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Dense bread and additional ingredients
your yeast may have been old or dead. proof some in some warm (not hot) water to see if it "blooms."
Paper or Canvas? (Adios, Plastic)
i have this bag! but i use it for school - books and such.
Meat Substitutes-Which do you prefer?
i really like making "fake meat" (which, thankfully, doesn't taste anything like meat) with a mixture of wheat gluten and beans/chickpeas. you can control the texture by how long you knead it and develop the gluten strands. mix in some nutritional yeast, bread crumbs, and season it well, and it's really tasty either baked in the oven or pan-fried.
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Recent Comments | Response to Comments
Anyone Tried Cornell Chicken?
i grew up eating this stuff. it's best served with salt potatoes.
Dense bread and additional ingredients
your yeast may have been old or dead. proof some in some warm (not hot) water to see if it "blooms."
Paper or Canvas? (Adios, Plastic)
i have this bag! but i use it for school - books and such.
Meat Substitutes-Which do you prefer?
i really like making "fake meat" (which, thankfully, doesn't taste anything like meat) with a mixture of wheat gluten and beans/chickpeas. you can control the texture by how long you knead it and develop the gluten strands. mix in some nutritional yeast, bread crumbs, and season it well, and it's really tasty either baked in the oven or pan-fried.
Going to Rochester next week; where should I eat?
if you want to catch an independent movie, go to "the little" on east ave. it's one of the best independent theaters i've ever been to, and it's been around since the 1920s. the cafe at the theater is interesting, too, and they serve wine and beer. just down the street is spot coffee - housed in an old car showroom, it's a must-see if you're a coffee lover. enjoy the terrible, depressing weather, too! ;-)
My childhood holiday treat favorites were ____
every year at school, they handed out those white, tree-shaped, little debbie brand snack cakes (yellow cake with white filling). they were so disgustingly sweet, but i still find myself craving them at this time of year.
as for the homemade.....the italian cookie plate from our next door neighbors. my favorite was the soft, peanutty cookie with a dollop of frosting and a peanut m & m on top.
Grocery Ninja: Sour Plum 'Space Dust' Powder
i miss li hing powder. when we were in hawaii, we'd put it on everything - especially fresh pineapple. i also like the gummy bears and sour patch kids coated in it.
Which fruit do you avoid?
coffeefrap - cherimoya is fantastic!!! it has a custard like texture, and it's lightly sweet. the only time i ever had one was at a farmer's market in los angeles, so it was perfectly ripe.
Egg-free recipes for baked treats?
and...i can't do html. it's theppk.com!
Egg-free recipes for baked treats?
soy yogurt and pureed silken tofu are also great egg replacers. check out link for some great egg-free recipes!
Are Bakeries Making a Comeback?
here in greensboro, NC, we have a little bakery buried down in the back of an alley, called "Simple Kneads." they make mostly bread, but i've had their fabulous cookies and my husband really enjoys their pastries. north elm street, next to the chakras spa - check it out.
Where do chef's eat in Chapel Hill, NC?
i really like the spotted dog in carrboro. lots of fun, good food, and reasonably priced.
Why the hostility toward restricted diets?
I'm a vegan (for about 6 years now), and I've experienced hostility from others toward my diet from time to time. I've found that if I don't make a big deal about my food choices, people will back off. I'm not "militant," but I will share a great vegan recipe. What I put into my body, just like any book I read, movie I watch, or exercise I do, is ultimately up to me!
A Map of Regional Foods
no one ever remembers buffalo unless snow or super bowl losses are involved. we're a tough bunch. ;-)
What's Your Go-To Weekday Breakfast?
it's always the same. 1 cup of puffed wheat, 1/4 cup of kashi golean, and 1/2 cup of honeycomb. drizzle with sugar-free breakfast syrup and top with 1/2 cup of unsweetened soymilk. yummmmm.
soup season....
yummm....can't wait to make clotilde's vanilla butternut squash soup. i love it! link to recipe
Of all Doughnuts...May favorite is....
unglazed kruller
Perfect PB&J? What's your preference?
snyders pretzel snaps with skippy natural (smooth) and homemade blueberry preserves, open-faced. then you get to eat like 25 mini sandwiches!
