jackal10

Sourdough is different form ordinary yeat. Firstly the yeast ferments much more slowly. Ordinary yeasts are bread to rise in an hour or so. My sourdough takes about 6 hours at room temperature. The recipe above uses very mature spaonge, and the residual heat of the dough as it cools in the fridge. Recently I've been fermenting it for an additional 3-4 hours with even better results. Secondly it is acid. After a discussion with Dan Lepard, I begin to wonder if the long exposure to acid doesn't cause hydrolysis and conversion of some of the cellulose and starch to sugar over the long fermentation period, giving a continuous supply of ferementable sugars. Certainly the dough gets remarkably more liquid, and I don't think this is due to gluten breakdown.

No, no, no! There is no magic flour The type of flour has only a small amount to do with the final product, except in gross character - rye vs wheat, wholemeal vs white, soft vs hard. Technique is more important. What distingusihes most commercial bread is that it is often made using the "no-time" or chorleywoood process. Short high intensity mixing, often under air pressure, followed by expansion in a vacuum, very hard to duplicate at home. You can mix in a food processor - usually the bread has about 11 watt/hours per kg work done in the mixer, which for a 650w food processor means about a minute. The result is like a cream, but one that will stiffen up quickly if you fold it a couple of times.

My gut reaction is the answer is that depends on the baking powder. Single action (bicarbonate + acid) will react even at freezer temperatures, but double action (initiated by heat) should freeeze OK. You may need to double the amount though.

Chutney recipe yields about 14lbs. pickles about 3 pts

Added to Recipe Gullet

Its that time of year again. The cold nights are beginning to turn the tomato leaves black Just picked 8 lbs of green brandywine that will turn into chutney long and slow cooked with onions, home made wine vinegar, raisins, sugar, spiced with ginger and chili. The essence of this style of chutney is the mellowness from long cooking and maturing, and simplicity works best. Also picked 4lbs of green cherry tomatos (Sungold and Gardener's Delight) for sweet green pickles flavoured with vanilla. The smell of the simmering chutney is filling the house...

Sweet Green Tomato pickles 3 lb green cherry tomatoes 2 lb sugar 1 tsp vanilla essence OR cinnamon 1/2 pt vinegar Wash the tomatoes. You can peel them but I don't Bring the vinegar, suagr and 1/4pt water to the boil, add the tomaotes and reboil for 10 mins. Pour into a non-metal basin, cover and leave for a week. Strain off the liquid, reboil, add the tomatoes and boil for 5 mins. Pack into jars and seal hot. Leave for a month or two in a dark cupboard before eating. Keywords: Condiment ( RG1417 )

Green Tomato Chutney Adapted from Bulletin 21 "Home Preservation of Fruit and Vegetables", Her Majesty's Stationary Office, first published 1929 You can adapt this for any garden surplus: apples, marrow, plums etc. Liquidised and sieved you can use it as the basis for a brown (steak) sauce. The long slow cooking and maturing gives a mellow dark brown chutney. The basic ingredients should be cut up and cooked so that the result is not completely smooth, but nothing is directly recognisable. Raisins, small cubes of crytallised ginger etc may be added to give character. 8 lb Green tomatoes 2 lb Apples 1 lb Raisins 2-1/2 lb Onions 2 chillis (more if you like it hotter) 1 oz Ginger 1 oz Salt 2 lb Brown sugar 2 pt Vinegar Cut up the tomatoes, peel and chop the onions and apples. Chop the raisins if they are large. Chop up the giner and the chillis, and tie them in a piece of muslin Place everything in a large pan, bring to the boil and simmer slowly until the desired consistency - about 8 hours. Remove the bag of spices and bottle in preserving jars (canning jars) while hot. Leave for a month or more in a dark cupboard. Keywords: Condiment ( RG1416 )

If you refresh the starter a couple of times - throw out 2/3rds and then feed it with equal weight of water and flour, ferment out for 12 hours and repeat it should be happy, bubbly and voracious. If the tap water has a lot of chlorine in it you may want to use bottled water, Temperature is important, warm, around 30C.

Dense, poor rise, and a few large holes are symptoms of the bread being under-proved. The baguette demonstarted relies on a very active and well feremented starter. If its not working for you, try proving the baguettes at room temperature for 4-6 hours after shaping. The dough will be much softer, and you might then want to chill it before handling.

Help! I am comitted to supplying honey cake to my brother for Monday. Is the Moist and Majestic one by from a Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking by MArcy Goldman still the one to bake? ANy additions, substitions (coffee for whiskey, for example)?

The nicest buns in the world are from Fitzbillies http://www.fitzbillies.com/ What is more is that you can order them online and they will post them anywhere in the world (I have no connection with them except eating their buns)

A local butcher that makes sausages might sell you some as well if you ask nicely, and buy some meat...

Does anyone have a recipe for Leberkase? I can't seem to get that smoth texture right...

Sausage making supplies, for example http://www.alliedkenco.com/data/data_sheets/data_cures.htm This site also gives the formulations of the cures.

This site: http://home.pacbell.net/lpoli/index_files/...etical_list.htm goves three different Lop Chong formulations: plain, mushroom (dun goo lop chung) and char sui Hawiamn style

Hitachi "Magic Wand" vibrator/massager held to a baking sheet on a towel? Available for Amazon and lots of other places. If that doesn't work I'm sure you can find other uses for it...

