Anna N

While the book does say you can get satisfactory results using cold cast-iron, and I know because I have done it, you will still get better results with it pre-heated. See 3-377. “We also tested placing a cold pot with proofed dough directly into a hot oven and found that it worked better than expected, though not as well as a fully preheated pot.”

I wonder if they have replaced the beef with beans. Doesn’t strike me that dried beans are much in evidence in Thai cuisine. But I am no expert. And I don’t like beans so unlikely to experiment.

Salad with watercress, grapes, blue cheese and hazelnuts. Dressed with hazelnut oil and merlot vinegar.

Fish? You? Must be something in the air.

Two recent dinners. This did not photograph well. Or perhaps I should be more forthright and say I did not take very good photograph of it. Reheated Nando chicken and Belgian endive gratin. The gratin was made using crumbs from the “gothic” bread over on the Modernist Bread topic. Tasted much better than it looks. Last night I reheated the leftover-leftover chicken and endive gratin and added in a sous vide lamb loin chop and a watercress salad. And for those who like to know such things the lamb chop was cooked at 55°C for one hour before being given a quick sear in a cast iron pan.

I don’t think so. If you use ordinary instant yeast and increase the amount by 25% you should be good. Both @Chris Hennes and I did this before we were able to source the isotolerant yeast.

Depends. If you need your oven for something else a countertop rotisserie is a godsend. I have one which I would love to promote on this thread but it is in my basement and at the moment out of my reach. It was given to me by my daughter who didn’t have room for it. If I had counter room for it it would get a lot more use than it does. Roasting a chicken usually involves also cleaning an oven. Rotisserie roasting in a countertop closed system means just a wipe down of the inside of a small appliance. Once I am over my current physical limitations I will share a photograph of mine with everyone.

Not every lunch is as successful as every other. @Kerry Beal flies off to San Francisco tomorrow and so is on a jet lag regimen today. For lunch her regimen pointed to a low calorie meal with some protein and a carb. Knowing what was on the menu at Mo’s diner and that they served an all-day breakfast we returned there. I do love their small carafes. The black is for coffee and the white is for tea. Kerry ordered two poached eggs with brown toast. That particular order automatically comes with their hash-browns so I suggested she get them and I would eat them. But they are terribly underseasoned so we both ended up just picking at the crispy bits. I was not starving and thought a sandwich and some coleslaw would meet my needs. It has been very long time since I ordered a toasted Western at a restaurant and it will be a very long time before I do it again! Sorry that we didn’t take photos before we began but you might be able to see that this was not a toasted Western sandwich but a toasted green pepper sandwich! I am sure they could not have jammed even one more dice of green pepper in there. YECH. I managed to eat almost half of the sandwich, all of the pickle slices and barely any of the coleslaw. The coleslaw was so lacking in flavour that it was beyond redemption. Oh well! Kerry arrived at my house with 11 gorgeous little lamb loin chops that she had found on sale and took me grocery shopping before lunch. I don’t think starvation is in my immediate future.

Yup. And I do know that. And there’s no real explanation about why it matters here. My assumption would be it has more to do with colour than with flavour and/or the pH. I understand that even the pH becomes irrelevant when there is only a small amount of cocoa being used relative to other ingredients.

Well Dutched or not it worked just fine. Mine was a gift and came without any labeling. It was part of a larger batch I believe.

American Pumpernickel was on my radar but when @Chris Hennes tackled it I moved it up on my list. Like Chris I was missing caramel colouring so I subbed a tablespoon of espresso powder dissolved in 30 g of water. I was also missing non-dutched cocoa powder so I subbed in black cocoa powder. That certainly made for a dramatic looking loaf. The recipe calls for 75 g of caramelized onions and I tried to do the math to reduce thr given recipe to give me a little over 75 g. Apparently my math failed me again or maybe my caramelizing ability but I definitely ended up with far more onions than I needed. But in which universe are extra caramelized onions a bad thing? I do think the amount of yeast called for is a bit over-the-top and would consider reducing it the next time. This dough ferments at an alarming rate. I love the taste and it reminds me of a Dempster’s bread (Pumpernickel rye) that I enjoy. One nitpick. I found the crust not to my liking. I would’ve preferred it to be very similar to the texture of the crumb. It’s a bit crispy which I don’t find quite right with this bread. Not sure why it looks wet but it is not.

