slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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Just FYI, bergerka and I have secured a ride to the shindig.
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Go to the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. Get a bunch of raw oysters and an oyster pan roast. These are consistently excellent. Stay away from everything else.
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Anyone who knowingly eats blood should be hit with a hammer.
I'm offended, or at least maybe I don't understand the comment.
I think he means that eating blood is so delicious that these people should be hit with a hammer so the rest of us might feast upon their deliciously flavored blood. Or maybe I'm misreading it myself...
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YMMV, but freezing starter never works for me. I wonder if there is some special technique?
Never tried it myself. Never felt the need to.
It is entirely possible that Carl's sourdough culture simply responded to his treatment by evolving a certain tolerance to freezing.
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Never freeze the starter. It will rest in the back of the fridge quite happily.
Freezing kills it.
Actually, some starters seem to be able to withstand freezing quite well. Carl Griffith of the widely-disseminated Carl's Starter regularly froze some starter and never had any trouble activating thawed starter. In addition, when he prepared dried starter to send out to people, he always made it in batches and kept the dried starter in the freezer until he ran out. Carl's starter culture was famously fast to activate. So... at least in this one case, we have an awful lot of people using a starter culture that was frozen at least once, and probably many times.
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Questions regarding the use of a baking stone in a home oven:
1) Is it better to put the stone on a rack in the lower part of the oven or to put it on the floor of the oven itself?
I'm waiting for the answer to that, too. I have my starter up and bubbling and am planning to take the next step.
Floor of the oven is better, so the oven burner fires more or less directly into the stone. You want the stone as hot as possible for maximum oven spring.
Another question: Regarding the starter itself (now that it is fully active, resting in the fridge): I know that I must refresh it before using it, but how often must it be refreshed WHILE stored in the fridge? And if I go away on an extended vacation is to be stored in the freezer? Or must it be passed on to someone who will feed it occasionally, like the cat?Yes, you should refresh the starter before you use it. One good way to do this is to make a sponge with some of the water and flour from your recipe and inoculate it with maybe a tablespoon of starter. That sponge is that you will use to make your bread. You can then scoop most of the starter out of your storage jar (I only leave behind the starter that sticks to the sides and bottom of the jar) and feed that. Once the jar of starter starts to show some beginning signs of activity, you can toss it back in the refrigerator.
As long as you feed your starter well by high dilution so it is nice and healthy, a refrigerated starter should keep perfectly fine in the fridge for at least a month. Just make sure it's really humming along -- showing peak fermentation activity within 8 hours with a 10% inoculum -- before you put it away for a long rest and feed it several generations when you return.
Oh yes, and this brings up another question. When you refresh a starter that has been refrigerated, do you just add some flour and water to the batch or do you do the 1 cup each flour, water, starter, disposing of the remaining starter?You should definitely get rid of any extra starter. As I mentioned earlier, if the percentage of old starter is too high, then the pH will be too low and the sourdough microorganisms (especially the lactobacilli) will be inhibited from growing. As a sourdough scientist relates here:
...in doughs that are continuously operated with a high inoculum (more than about 30%), you'll find more yeasts and fewer lactobacilli. Eventually, the lactobacilli flora may change, with more acid tolerant lactobacilli (e.g. L. pontis) prevailing.If you use one cup of starter and one cup each of flour and water, you are refreshing your starter with an inoculum that is greater than 30%. This means that you are inhibiting Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis from growing and, after a number of such generations you may kill off the L. sanfranciscensis completely and end up with a less desirable lactobacillus in your sourdough culture.
The best way to feed your starter for maximum growth is to give it right around five to ten times more food than there is starter. I have found that the best way to do this is to use nothing more than the tiny bit of starter sticking to the sides of the jar as the inoculum and feed it with, say, a half cup of flour and enough water to form a thick paste.
I've been reading about starters in the Silverton book which is sufficiently different from the information here as to have left me more, not less, confused.The best thing to do here is to find all the pages in the Silverton book having to do with starting or feeding a sourdough culture and tear them out. Silverton's book is notoriously terrible in that regard. Great recipes. Bad advice on starters.
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This is one reason, by the way, that many (most?) long-time sourdough bakers recommend starting with an established starter rather than starting one yourself.