That sounds expensive for vitC...should be able to get it from any pharmacy. Vit C doesn't make that much difference. My guess is that you might be over=proving if you are not getting the oven spring and wide open slashes..a hot base, such as a hot pizza stone also helps. Keep practicing, and you'll get there!

Oh. I thought the preferement you were using was a natural leaven... If they were overbaked they would be dry. ndebaked a little moist and gummy in the centre. Contrary to popular belief bread in a brick oven actually bakes in a rising heat, as the oven recovers heat lost when loading with cold dough from the heat reservoir in the poorly conducting brick. The overall heat loss is small compared to this process.

Beerenauslese is not Icewine style. Eiswine is icewine, pressed from frozen grapes. Beerenauslese is botytis affected (like Sauterne) but where the individual bunches of grapes have been selected. Trockenbeerenauslese (TBA) is where the individual berries are selected. Let me decode the label for you: Rheinhessen is the wine growing area to the west of the Rhein 2000er is the vintage. "Plagued by rain and rot, with outstanding results from a handful of growers. Variable quality; choose carefully" Bechtolsheimer is the area of the vineyard, near the village of Bechtolsheim Sonnenberg is the actual vineyard name where the grapes were grown Siegerebbe The grape variety. A cross between Gewurtztraminer and Madeline Angevine, it can achive high levels or ripeness and richness Beerenauslese: See above, but indicates sugar level in the must. Qualitatswine mit Pradikat (QMP). Top German quality designation for wine made in defined areas and, more importantly , from grapes not requiring any additional sugar to achieve the correct alcohol level. Amtliche Prüfungsnummer (AP Nr). The final two digits give the year in which the wine was approved (not the vintage), and the two digits before that give the running number of wines to be approved from the producer in question. Producer and region are coded in the remaining initial digits. The first digit is the testing station. Erzeugerabfullung Estate bottled 9.0% alcohol by volume; 375ml (half bottle) Weingut Ernst Bretz. The producer, Ernst Bretz is a family owned and run winery in Bechtholsheim founded in 1721, hnce the gold crest. I'd expect to pay between $10 and $15 for this retail. Sweet, botrytis and peachy fruit, but fairly simple. It would keep at least 20 years, drying a little.

The title of this thread "Diffusion of Innovation" is also the title of Everett Rogers's groundbreaking book, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...=books&n=507846 now in its fith edition and a standard text in economics. In it he describes how ideas spread, be they a new food, a new sort of corn elevator or even a new religion. I wonder if the reference was deliberate. He derives five criteria: ACCTO. A stands for relative advantage. There must be some reason to adopt the new food or cooking method - maybe it tastes better, or is easier or cheaper to prepare. C stands for Compatibility. The food must fit into existing dining and kitchen arrangements. For example a high end kitchen can easily accomodate water bathe for sous vide cooking, but surprisingly few bakeries have walk-in cold stores for cold dough or retardation. C stands for complexity. Cooks (and guests) must understand enough to make the new food, and diners must understand enough to appreciate it. T stands for testability. Restaurants (and guests) must be able to test out the new offerings without completly having to revamp their menus - amu offer it as a special initially. O stands for Observability. The new must be visible - hero chefs, TV chefs, famous restaurants, articles in the trade press (and eGullet). Of course with the Internet information travels faster, but innovation still takes about 10 years from lab to mass market product. Its not always the high end chegs that innovate which then trickles down: Innovation seems to be going the other way with leading edge chefs adopting techniques like gums and other texture modifiers, that have been around in the industrial food industry for ages. Technology hasn't changed that much in home cooking. Its still hard to get a domestic oven that will cook well, hot enough or cool enough. Information technology at one stage promised that goods could be made to order, instead of mass-produced. For example no longer as Henry Fors said "you can have any colour as long as its balck" Nowdays we can order a new car or a new computer in any number of colours or options. No so with packaged or mass food: the choices are increasingly limited. The biggest high-tech innovation in food? Probably the microwave, maybe the home breadmaker.

Is it possible that the loaves are underbaked? 265C is perhaps a little hot. That would give a slightly moist, tough crumb. I would expect a loaf that size to take 40 mins or so to bake. A softer flour, around 12% protein will give a softer crumb. Otherwise I'm puzzled. You could try omitting the yeast, and lengthening the fermentation and proof times instead (4 hours and 2 hours is what I use at 30C). The slightly sourer environemnt will also soften the gluten.

Exactly what is your formula and technique? And what do you feel is wrong with the final bread?

hmm... if you are using 100% wholegrain you have other issues. The bran particles puncture the gas cells, so you will never get as open as texture as with white flour. Also the apparent protein content will be higher - and the ash content will also be higher as much of the mineral content is inthe husk. How finely ground will also afect the character. However I think you main problem is that wholemeal flours adsorb a lot more water. You might want to increase the water content to about 70% hydration, but you can tell by when the dough feels right to you. Rye is another whole area, since the gluten in rye is different to wheat, and needs different treatment

Jon: What is your source for this statement? Forks are a comparatively recent invention - 17th century.