BadRabbit

My climate is so humid, even Morton's clumps. This may be why they don't sell DC where I am. In Alabama, the humidity is over 90% for most of the year.

I use it to make potato and leek soup and it gets raves.

Diamond Crystal is too hard to find here so I use Morton's. Now even if I could find DC I doubt I would change.

My dough often climbs onto the hook and stays there with little movement (relative to its position on the hook). Eventually it is just riding around in a circle like a kid on a ride. It is not really being worked at all at that point unless the centrifugal force is somehow working the dough even though it is stable on the hook.

That's an interesting point. I wonder how many people think critically about these ratings? Shanghai uses a system of smiley faces - A smile if they're compliant, a straight line face if they're average, and an angry face if they're not. The only places I've ever seen with smileys are Starbucks and McD's, which makes me right away suspect the system. I think this is a problem even with numbered grades. Most people don't take the time to look and see what the infractions are. I would rather eat at a place with a bunch of small infractions and lower grade than at one with 1-2 big infractions that actually affect food safety (e.g. cooler or steam table temperatures). Who really cares if a restaurant left the dumpster door open or didn't have a coat hook on the inside of a bathroom stall door when you could be worried about dangerous pathogens growing in food. Edit: Clarified language

Is the pigtail available for all models? I have a tilt head artisan. I've read that using a spiral dough hook on an older machine for which it was not intended will damage the motor of said machine. My machine is not old (maybe 2 years). I would check the Kitchenaid website but for some reason it doesn't want to load on my browser.

I've done an experiment where I've left an average grocery store egg on top of my frige for a month and then cooked and ate it. It didn't have a nice rich yolk but other than that it seemed unharmed. I realize that this is anecdotal and too small a sample size to mean anything but just thought I'd mention it.

My mother grew up on a farm and they never refrigerated eggs. My Grandmother kept them in a basket hanging over the sink. I keep mine in the frige but I often leave them on the counter for most of a Saturday without a thought (if I'm doing a marathon baking session). Fruit and bread are different. I don't keep my fruit in the frige but will stick some in there if I know I'm going to eat it that day. I just like my fruit cold; it's not about preservation or paranoia. Some breads we just don't go through that quickly so I keep them in the frige so that they last longer (e.g. English Muffins). I eat one about every other morning and they won't keep on the counter over a nearly 2 week period.

Is the pigtail available for all models? I have a tilt head artisan.

Mine doesn't seem to do much at any speed with the doughs I've had issues with. Reinhart's Napoletana pizza dough is the one I most recently had problems with. It's relatively high hydration and just seemed to climb up the hook. I tried everywhere from mix on up to 6 and nothing worked. I ended up kneading by hand to get my windowpane.

I agree here too sometimes a bit of white wine vinegar is all a dish needs to overcome the saltiness.

I'm southern and have Yankee inlaws so I feel your pain here, Chris. My wife's mother hardly salts anything (and thus produces very bland food)and she thinks everything I produce is oversalted. I've lately focused more on getting everything salted a little bit from the start and then adjusting a little at the end. For example, I brine nearly everything except beef but I try not to get the protein quite fully salted with the brine. All veggies are very lightly salted as well. I also leave out salt in any liquids or sauces to begin with so that reducing will not render them overly salty. I adjust them in my final tastings. I find that the above gives a more balanced salting of the dish and prevents me from oversalting when making adjustments at the end. I attribute this to the fact that I am not going to take a test bite with a profoundly undersalted component that is not representative of the overall saltiness of the dish. P.S. This is a very difficult subject to write about without sounding repetitive.

Are there any tricks to make a Kitchenaid dough hook more effective? On some doughs it just seems to spin the dough around without doing much.

This is a problem other places as well. I spent most of my restaurant career in Alabama and there were all kinds of rules about where the dumpster could be in relation to the building. For most restaurants, this isn't really a choice. The dumpster has to be on their property and in a location where the collector can get to it which was often not in accordance with codes. The points more often lost in kitchens where I worked were due to rules that everyone ignores like no drinks on the line. Lines are by their very nature hot places and the cooks need to stay hydrated. To follow the letter of the law, they would have to completely leave the kichen every time they wanted a drink because drinks were not even allowed in inactive storage or prep areas. It's an unreasonable thing to expect cooks to do in the midst of a Friday night rush so most everybody just decides to take the 2 pt hit. In one of my restaurants, the only places a cook could have a drink and still be compliant was out the back door or in the dining room.

I tried the Napoletana dough the other night and it was spectacular but I thought it was pretty hard to deal with. Even flouring my hands very well didn't keep it from sticking to my hands. I also had a good bit of trouble keeping it from sticking to the peel. Which of the doughs are the easiest to deal with? I would like to try something more forgiving until I get better at the shaping technique.

Actually, you can supposedly eat DDT by the spoonful with no harmful effects (though I am in no way suggesting that one should).

Heston's already done it so it certainly can be done. http://www.eatmedaily.com/2009/03/the-trojan-hog-on-hestons-roman-feast-video/

They definitely work. My wife's family owns part of an island off the coast of Maine (no running water and the community well is a considerable distance away from the house) and we use a Brita to filter the rain water from the rain barrel (after we boil it for consumption). As to how much they will pull our clorine and flouride I am not sure but they turn smelly rain water into something akin to bottled water.

It's obvious that Mr. Wolke wasn't much of a scientist as a kid or he's have known about the electrical properties of potatoes. I mean, who didn't have the famous potato clock?

One thing I think would really improve the experience over on EYB is if the users would take some time to make comments/notes and rate recipes. One of the best things about the online recipes sites is that you get to learn from others mistakes and don't take on recipes that have been universally judged as failure. Has anybody else been using this feature on EYB?

My favorite of all times. Even Gelato is better with bacon.

I thought somebody(McGee?)had disproved this one.

Too late to edit the last post but: Jane addressed the ingredients issues very quickly and is fixing the problem. Her constumer service has been top notch.

I feel like this has probably been covered on the board before but after multiple searches, I couldn't find it. I was using Corriher's "Cookwise" the other day for her Brioche recipe and ran across what I always thought was the best part of the book. In some of her sections, she describes how to fix common issues (e.g. flat cookies). I thought it might be helpful to have all of those type tips in one thread. The one I think is was most helpful to me when I was first learning to cook was: Too Salty = add acid What other fixes are there that will solve common problems?

I ended up posting on their forum and received a reply from Jane asking me to use the report an error button. The issue is that the report an error key doesn't appear to link directly to the page you are on which means you have to type out an exact description of the book, recipe, nature of the problem, etc... for every issue you have. If it automatically logged the page you were on you could just type the nature of the issue. After receiving her reply, I realized that the problem is that recipes that contain component recipes don't list the ingredients for everything you need. Since this practice is so prevalent, I have found very little use for the ingredients lists. I still have to go drag out and flip through the cookbook to all the component recipes to come up with a comprehensive ingredient list. Looking through my cookbooks that I have entered, I can tell you that at least half of Frank Stitt's recipe's have component recipes in the ingredient list and Hasting's book has more than that. It's just frustrating because this website is exactly what I've been looking for. It would be great to be able to access my ingredients list I needed at work and pick up everything on the way home. Then I would just have to break out the book to see proportions.