jeffG

Well I just wrote a reply and lost it. So this one is more direct and to the point. A great way to use spent vanilla beans: Vanilla sugar... You get the most flavor and yield and the least amount of time. When you have used beans, rinse them well, and place them on a small pan on top of the oven or in a warm place. Once dried(1-2 days in a restaurant kitchen) transfer to a container to stockpile. When you have amassed a small fortune of beans you can process them into sugar. The ratio depends on you. A couple of beans will perfume 1-4 cups of sugar nicely. In this case, The more the better. (20 beans /4 cups sugar) Place the beans and sugar in a food processor, process as fine as possible, then you will need to sieve this mixture a couple of times. First through a large holed China cap, then through a Tami. You may even pass again through a finer mesh sieve depending on your use. Hope this helps

I have to interject here since bagels are another inspiring topic. I have to agree, If you are using baking soda, your following a method for giving pretzels their shine and particular taste. I won't go so far to say it's wrong but typically the poaching liquid for bagels is with an invert sugar such as malt syrup/ powder, honey, even plain white sugar. I have a conflict of my own, I have yet to make a really good bagel at home. It's come down to the texture, which is usually too bready. Bagels are the only breadstuff I know of where dense, chewy almost to the point that you could wad the interior up like soft clay, a similiarity of the"Wonderbread" family. There are like 3 recipes at king Arthur for bagels, they all use A-P flour but I believe you really need a hi-gluten flour to give acheive the chewiness? Any good recipes?

I have joined this site because of my renewed interest in Canneles. Years ago, with my now wife we first had these canneles at Dean and Deluca in New york at the bakery counter, they were from Bouley bakery. This was truly love at first bite which prompted buying 6 copper molds and researching recipes on the net. I was pretty successful, if a bit inconsistent with the results. The taste and texture were always right on, but the shape would sometimes, often more time than not be altered by the accumlation of melted butter in the bottom creating a pocket and disfiguring these otherwise perfect creatures. The molds were a bit hard to clean too. At any rate I quit baking them as well as others here. Recently I decided to give it another shot, this time using a hint a fellow baker gave me about using beeswax to coat the molds as they did in France. Low and behold with the new search query: cannele/beeswax, I find all these other links talking the two up. Next mission, Though we now live in another country, I was able to find 'cera de abejas' at a craft shop nearby, They thought I was loco, because I wasn't making soap or candles. End of story, Glad I found this site of "fellow Cannellers" At one time you could talk about these as if you'd traveled to far off places and found gold, because nobody knew of them. Even better if you made them. Will post results good or bad. Until then, Ciao, jeff