Help, I am dating a vegetarian!
i'd give the recipe index at http://blog.fatfreevegan.com a try. although the recipes seem a little "healthy," she's very honest about when dishes taste great and when they'd benefit from some added fats. it also has beautiful photography :-)
"Alone in The Kitchen....
i'm with you, kiana - i'll always pick sweet over savory. if my husband's not around, there's a strong possibility i'll have pretzels dipped in peanut butter and sprinkled with chocolate chips for dinner. actually, it's not just a strong possibility, it's a given!
Desserts I don't like...
wow, after reading everyone else's hated desserts, i think i can honestly say there are none that i dislike. i love sugar!
Whole Foods Exec Makes Fake Posts on Yahoo Boards
i feel like he tried to write "deborah" backwards, and sadly, failed.
Question of the Day: How often do you stock up?
almost every day, usually in the middle of the night! i have trouble sleeping, so i wander the aisles for fun :-)
Question of the Day: What are your favorite "simple" foods?
raw, unroasted almonds and good raisins.
Everyone's got a regional specialty..
don't forget ny bagels!
Perfect PB&J? What's your preference?
Old skool, yo. I can't imagine why people would want to gourmetify something so classic and delicious as-is!
White or Sara Lee soft wheat bread
Creamy PB, any brand
Grape/Seedless raspberry JELLY (jam no... too thick.)
Cut diagonal with a tall cold glass of chocolate milk.
Help, I am dating a vegetarian!
Does he drink too much? If not I wouldn't worry.
Going to Rochester next week; where should I eat?
One place - Food at Fisher's Station. Spectacular! I almost hesitate to tell people about this place. I don't want more people there on a Saturday morning when I may have to wait to get seated. I HAVE NEVER LEFT THE LINE BECAUSE THE WAIT WOULD BE TOO LONG, HOWEVER. The food is worth almost any wait. Rick and his wife own the place. Rick is a gourmet chef who decided he didn't want the gourmet chef hours so he opened his own place in Fishers (near Eastview Mall, Victor). Everything there is fresh, cooked to order and ...perfect. They have a menu, but skip it look at the Specials Board and order off that. The wait staff is not chatty, as they are busy...but you will not be there to chat, you will be there to thoroughly enjoy yourself.
Serious Eats's Chocolate Faves for Valentine's Day
There are MANY MANY mail order available gourmet sweets to chose from on the new website http://www.foodsoftheweb.com which is basically a directory of small vendors who offer mail order. The site is well-organized and not cluttered.....uses photos.
Question of the Day: Any vegetarians out there? Why'd you go meatless?
i read way too much about the meat industry, was the first thing. if you start to think about what it is you're eating, and how it was raised, and how it got to your plate... yuck. i love reading the pioneer woman's blog, but i can't think too much about how her family earns their living.
then i decided that if i couldn't kill it myself i shouldn't eat it either. it just started to feel wrong. and why should i share my home with an animal, encourage it to sleep in my bed with me, and yet perpetrate such harm and suffering on its brethren by buying commercially raised meat and dairy?
even the politically correct meat sellers at the greenmarket who give their livestock better lives than that in the end have to kill their animals.
and the kosher meat industry! don't get me started. such hypocrisy! they don't treat their animals well, which is one of the whole points of being kosher, and they treat their workers worse.
don't get me wrong, i LOVE meat. i can eat a whole ribeye steak in one sitting and lay waste to a sandwich at carnegie deli all by myself, no problem. it's sad for me to think about everything i'm turning my back on... brisket, chicken matzo ball soup, chopped liver, hangar steak, banh mi, pastrami on rye, boeuf bourgignon, duck gizzards... but i'll survive.
geez, i think i gave the term "serious eater" a whole new twist today!
Question of the Day: Any vegetarians out there? Why'd you go meatless?
@joejoe, in the US, very little of the corn grown is fed to humans directly, since that's usually not sweet corn. Much of it goes for non-food items like biofuel, and a lot goes for HCFS.