I agree. here's one that I have been using for nearly ten years with much satisfaction. It is available for the cost of a self-addressed stamped envelope from the family of a man who literally spent the last years of his life dedicated to giving it away to anyone who asked.
A good part of the sourdough spirit resides in sharing. Carl exemplified that.
Yea. Carl lives on in the refrigerators of a great many sourdough bakers.
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However, still interested in feedback about "What would you pay?" What would you pay for a 32-oz (27 oz yield) presspot of (objectively speaking) kick-ass coffee?
Hmmm... the real barrier for me would be the size of the drink. Who wants to drink 27 ounces of coffee all in one go? Staryucks largest drink is, I think, only 20 ounces -- and that's too big for many people.
How do your prices stack up against the local Starbucks? Since I assume you offer better quality, if you can slightly undercut their prices I'd say you're offering a very good value. How much to they charge for a 20 oz drip coffee?
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I used organic red grapes as the yeast source, water and flour, and that's it. PM me if you want some in a couple of weeks when it's stronger.
Eventually this should turn into a good starter, but it won't have anything to do with the grapes as a "yeast source." Sourdough microorganisms don't live on grapes. Grape microorganisms live on grapes. Grape microorganisms can't survive in the environment of a continually refreshed sourdough starter.
As I said in this thread, which has some information and discussion relevant to this topic:
...sourdough microorganisms don't live on grapes. So all the grapes do is provide fermentable sugar and a bunch of resident grape microorganisms that eat the grape sugars and then say "my God! this isn't a grape... this is flour and water! I can't live here... I ws evolved to live on a grape for God's sake... It's getting dark... I... I... I... aaaaaaaaargh!... rosebud..." -
I need some help. I have been trying off and on to get a starter going for about 1year. I have no trouble getting the initial bubbles in a couple of days but when I start feeding it always just quits growing.
What is your feeding schedule? How much do you tend to feed relative to how much starter you keep?
This is one reason, by the way, that many (most?) long-time sourdough bakers recommend starting with an established starter rather than starting one yourself. When you start your own sourdough culture, you add another significant complication to what can already be a fairly tricky thing. If your bread doesn't rise right or if it's too sour/not sour enough, is it the fault of the starter, your technique, the ingredients? If you begin with an established sourdough culture with known performance characteristics, you eliminate one major source of variation.
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Why does the store bought sourdough taste a little "sour"?? Where as mine, while still great tasting, hardly has that sour taste. Is it the type of starter? or is there anything I can do to get a more sour bread?
A while back I made a "starter" by making a white bread dough with 1/8 teaspoon of yeast per 3 cups of flour. When it rose, I put most of it in a pan to bake into a loaf, and mixed the rest into a dough again. After about 2 weeks of repeating this procedure, it was starting to get pretty sour. After another month or two, it got so sour that it no longer leavened.
There are several things here:
1. The first loaf of bread you made wasn't sourdough at all, you only made a sponge with commercial yeast.
2. As you continued to keep and feed the starter, eventually the commercial yeast was replaced by soudrough microorganisms that out-competed the commercial yeast, which is not well-adapted to living in that environment. Only after several weeks did you have a sourdough starter, albeit a very young one. Even if you continued to add a little commercial yeast every time you fed the starter, it is likely that the acidity of the starter killed most of it off anyway once the sourdough microorganisms started to establish themselves.
3. There are several possible reasons it became too sour: 1) if you don't feed the starter often enough, it will tend to get sour and lost its leavening power; 2) if you were using the saved portion of dough to make most of your loaf of bread, you were going about it the wrong way -- the "old" dough is going to be sour because of all the acid that has been produced by the lactobacilli, and the leavening power will not be good because most of the microorganisms will have died off or gone inactive due to low pH and low food conditions. What you want to do is use the saved portion of dough (the "starter") as only a little bit of your final dough.
If you feed your starter appropriately and use a much smaller inoculum, you should get much better results.
This may be of some interest.
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You might ask 'why leaven bread naturally if not to achieve sourness?'. For me, it is the pleasure and inherent beauty of the slow process. The simplicity, if you like.
