Elle Bee

@DianaB thanks for that reply and for the reminder of how dangerous even trace amounts of gluten can be for people with coeliac disease. So sorry about your nephew. 😢 I am fortunate to have a dedicated candy kitchen in the basement of our home. No oven there, so all my baking happens upstairs in the main kitchen. Still, as you point out, equipment gets shared and in any case it's a house and the same air circulates throughout, and it's a risk. I've been gifting candy to dozens of people for about 15 years now. From the beginning I've always been obsessive about asking before I send it, and clearly warning about nuts and other potential allergens... and yet it has never occurred to me to expressly state that there could be gluten contamination. That's important information and I appreciate that you caused me to focus on it. Thanks again for that. As for the proofing box, oh my gosh I LOVE this thing. I'll be sharing more details in a separate post about how I'm using it, but basically I'm just using it to melt chocolate and hold it until I'm ready to use it. It's working great for me and saving me hours and hours of time. The oven in our main kitchen has a proofing function, so I will use that for bread and probably just keep the Brod and Taylor proofing box for chocolate.

I will definitely report back! The blood orange marmalade really was wonderful. Funny story: I had just recently met and started dating my significant other at the time and he offered to help make the marmalade. His kitchen "thing" is pretty much limited to cooking meat (which he is really good at), and since he had no idea what he was getting into, he generously offered to juice all the oranges. I had ten oranges sitting next to the juicer, so after he juiced those he was like, "Done!"... only to discover there was a huge box of them on the other side of the counter and we'd need to juice ALL of them. To his credit, he persevered, and he has continued to persevere with my projects ever since. He's a keeper. ❤️

Thanks, @Saltychoc! Good point about cross-contamination—I never thought about that. Even though I'm not selling anything I make, I give A LOT of it away, and do always like to provide people with ingredient and allergen information. So that's really useful to know. I did get the proofing box and am going to try it out. Worst case, I decide it's not a good fit for me in the candy kitchen and I either return it to Amazon or take it up to our cabin to use only for bread-making. I am very interested in hearing more about your countertop warming tray. Do you have a link you could share? Also, since you mentioned it in the same paragraph as the dehydrator, I'm not clear whether you're using the warming tray in the dehydrator or just to keep the chocolate/cocoa butters warm while they're out of the dehydrator. Will you please clear that up for me?

Not sure how I missed this question earlier (probably packing candy boxes to mail 😋). I don't have a Thermomix, but I'm super intrigued because I do have one of these Ball FreshTech Automatic Jam and Jelly Maker (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). They don't appear to be available on Amazon right now, but I thought I'd provide the link in case anyone is interested in looking at the reviews. Anyway.... I bought it a long time ago with the idea that I would actually make jam, and despite continuing to have that same optimistic idea every single summer... I have used it exactly once. For making blood orange marmalade, which turned out great. That was maybe 8 years ago. Then I packed the thing up for a move, and never thought about it again until right this minute. Now I'm thinking it would be worth experimenting to see if I can make it work for cooking smaller PdF batches than I normally make in my large copper jam pan. What I love about the Ball jam maker is that it does all the stirring, but what I did NOT love about it is that it's one of those overly automated appliances with a bunch of built-in programs. To be fair, I have the same objection about our Breville toaster oven and Fagor multi-cooker, and when I use those, I just ignore all the pre-set options and manually choose whatever I want to do. What I can't remember about the Ball cooker is whether the user is able to override the pre-programmed options. (I also have the Ball automatic canner for jam, and have the same irritation with that device. It does work, but you must choose one of the built-in programs to use it, because there is no manual setting option.) But I digress. I'm going to get this little jam maker out of our storage room and see if I can make it cook some PdF.

@The other Sven a couple of questions: 1) Looks like you ordered the 24" threaded rod. Curious what length you cut it to. I'm thinking an 18" rod would work for cutting a 12x12 slab—4" of the rod would get threaded into the handles (2" per side), and then I could put a 1" spacer on each end next to the handles to take up the extra 2". Does that make sense? Or I could cut the extra couple of inches off, although I think stainless steel is hard to cut and I'd worry about messing up the threads. Did you just use a hacksaw? 2) Since the threaded handles can't turn independently of the rod like regular rolling pin handles do, I'm wondering if they have a tendency to come unscrewed from the rod as you're marking/cutting across the slab?

