JoNorvelleWalker

The knife may or may not be dull by now but the main problem is it isn't long enough to address a kg boule.

Oh, yes, but not that I belong to. However I'm about to go grocery and wine shopping while I can before the temperatures drop and that should warm me up. Plus tonight is bread baking! Seriously I hope they solve the problem. I am worried about my poor poolish.

Another thread...still no hot water, and now it seems no heat. My heat and hot water come from a large boiler that supplies three buildings. My guess is that with this weather something froze. I probably won't be running the dishwasher anytime soon.

No hot water here, so leftovers. Not particularly exciting but enough to stave off starvation and sobriety. During dinner I read about cooking in Georgian homes that do not have running water. It's now past 4:30 and I am contemplating the prospect of bed without a shower.

I had come to realize my trusty Wusthof 8 inch was no longer cutting it. OK for a baguette perhaps. Unfortunately these serrated knifes with pointed tips are no longer in the Wusthof catalog so purchase of a longer one was not a possibility. They used to be available in several sizes. The closest I found was the Wusthof 10 inch bread knife: http://www.wusthof.com/10-bread-knife But this looked a little flimsy in comparison and there was not much height to the blade with no room for knuckles. And so I went shopping for another brand of bread knife. Many of my knives are Chicago Cutlery and they offer several such. However I have ruled out a "bread knife" with a rounded tip as I believe these are more suited to slicing protein than bread. Besides I already have a Wusthof 16 inch with a rounded tip. Worse I have read the quality of Chicago Cutlery has deteriorated over the years. Last month I bought a Cuisinart electric bread knife as recommended by Modernist Bread. Unfortunately the Cuisinart does not cut through bread. Maybe others have had a better experience? Fat Guy and others have argued for a chef knife but in my hands a chef knife, not even my heavy 10 inch one, can intimidate a hunk of bread. I checked out the usual suspects and I even found a bread saw. But what I went with was a Henckels 10 inch that was taller and half again as heavy as the Wusthof. Though I'm guessing the Wusthof would have had a little harder steel. Are there any new recommendations?

WS 20% off one item and free shipping with code UPICK. I have got to stop now.

And I just had word that EYB had indexed it.

The Spice House is offering free shipping on orders over $25 today only, 12/27/2017, with code fruitcake17. So I spent several times that much.

I do not celebrate holidays but tonight's dinner was chicken with nut sauce from Carla Capalbo's Tasting Georgia (p350), said to be a speciality of Restaurant Diaroni. Here is the nut sauce just after incorporating the wine vinegar and before I gave up and transferred everything to the Waring and settled down to a mai tai and a Celebrex. Just joking about the Celebrex but may reconsider before bed. This pounding in a mortar business is overrated. I may have overdone it with the Waring as the walnut sauce ended up the consistency of mayonnaise. The chicken is rubbed with olive oil and baked with paprika, savory, and black pepper. In addition to walnuts the sauce is garlic, coriander, marigold, fenugreek, and red pepper. For anyone following along at home this is a far larger platter than I usually show. They say Georgian meals last for hours which I can well believe. I had a pomegranate I intended to serve but I gave up and went with cranberry instead. Edit: oh, and I forgot the bread. I notice some of the pictures of Georgian meals show a couple of flat breads on the table and three or more raised breads.

Thank you. This was one mammoth hexapartite russet prepared by the most recent Kenji method -- except that I left on the skin. The pieces were dropped in boiling, salted water, to which 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda had been added. After 10 minutes the pieces were drained and returned to the pot to dry (and allow the starch to retrograde). When the pieces had cooled a bit I tossed them in duck fat and steam baked on the middle rack position 400 deg F. in the CSO for 20 minutes. Following the first 20 minutes I turned the pieces, sprinkling them with hand crushed rosemary, and continued cooking on steam bake for another 25 minutes or so until my copper Béarnaise pot was washed and dried. Kenji specifies sauteeing garlic and rosemary in the fat. The flavored fat is then strained before tossing with the potato pieces, and the herb mixture reserved for a final garnish. I omitted this step last night.

Ribeye from the Zojirushi grill... Broccolini, rosemary roast potatoes, Béarnaise. No bread. Bottle of French Malbec. I licked the platter clean...or at least the bowl of Béarnaise.

Agresto seems to contain honey and other stuff. It's used in Bugialli's recipes. Perhaps another possibility for @Pan

How about a retail source of agresto?

Salt -- how do we feel about the amounts of salt in French lean recipes? MB calls for 2.02% (to be clear, that's baker's percentage). Hamelman specifies 2%. Calvel reports at the time of his writing the usual amount of salt added was 2.2% "and sometimes even higher." Though Calvel argues for a return to 1.8%. Through a tragic accident when I once forgot the salt, I know I could never live in Tuscany. But 2% or more tastes to me like too much salt. My last loaves were as close as I could measure to 2.02%. In contrast when I brought a kg boule to our library party the salt was only about 1%. I even received an unsolicited compliment that someone liked my bread because it was not too salty.

By that do you mean the best bread or the best bread for the least effort? How would you say Pain Rustique compares to the French lean bread result?

Here is my new marble mortar, 24 hours from Carrara... Nominal size 20 cm, inside diameter 14.3 cm, capacity 1 liter, shipping charge 77 Euro. Olive wood pestle pictured. In addition I purchased a marble one. For comparison shown with my trusty little 30 year old model, inside diameter 8.8 cm. And if it counts as a mortar I also have a suribachi somewhere.

While I was worried about the scale, I checked it with a weight. The scale seems OK and the weight and volume measures of salt seem to match, but let's not burden the butter topic. I'll leave it that I prefer my butter unsalted.

I'm thinking about Making Dough by Russell van Kraayenburg. Currently $2.99. I am a US Prime member and all of that.

Modernist Bread does not fit on my iPad either.

Is that a wooden bench in the shower?

Don't expect me to like kale...beer maybe, yes.

Lovely @liuzhou -- wish I could be eating this right now!

Wow. I find the MB French lean bread recipe as written a bit too salty for my taste even by itself.* Thirteen grams per kg. And I happily ingest salt out of hand, as I'm doing at the moment. With their French lean bread I go for unsalted butter and finishing salt as needed. *That or my scale is broken.

While it's yet 2017... As I'd mentioned I've been much enjoying* Tasting Georgia, which led me look for other Georgian cookbooks. Tonight I ordered Supra -- A feast of Georgian cooking by Tiko Tuskadze, though sadly it shan't arrive till after the new year. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1911216163/ref=od_aui_detailpages00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 *enjoying, not yet cooking from, though I am assembling ingredients and tools.

The iPad works better in the kitchen. https://vimeo.com/37942209