Well... I also think that naturally leavened bread has an infinitely more complex and interesting flavor. Once I got used to naturally leavened breads, breads leavened with commercial yeast began to taste insipid to me.
Good to see the extraordinary rec.food.sourdough mentioned here. It is a mighty resource, and one that must be required reading for every bakery student. Darrell Greenwood's sourdough faq's are, as he rightly describes, 'the definitive web pages on sourdough bread information'. If you haven't looked and been inspired, go to http://www.nyx.net/~dgreenw/sourdoughfaqs.htmlYea. It's a great source, although some of the personalities there can be a bit strong from time to time. One is well-advised to lurk for a while and get a feel for the place. References to "sourdough starter" made with commercial yeast and fed with sugar or recipes for "sourdough bread" leavened with commercial yeast or assertions that "I can call this yeasted bread 'sourdough' if I want to" are not likely to be met with a positive response.
As I said, I don't post there too often any more, but I am proud that some of my materials are preserved in Darrell's FAQ.
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Sour bread is not the goal of many regular sourdough bakers. Sourdough is an unfortunate misnomer in this regard.
I agree. I think too many new sourdough bakers are frustrated by trying for super-sour bread which is actually the most difficult thing to attain as strong gluten and plentiful acid are to a certain extent mutually exclusive. I have always thought that "naturally leavened" or "wild leaven" would be a better term than "sourdough." But, for better or worse, we're stuck with it.
When Dick Adams makes it onto this board, you know that sourdough has gone mainstream.Hee hee hee! I'm an old-timer on rec.food.sourdough. Don't post on Usenet much any more, but have learned many things in r.f.s over the years and butted heads with Dick a time or two. He has a unique, gruff posting style that rubs many people the wrong way, and I don't agree with him on some key points regarding sourdough microbiology, but he knows his sourdough. One could certainly do much worse than emulating Dick's methods.
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Foodman,
The main variable that will affect the total acid in your sourdough loaf is the buffering power of the dough. A buffer is a substance that maintains the same approximate pH despite the addition of a modest amount of an acid or base by releasing or absorbing H+ ions. Doughs with more buffering power are able to accumulate more acid before the pH drops to levels that inhibit the activity of the lactobacilli. Whole wheat flour has a higher mineral content than white flour and therefore has greater buffering capacity. This is why whole wheat sourdough bread usually tastes more sour than white wheat sourdough bread.
The main reason that storebought "sourdough" bread often tastes so sour is that it is not sourdough. Instead it is bread which is leavened with commercial yeast and flavored with various souring agents.
The main trade-off with sour flavor, as previously mentioned, is that acid degrades gluten. If you let your sourdough ferment a really long time and get really sour, you are likely to end up with a very sour brick because the gluten will be weak and the leavening power of the culture will be inhibited by the low pH. Note that even commercial "sourdough" breads are often quite dense. Boules and other free-formed loaves are generaly out of the question if you desire extra-sour bread. The long fermentation required for such flavor degrades the gluten to the point where the dough is not able to maintain the integrity of its shape without the extra help provided by a loaf pan.
There are several things you can do, however:
1. Use 100% bread flour. This is high in gluten to begin with, so you have a little more of a margin when it comes to gluten degradation. If you can, include plenty of duram wheat flour, which has a particularly strong kind of gluten that seems better able to resist acid degradation.
2. Use whole wheat flour to increase the buffering power of the dough.
3. Do an extra-long fermentation and use loaf pans. Treat these gently as you put them in the oven, as acid-degraded dough is extremely fragile.
4. Dan Wing recommends making a dough with around 20% of your total flour a few days beforehand and fermenting it a long time until it gets really, really sour. You then add the soured dough to the final dough along with a fairly high inoculum of very active starter-sponge. Form into loaves, rise as fast as possible and bake immediately. The soured sough provides a hefty dose of acid while the large inoculum of active starter sponge provides good leavening power. The trick is to get the bread leavened and baked before the acid has a chance to degrade the gluten too much.
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Tad,
The only thing that makes me doubt that is the case is that we're talking about something from 30+ years ago... back when it was worth your life to find extra virgin olive oil in the States and even fresh garlic was hard to find in many areas.