@The other Sven thanks for tagging me in that other thread—it reminded me I want to do this! Planning to order the parts this weekend. 👍

Yep, that's true. The back is hotter than the front, since that's where the heating unit is, and also presumably loses less heat than the front when you open the door, especially if it's pretty full. They do recommend turning everything halfway through. We did this with the three racks of ribs we smoked. Reversed them from back to front, and also from top to bottom (we left the ones on the middle rack in the middle, but did switch the front/back position). EDITED TO ADD: I can't speak to the cooking decisions in the videos since I'm a candy maker who doesn't really know anything about actually smoking stuff. Yet. 😁

Count me in as another Rose Levy Beranbaum and Shirley Corriher fan. I have all of Beranbaum's books, as well as Corriher's Bakewise and Cookwise, and all are well used. I'm also a frequent pie and tart baker. My go to crust for regular pies is Julia Child's pâte brisée fine (page 381 in The Way to Cook), made in the food processor. I think the recipe is just a bit skimpy for a double crust pie, plus my family loves the leftover pastry scraps baked with butter, sugar, and cinnamon, so I usually increase the recipe amount by 50% and then everyone is happy. I agree that parbaking a bottom crust can minimize its tendency to get soggy and I do this sometimes with single crust pies. But I confess that while I love a crispy, flaky pie crust, I also actually LIKE the contrasting character of a soggy bottom crust in a fruit pie—and this is one of the main reasons I almost always make my fruit pies with a double crust. Of course now I want one with caramel sauce. But speaking of Rose Beranbaum... here's a terrific article she wrote for Food 52 on concentrating fruit juices for pies. In the microwave. Easy and delicious.

@gfweb just checked, and it is a combination ionization and CO2 detector. This one, specifically. Thanks for causing me to think about this—we have a number of older smoke detectors around the house and now it occurs to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea to do an inventory and determine whether they should be replaced with newer models.

Well now I've gone down the rabbit hole of learning the difference between photoelectric and ionizing smoke detectors (mission accomplished) and trying to figure out what kinds of smoke detectors we actually have (not sure, guessing it's a mix, wishing it would just be printed somewhere on the outside of the case because now I'll obsess about it until I actually climb up there and look inside a couple of them 🙄). There's a reasonably accessible one down the hall from our kitchen—someone who shall remain nameless has managed to set it off more than once while searing steaks in butter despite having a powerful range hood running on high—I'll go get the ladder and check it out.

There are no filters. It uses some special kind of witchcraft that GE calls "Active Smoke Filtration" via a "highly engineered catalyst system" to disappear the smoke. I have no idea what those terms actually mean, although I imagine it working in a manner analogous to a catalytic converter system for vehicle exhaust. What I do know is that the smoker's "Clear Smoke" function (which you use any time you want to open open the door during the cook) works absolutely flawlessly. My kitchen passions are baking and confectionery. I've always loved eating smoked food, but have never had the slightest interest in making the smoked food. Until now. Seriously, if someone had told me before we got this thing that I would develop an obsession with using a smoker, I would have laughed in their face. And now... here we are... and I'm like some kind of evangelist. Here's a review with lots of good pictures showing how much it can hold. And that YouTube playlist I linked to in an earlier reply to rotuts is worth looking at—lots of great detailed information in there, including a video showing how easy it is to clean. This Minnesotan is delighted with it. Now if we could just get some snow my winter life would be complete.

@rotuts yeah I totally get that. I'm pretty risk averse myself.

@rotuts it just occurred to me to share this... the guy who developed the GE Profile Indoor Smoker (it was initially a Kickstarter project) has a YouTube channel where he demonstrates all kinds of things about the smoker and does various cooks in it. He's really good about answering questions and may be able to shed more light on the cabinet clearance issue as well as other information. Here's a link to the whole playlist. Don't stop drooling yet. The sale is still going.... 😁

@rotuts I'm just starting to make a ganache for some truffles, but will definitely take some detail pictures of the smoker when I get it set up on the cart. And will also give some thought to the chicken question for those who want to know. (Sounds like you've made the decision not to pursue getting one after your convo with GE, but I assume there are others who may be interested.) I do not think this is a good candidate for operating without a reasonable generous amount of clearance around the top, back, and sides. It gets VERY hot. GE recommends 4 inches—personally, I'd be inclined to give it even more. We knew that the surfaces would be quite hot, and decided to go for it anyway because of our decision to keep it on a cart that can be moved around. In fact, the eating area in our kitchen is situated between a wall of windows and an unheated screen porch and it has occurred to me that the smoker would be great to use over near those windows on some of our more frigid Minnesota winter days because it generates so much heat.

@Jim D. Hmmmm. Good to know about your experience with it. Before I saw your latest comment, I was cruising around the forum searching for mentions of it and came across a bread thread where one of the bakers mentioned also using it on occasion for chocolate. @DianaB, I think it was you? I know you love it for bread (which I would also use it for), but do you still use yours for melting chocolate?