defrost cryovac-ed fish by placing the still-sealed fillets in between two nested 12" cast iron skillets. I never run the risk of cooked fish bits and can attend to other tasks while the fish defrosts. Thin fillets are defrosted in around thirty minutes.

There was no venting at all my in 10' x 4' Queens kitchenette while I smoked those ribs. I dreamed of sealing off the doorway, turning the whole room into a smoker, and venting out the kitchen window. As it turned out, moving to the 'burbs was a lot easier.

You could try a stovetop smoker, but it won't be nearly as good. It may also precipitate a visit from the fire department, as it did one of the two times I used one in my old Astoria apartment.

The therapeutic benefits of cooking and baking were never more clear to me than last summer, when my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and later sent home on hospice leave shortly before she passed away. After the diagnosis, and before anyone knew how sick she was, I was cooking up huge batches of soup, and baking bread and cookies to bring to my folks in Brooklyn whenever I would visit to drive my mother to chemotherapy in Manhattan. Once she was sent home, and we spent nearly a month with nurses and visitors running around the house, waiting for the inevitable, I became even more immersed in baking, in particular, even dragging my second Kitchen Aid standing mixer to Brooklyn to help out. Everyone thought I was nuts, but were it not for the ritual of weighing ingredients, creaming butter with sugar, cutting parchment paper, and hovering near the oven to make sure I turned things around halfway through, I would have had a nervous breakdown. It was the single most upsetting thing I have ever experienced, yet I survived it thanks to both my wonderful husband and my love for baking. One moment I will never, ever forget was when I set out to make lentil soup for my mother, according to her specifications. She was always quite particular about how her food was prepared, and was less than happy with the last batch I had made her, since it contained rice, not pasta, and prosciutto. I know the basics of how my grandmother, my mother's mother, had always prepared lentil soup, but wanted some specifics from my mother, who was was sleeping in the living room on the same floor. Every few minutes, I would drag the pot over to my mother, who was sitting up at the moment, asking for her input. "A bag and a half of lentils", she would say. "No garlic!" Her friend, Gerri, thought this was great, because it kept my mother involved, and us interacting about something we both enjoyed. For a brief moment, life was almost normal. For those of you who have been in similar situations, normalcy is a major achievement. Food is what got us there that day.

Baking no-knead bread requires that the dutch oven be preheated. For sandwich bread, one would normally do the final proof in the loaf pan. Then again, I don't want a hard crust on my soft sandwich bread, so maybe this pan would work? But would color be affected? I have this same issue with a stoneware deep dish pizza pan I've owned for years. Not quite sure what to do with the thing.

I don't know from bread machines, but do know that this Rose Levy Beranbaum challah recipe is excellent. I've tried several others, including RLB's original, Martha Stewart's, and one touted elsewhere on eG, and find this to be the moistest, most flavorful of the bunch. It also makes use of old starter, which I always have in the fridge, and which you will obviously need as well. A new (as in, last week) tradition of mine will be to make a loaf of challah using old starter, then a loaf of sourdough, once it is refreshed. The next step will be seeing if the proofed loaf I have vacuum sealed and sitting in the freezer will, in fact, rise to the occasion when called upon. At any rate, I think you should be fine with mixing challah dough in the bread machine, then baking it elsewhere. Good luck.

Two nights ago, I made this Sicilian style pizza using Peter Reinhart's pain a l'ancienne dough, Pomi chopped tomotoes (should have used the usual Muir Glen fire roasted tomatoes for this), fresh mozzarella and fresh basil. The texture was perfect, but the tomatoes could have been sweeter.

I made some great hamantaschen the other day using your recipe. I filled some with raspberry baker's jam and chocolate chips, cherry preserves and chocolate chips, and nutella. They were great! I actually liked them all equally, and I've never been a real fan of cherry filling. About two de-triangulated and, even then, were nice enough to serve to company, had I any company to serve them to. Thanks so much for the recipe and the inspiration. Rugelach-tasting hamantaschen are clearly the way to go.

Most of my flours are from King Arthur, with the exception of a box of Softasilk cake flour, a bag of white rice flour, and one 5-lb. bag of Wegmans (store brand) whole wheat flour that I use for suet making for the birds. The rest are all-purpose, bread, white whole wheat, potato, high gluten, unbleached cake flour, semolina, durum, pasta blend (A/P, semolina & durum), medium rye, first clear, pastry blend, whole wheat pastry (graham), tapioca, almond and toasted hazelnut. The bulk of these are kept in the freezer, with a bag of A/P, bread and cake flours at room temperature at all times.

Yes, this is how I did it.

I buy ground Vietnamese cinnamon by the pound from Penzey's, and keep the bulk of it in my freezer. It doesn't seem to lose any of its potency, which is plentiful. I probably go through a pound in 1-1/2 years. Vacuum sealing it would make it last even longer.

Since it was refrigerated for almost a day, it was easy to invert and slash right before going into the oven. Actually, into a dutch oven that was placed on a stone in the oven. That no-knead bread trick has me spoiled for shaping crusty breads into anything but a boule. Thanks again, everyone. I've got another loaf retarding in the fridge right now. I hope this wasn't a once-only fluke.

That's a gorgeous loaf and a couple of great pictures. Most kind of you, sir. Thank you.

I finally had some real success with sourdough last week. Using Jack Lang's basic ratios, my own 2-1/2 year old starter, Dan Lepard's folding technique during bulk fermentation, and the brotform my mother purchased for me last year shortly before she passed away, I produced the following very tasty, if imperfect loaf. My slicing, slashing, and photography skills clearly need some work:

I always include some fresh thyme in my Greek inspired marinades.

It sounds like the Italians see you as Neapolitan. Right on. Well, one quarter Neapolitan and one one quarter Sicilian. Edited to add that my other Brooklyn grandmother, the one actually born in Naples and who rarely made lasagna, always prepared her giant pot of pasta sauce with the addition of braciole and meaty bones.

My lasagna is of the variety of my Brooklyn grandmother -- loaded with lots of meat. The last time I made it was this past Christmas. It included homemade meatballs and sausage, both of which were browned, then cooked in a stockpot of tomato sauce for hours, sliced, then layered into the lasagna along with homemade noodles, tomato sauce, and a ricotta mixture loaded with shredded, fresh mozzarella, parmigiano reggiano, egg, parsley, etc. Takes forever to make, as evidenced by the fact that Christmas dinner was served at 11:50 p.m. that night.

According to KAF, their regular white whole wheat flour is 13.2% protein, while their organic white whole wheat flour is 14.5% protein. I don't doubt your success with this flour, having used it for cookies and brownies myself, but low protein flour it is not.