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This doesn't sound like Italian cooking... it sounds like old-fashioned Italian-American cooking, which can be great. What you describe is a fairly typical "Sunday Gravy."
There's no big secret to what you describe. Usually it starts with some onions and garlic softened in lots of oil. Some families would add green pepper to this. Some families would then brown off some beef or pork stew meat and Italian-style pork sausage. Some families might use granulated garlic and/or onion.
Once the vegetables are softened and the meat is browned, to all of this is added a copious quantity of tomato paste and enough water and/or red wine to give a relatively thin consistency. Again, some families would include some crushed tomato or whole peeled tomato along with the tomato paste. Sounds like this was not the case with the version you were eating.
Plenty of dry herbs are added to the sauce, with the specific herbs depending on the family. Dried oregano, thyme and basil seem to be the most common.
At this point, the sauce is simmered slowly on the stove for a long time until it becomes thicker and most of the sugars have caramelized. Periodic additions of water and/or red wine to maintain the desired consistency are routine, as the sauce simmers for up to 24 hours. The result is a brick red-brown sauce with the fat beginning to separate and float to the top. In my opinion, and it may be that I am most familiar with Mama Graziano's method (she's the mother of my 100% Sicilian-American best friend), this kind of sauce only attains the best flavor when the color begins to turn brownish instead of a uniform red. This seems to take 18 - 24 hours of low simmering. As times has progressed and there aren't as many Italian-American grandmothers with all day on their hands to tend a simmering sauce, however, the simmering times have shortened and 4-5 hours is considered a long time. These can be great sauces, but I miss the earthy quality of an all-day sauce. I'll usually stick to a traditional Italian sauce rather than Italian-American Sunday Gravy if I don't have all day (a crock pot is good for this, BTW).
Anyway... as dinnertime approaches, meatballs and other meat items such as braciole are prepared, browned (or not) and added to the sauce for a brief simmering. These are usually removed from the sauce and served separately along with the sausages and stew meat (which I find have given up most of their flavor to the sauce and tend to taste rather insipid).
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Yea. I have found that to be true as well. Plus, by the time the dough warms up, there is a serious concern about deflating the dough when you make the slashes.
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I forgot to add that retarding the dough overnight in the fridge makes it much stiffer and easier to handle, so it does not spread as much in the oven.
You turn out the dough and bake it while it is still cold, yes? This can make a big difference when working with a wet dough -- especially with respect to spreading. When baking a cold dough I have found it is is crucial to make sure you have a thick, hot baking stone (or, if you can, an oven like Jack's). With a big hot stone you can get amazing oven spring starting with cold dough.
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It's what you might call an integrated oil.
that's a really nice turn of phrase--may i borrow it to describe these delicious elixirs when i use them in class?
Why not? After all, I borowed the phrase from the side of my Fairway bottle.
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A question about measures: British cups and American cups are different, correct? Which kind of cups did you use for writing the recipes in this course?
While British Imperial liquid and dry gallons, pints, etc. differ from U.S. liquid and dry gallons, pints, etc. I think that a cup is the same. There is just a different number of cups to a gallon, depending on which system you are using.
Edit: Jack beat me to it.
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I get it, the olive oil actually being PRESSED by the lemons..............
I think they mean more of an infused type of oil,
of course I could be way off here.
Not quite an infused oil. It's what you might call an integrated oil. The lemons are crushed together with the olives. Later, when the oil and other liquids are separated (yes, olives do contain water) you have a product that contains both lemon oil and olive oil. Fairway just came out with their own house brand (their house brand evoos are exellent) of integrated lemon/olive oil that is cheaper than the versions by O and Da Vero and, to my taste, maybe a little better,
I love integrated lemon/olive oil on seafood, poultry, salads, in mayonnaise... just about anywhere you would like a little lemon flavor.
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Very nice course, Jack!
