curls

@drbrenner please tell us a little bit more about your chocolate making plans. How much experience do you have? How many chocolates would you like to make in a day? What sort of chocolate will you be using (dark, milk, white)? Are you hand dipping, molding, enrobing? The more details you can provide the better chance that someone can provide some helpful suggestions. If your just starting out I don’t think you need any of the suggested options... just a bowl and a microwave or melted chocolate and a slab of marble. Please let us know more about what you do and what you want to do with chocolate.

liamsaunt and @Kim Shook my condolences to you and your families.

Interesting set of experiments for the Cacio e Pepe pizzas. Thanks for documenting this @Chris Hennes.

@rotuts keep your eye out for your commission check. I just ordered a used copy of Lettuce in Your Kitchen: Flavorful And Unexpected Main-Dish Salads And Dressings. Thanks for the recommendation!

Indeed that is what I would think too but so far CI is providing his sourdough content for free and without website registration. They probably just wanted more website clicks.

@weinoo thank you for linking to this older sourdough topic. When I thought about trying to make sourdough bread I found the eGullet sourdough bread course but I did not find the content you just linked too. Happily going down that rabbit hole of a topic! The Cooks Illustrated author, Andrew Janjigian, wrote about moving from an equal parts refreshments to another ratio (1 part starter:2 parts flour:2 parts water) once your starter was active on his quarantiny starter blog. Sadly the content on his blog and in his instagram posts was pulled (suspect he is dealing with some legal issues with CI). Very interesting to read about the eGullet recommended refreshment ratios from the 2009 topic that you linked to. In case anyone else would like to access go down a rabbit hole the eGullet courses (they can be difficult to find). Here are a few links:

Another week, another loaf of sourdough. This was last week's loaf... tweaked the previous recipe by adding some whole wheat flour and upped the hydration from 72% to 74%. Will not be making a loaf this week... have a bit of bread in the freezer that I want to start using up.

Interesting question. My guess is that it would just give your bread extra lift and may mellow out the sourdough flavor just a tad. Would be an interesting experiment... bake two loaves (one with sourdough & yeast / one with just sourdough). If you like, I can mail you some commercial yeast.

My standard fudgy brownie recipe -- using Valrhona unsweetened chocolate. Not as rich or dense as the Paul Young brownie recipe but still very rich and chocolatey.

Sourdough discard drop biscuits -- tasty and quick. Another great recipe from @wordloaf / Andrew Janjigian. https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/2388-quarantinystarter-recipe-sourdough-discard-drop-biscuits

Sourdough Discard Flapjacks recipe from Andrew Janjigian / @wordloaf on Instagram (recipe included on Cook's Illustrated website a few days after the Instagram post). Served with coffee and maple syrup. https://www.cooksillustrated.com/articles/2343-quarantinystarter-recipe-sourdough-discard-pancakes

As Jim and others have noted, peach can be a very subtle flavor. I tried a peach pdf once, it didn’t taste very peachy. I tend to use other fruits for pdf. Now I just eat peaches or if I have a lot of them, I make peach preserves. But definitely experiment, perhaps you will figure this out. It would be great to have a tasty peach pdf!

The shelf life of pdf made with sucrose is very good. @EsaK what sort of shelf life are you looking for on your pdf? Are you enrobing it in chocolate, coating it in sugar, or using it in some other way? I am very happy with the pdf’s I have made based on Notter’s recipes and have not used dextrose or sorbitol. I do add tartaric acid to bring out the fruit flavor & cut the sweetness.

Perhaps some experiments in cherry ice cream or make brandied cherries.

I use Valrhona and the ones that I use most of the time are Caraïbe, Alpaco, Jivara, and Ivoire. There are many very good chocolate makers, to name a few: Guittard, Felchin, Amedei, Cacao Barry, Callebaut. All of the chocolates I mentioned have couverture in disc form and are available from chocosphere.

@Kim Shook Wegmans usually has whitefish salad. Generally it is close to their selection of lox and nova. Probably not as good as anything you could get from Russ & Daughters but I have had it and it is tasty.

Uh oh! I hope you cancelled that reservation and just didn’t delete the reminder.

I would have been driving up to Buffalo.... @Kerry Beal you definitely made the right call to cancel this year's workshop. Hopefully we will be able to get together next year. Missing all of my chocolatier friends and the pre-COVID-19 world!

They share a number of their recipes in their monthly flyer.

Not yet.. but now I’ll get them the next time I am at Wegmans. Have you tried contacting Wegmans to see if they will share their recipe?

That’s only because I haven’t owned it as long as all of you early adopters!

Another week, another loaf of bread. Switched from an 80% hydration recipe to a 72% hydration recipe. So much easier for me to work at the lower hydration level... hoping that with practice, I can return to the 80% recipe and not have such a struggle shaping the dough. No matter what, homemade bread is tasty! Half of the loaf went to my mom.

I've been watching a few of the King Arthur Flour videos that they have been posting recently and one of them included this cake... It was tasty but tastes a lot more like a regular box mix chocolate cake than a rich dark chocolate cake. Great videos, I really enjoy watching Jeffrey Hamelman. He makes so many difficult things look so easy (watching a master at work). And yes, a corner is missing... I had to check if the cake would be fine on its own or if I wanted to make the frosting recipe... then I had to check if the frosting worked well with the cake. When I made the frosting, I added some chocolate chunks when mixing & melting. link to the video links to the recipes used - https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/king-arthurs-original-cake-pan-cake-recipe - https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/fudge-frosting-recipe

Banana walnut bread baked in the CSO . Preheats so quickly & doesn't heat up the kitchen.

Couldn't find a topic devoted to sourdough discard cooking, so thought I would start one and see how much interest it would generate. Moderators, if there is a topic, please merge. Recently I have begun making sourdough bread and am caring for a sourdough starter. Since there is currently some difficulty finding flour (due to COVID-19 related supply chain issues, etc.) I don't want to throw out any of my sourdough starter. I am also following guidance from King Arthur Flour and Cooks Illustrated for working with a small sourdough starter (10 g. flour | 10 g. water | 10 g. sourdough starter) and using recipes that use smaller amounts of sourdough starter or only building my starter up if called for by a recipe. I have made the following recipes and would make them again: - King Arthur Flour sourdough discard crumpets. https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/sourdough-crumpets-recipe - King Arthur Flour sourdough discard waffles. I used a mix of yogurt & milk instead of buttermilk but otherwise made the recipe as written. https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/classic-sourdough-waffles-or-pancakes-recipe What are you doing with your sourdough discard?