I am only ever seen them labeled “baby bananas” but the ones I see don’t really resemble the ones you bought. Yours seem to be much more rotund shall we say. Baby bananas also show up in the supermarket with red skins. I am not a banana fan and the only time I have tasted these they seemed overly sweet.

I use mine.

Cenk’s House Cookies from The Artful Baker. These are lovely cookies but not in my opinion at all like Danish butter cookies that are packaged in the blue tin as he claims. This time I was not slavishly faithful to the recipe. I allowed my common sense room to breath. I did not attempt to roll out the dough between pieces of parchment paper. I used plastic wrap. I did not freeze the ready to bake cookies as he suggested. First of all I couldn’t possibly find room in my freezer to do so and secondly I couldn’t understand the need to do so. I am wondering if the fact that he lives in Turkey has anything to do with his propensity to put everything into the freezer. I am amused by the idea of having a house cookie as one might have a house wine, his argument being that you always have cookie dough in the freezer ready to bake should company arrive. Not such a bad idea but I don’t get a lot of company. I do like the idea of developing a cookie that is so uniquely one’s own that it could become one’s signature cookie.

Homemade chicken soup and homemade bread.

This might help. Might need to scroll down.

The latter.

Instant Pot rice pudding with lots and lots (too many) raisins. Aiming to re-create food memory. This didn’t do it.

It looks to me like someone used the dictation feature on an iPhone or the like.

Savoury oatmeal (onion, bacon, cheese) and an egg with a broken yolk.

Let us see if we can organize an intervention.

Perhaps just a different name. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that it is not the sourdough that I am accustomed to. And I will give you that the sourdough I am accustomed to would not meet too many other people’s idea of sourdough. I suspect what I was eating would more properly be called a country-style bread with a sturdy texture and a soft crust. I need to stop comparing apples and oranges I guess.

Indian “butter tikka” the saga of which is related here.

I believe this is called project creep! I thought I would make the fast version of butter chicken that @Alex posted just upthread. I had already bookmarked the recipe even before Alex posted, but as it happens, @Kerry Bealalso sent me a link. Though she was at work today, when the alligators were not attacking her gluteus maximus, we managed to chat about the recipe. She fired up my enthusiasm and I found some chicken thighs in the freezer. This I could whip up in no time at all. The chicken thighs were bone in and skin on. I thawed them using the Joule, skinned and deboned them and cut them into bite-size pieces. I am so accustomed to making chicken tikka masala that it never occurred to me to actually pay much attention to the recipe. So the chicken thighs got the tikka treatment. This means they were marinated in yogurt and spices. While they were marinating I rendered the fat from the chicken skin to make a cook’s treat and a small supply of chicken fat and quickly put together the bones and other bits and pieces to make a stock in the IPM (Instant Pot Mini). After the chicken has been marinating in the refrigerator for an hour I melted some ghee on a sheet pan, added the marinated chicken and turned it over so there was butter on both sides and stuck the pan under the broiler. Please note that I have not officially even started the “fast recipe” that precipitated this activity. As I began to gather ingredients for the actual recipe I realized that somewhere along the line I had mis-read the recipe. Chicken pieces were not meant to be cut up into bite-size pieces. Nor were they meant to be marinated and broiled. I had somehow, I think, conflated the uses for the extra sauce with the main recipe. No matter. It would just be a little more flavourful from the char on the chicken and the marinade. The actual recipe came together very quickly. I decided not to place the chicken in the instant pot at the beginning with the sauce but rather to cook the sauce for five minutes and then add the chicken given that it was almost cooked already. According to my records I started this fast recipe at 2:20 this afternoon it is now 5:30 almost and I have just finished. Why do things simply when you can complicate the hell out of them. But this is my bounty: “Butter Tikka” before blending and addition of the cream. For me I think there are four meals worth here. I will probably cave and share some with my son-in-law. Chicken skin, chicken stock, chicken fat.

This is the sourdough crumb. I’m just not sure how much I like this bread. The trouble with being dependent on commercial sourdough is that you develop a taste for it and even if you get something better it’s just not the same. It’s a bit like the kids preferring the blue box (Kraft Dinner) over homemade macaroni and cheese.