If I can butt in here with a few comments:
For the best compromise between increase in volume and ensuring the sourdough culture is the dominant species, the old starter should be about 1/3rd of the volume, that is add equal amonts by volume of flour, water and innoculant (the old starter), then culture for 4 hours or so.Even doing a 33% (one-third) inoculum strikes me as fairly high. I personally don't think that there is too much to fear with respect to preserving the sourdough culture as the dominant species. I often feed my sourdough culture using nothing more than the little bit of starter stuck to the inside of the jar as the inoculum. In the amount of starter I typically keep, this probably represents something closer to a 10% inoculum. Since the starter comes roaring back to full activity within 4-6 hours, it seems pretty clear to me that the original culture remains dominant, as it would take any interlopers much longer to produce that kind of activity. One gram of active sourdough starter comtains between 10,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 sourdough microorganisms, so even a tiny amount of starter has way more yeast and bacteria than an entire sack of flour.
The major limiting factor for sourdough microorganisms is low pH. To make a gross simplification: more acid = lower pH. Since sourdough microorganisms produce acid, the result is that a starter ready to be fed has a relatively low pH because the sourdough microorganisms have been doing their work. If the pH of the starter remains low, the sourdough microorganisms will be inhibited from growing. This is the opposite of what we want. We want the sourdough microorganisms to be happy and grow a lot when we feed the starter or make a sponge or dough. So there are two things we want to do: 1) give the sourdough microorganisms lots of food to eat; and 2) raise the pH so the sourdough microorganisms are not inhibited from growing. As it so hapens, adding new food also raises the pH of the starter. The more food we add, the higher the pH will be (within certain limitations).
Now, as it so happens, the optimum pH for lactobacilli growth is is 5.0 - 5.5. This is the initial pH of a sourdough with a 5 - 20% inoculum. This tells us, then, that the best way to feed our starters for optimum growth is with a 5% - 20% inoculum (source). In other words, the old starter should be around one one-twentieth to one-fifth of the new starter, dough or sponge. So... if you save two teaspoons of starter, mix it with one quarter cup of flour and mix in enough water to form a thick paste (this consistency gives you approximately equal weights of flour and water), you're just about right.
When I make bread tend to use a very small inoculum from my starter jar (maybe a tablspoon or two) and mix that into a sponge (batter consistency) or chef (dough consistency) that contains around one fifth of the flour I will eventually be using to make the finished bread. By the time the sponge/chef reaches full activation, the microorganisms are really humming along with activity because they were never inhibited by a low pH. Starting off with a really small amount of starter also makes it easy to tell how much flour and water you have in your recipe. Of course, prodecures differ from person to person and Jack's method obviously works great for him as the results amply demonstrate.
I made my first loaf last weekend with the starter you sent me. No problems with the starter but I think (am pretty sure now having seen your pictures) I had the dough too wet. It was so soft it was difficult to shape and the finished bread was a bit damp although it tasted great.One thing to keep in mind -- not that this is necessarily your issue -- is that acid breaks down gluten. So, the longer the sourdough ferments, the more the gluten will break down, the more the dough will lose its ability to hold together and the more the dough will seem "wet" or "loose."
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A lot of the serious coffee people say the vacuum system (I forget the technical term for it) is the best way of brewing coffee without getting into high-pressure methods. One of those will probably be my next acquisition.
They're called vacuum brewers or vac pots. Very cool way to brew.
I have seen ads for a number of electric moka makers recently. Could be an interesting alternative to an inherrently crappy drip machine or an expensive espresso machine.
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With all due respect to all you Turducken fans out there, the whole exercise seems so pointless, all the labor and high risk of failure to produce a gastronomic Frankenstein, a real redneck culinary abomination.
I don't know why you would say this.
#1. There is not a high risk of failure. The margin for error with a turducken is significantly lower than it is for regular roasted turkey.
#2. Whether or not it is a "redneck culinary abomination" strikes me as a matter of taste. I wouldn't say turducken was inherrently "Southern low-class." One could easily make a turducken where the stuffings were mushroom duxelles and a truffled forcemeat, and in fact I have done just that on occasion.
Now... I'm over the whole turducken thing, but I still think ballotines are an interesting idea. These days I cook my breasts and legs separately when making turkey, but it makes a lot of sense to cook any festive whole bird as a ballotine. Not only will it cook more evenly, but it is easier and more elegant to carve at the table.
Bourgeat
in Kitchen Consumer
Posted
First... I would suggest that the qualities of an individual piece of cookware are more important than the manufacturer. Bourgeat is a very good manufacturer, but I have found much of their stuff way over-priced (although that is changing). You might want to take a peek around my eGCI class on cookware to get some background information.
Bourgeat has two stainless steel lines, the Tradition Plus line and the Excellence line. They both appear to employ an aluminum disk-bottom design at around 6 mm and as such are directly comparable to similarly designed lines such as Mauviel's Pro-Inox, Paderno's Grand Gourmet, Sitram's Profisserie, Chaudier's 5000, etc. They should all perform similarly, with differences mostly being in design details and configuration.
This line is made with the copper/stainless bi-metal developed by Falk Culinair, as is all stainless-lined copper cookware. As a result, the performance characteristics are absolutely equal for a given thickness of copper (with 2.5 mm being preferred). There are minor differences between the three manufacturers commonly available in the US: Bourgeat has a polished interior and exterior, Mauviel has a polished exterior and a brushed interior, Falk Culinair has a brushed interior and exterior (Falk has smaller rivet heads too, but I think that is a superficial difference). As mentioned in my cookware article, and discussed in the accompanying Q&A, I think Falk's brushed exterior makes it much easier to maintain.
Historically, Bourgeat's copper cookware has tended to be significantly more expensive. This has evened out over the years due to market pressures as buyers have figured out that there is no reason to pay 70% more for the exact same cookware with a different name stamped on the side. When buying stainless lined heavy copper cookware, choosing a manufacturer is mostly an issue of price, with ease of maintenance being a secondary consideration. In my experience, Falk Culinair clearly wins on ease of maintenance, and is almost always priced competitively (especially with their periodic sales and special offers.
Hmmm... how to put this... All-Clad's Cop-R-Chef line confers none of the performance characteristics of copper. This cookware is constructed with an interior layer of stainless steel at ~0.4 mm, an internal layer of aluminum at ~2 mm and an exterior layer of copper at ~0.4 mm. This amount of copper is too thin to offer any thermal advantages, and the thermal properties of the cookware as a whole are determined entirely by the aluminum layer. The only difference between All-Clad's Stainless line and their Cop-R-Chef line is that one has an exterior of copper and one has an exterior of stainless steel. All-Clad does make a line with a thermal layer of copper between internal and external layers of stainless steel -- the Copper Core line -- but it is obscenely expensive.
The best-performing All-Clad lines are the MasterChef and LTD lines, which only have an internal lining. These two lines have an aluminum layer at ~ 4 mm. Twice as thick as the Stainless and Cop-R-Chef lines!
What's the point unless you plan to do induction cooking?
This is easy stuff to make, and lots of manufacturers produce black steel and carbon steel cookware. Get the thickest gauge you can find and choose a manufacturer by price. Mine is De Buyer, I think.
What is the point of choosing a manufacturer? Better to decide what performance characteristics you want, figure out what kind of design corresponds to those characteristics, identify which manufacturers produce cookware with the specifications you desire and then choose based on price.
The performance of any stainless lined heavy copper cookware is going to be quite different from All-Clad -- especially the All-Clad lines that employ a thinner aluminum layer (Stainless and Cop-R-Chef).
The cookware designs where I think you can detect the biggest difference when using heavy copper are serious saucemaking/reduction pans (saucepan, sauteuse evasee, curved sauteuse evasee in smaller sizes), fry pans and saute-type pans (especially the larger sauteuse evasee).
As I mentioned before, I don't think it makes much sense to identify a manufacturer and accumulate cookware based on that alone. Not for nothing, the manufacturers that tend to have a lot of customers who accumulate entire batteries exclusively from their brands (All-Clad, Bourgeat, Calphalon, Le Creuset) are also the ones that spend the most money on slick advertising to convince you that their stuff is somehow better and worth a lot more money than the otherwise similar competition. This is not to say that they don't make good stuff, but it is to say that it is usually significantly overpriced versus the competition. Bourgeat's copper cookware, for example, used to be 50% - 70% more than comparable cookware by Falk Culinair and Mauviel despite the fact that they all use exactly the same materials. Lately the prices have come down quite a bit due to market pressures and it is actually possible to find Bourgeat copper cookware that is priced competitively.