And yes, a portion goes for animal feed. But, in a best-case scenario, the cow wouldn't be eating corn, it would be grazing on grass, which is what it evolved to eat. Eating corn is pretty unnatural for a cow.
Cattle can graze where farming is difficult, so it's not an either/or thing. And in fact, at the beginning of their lives, those corn-fed cows are grazing on grass. They're sent to feedlots later.
So if the cow isn't fed any corn, that acre of land could grow crops that humans could eat while the cow grazed elsewhere, and you could have your steak and your potato without any conflict.
Question of the Day: Any vegetarians out there? Why'd you go meatless?
my question is based on logic not the vegan carniviore thing.....
here goes
if an acre of land produces x amount of corn
how many humans will it feed vs. how much a cow eats of it and how many people will the cow feed
Anyone Tried Cornell Chicken?
we made it tonight (marinated since yesterday) and it was fantastic...the best chicken recipe I've had. Why hasn't the word spread on such a great dish!
Anyone Tried Cornell Chicken?
One of my favorites! A friend of mine who owns a marina on Lake Erie introduced me to this dish. My understanding is that the hotel school at Cornell gave the class an assignment: come up with a non-tomato based BBQ sauce. This was the result. Please try it....it rocks!
Dense bread and additional ingredients
What flour did you use? How much liquid did you add? What kind of yeast and how much yeast?
Dense bread and additional ingredients
I doubt it was the yeast being completely dead -- if it was, it wouldn't have risen at all.
It might have been that you didn't knead it enough. Kneading activates the gluten, which is what makes the dough stretchy and able to hold all the gas bubbles that the yeast creates. If the gluten is too weak, the bubbles pop and you've got a dense bread. When the dough is kneaded properly, it will be smooth and shiny and very elastic. You should be able to take a small piece of dough and stretch it so thin that you can see through it. This is called the windowpane test. If you look it up online, you might find photos.
It also may be that you didn't let it rise enough before it went into the oven. And/or you didn't let it rise enough the first time. If you're going by the clock when following directions, the results aren't going to be as good as if you go by the results. Let the dough have enough time to rise properly, even if the recipe says it should be done in less time.
Make sure you're not adding garlic salt and onion salt instead of the powders. You need a little salt in the bread since it regulates the yeast, but too much salt can slow it down more than you want. Different herbs and spices can affect the way the dough behaves, but if you're just adding a little bit, it shouldn't make a huge difference in the final product.
Your dough may not have been wet enough. The problem usually is the way people measure flour. If you can find recipes that use weight in addition to cup measurements, you'll get a better idea of how much flour you really need. Also, you might be adding too much extra flour as you knead, if you're doing it by hand. I use about 2 1/2 cups of flour per cup of water when I make bread, but it can be as little as 2 cups, depending on what kind of flour it is and what kind of bread I'm making. I might go as high as 3 cups of flour, but that's pretty unusual.
The drier the dough is, the longer it takes to rise, too.
Last, if you're looking for a soft, fluffy, pillowy texture, add some mashed potato or some instant potato flakes to the dough. Not a lot. I usually use the potato flakes because they're handy, and I add maybe a quarter cup to a loaf of bread (I make one loaf at a time, where most recipes are for 2 loaves).
Dense bread and additional ingredients
Same flour? Not rye (which is always sticky and dense to work with)? ow did the rise go? Slow? Same as usual?
Desserts I don't like...
Icing with way too much sugar. I'm usually the one scraping icing off of cake at parties.
Banana bread or cooked bananas (plantains don't count). I love bananas though.
Most corporate baked goods; you can taste the lack of love and care in them, and I can't remember ever reaching for carrageenan or sodium benzoate when baking.
Sugar-free anything. Sugar substitutes taste nasty.
Most fruitcakes. I'm bored with them.
Adult-sized slices of chocolate cake. I usually find it too rich to eat in large quantities. I love chocolate, I just prefer it in small doses.
Most donuts, except for cake donuts.
Crunchy cookies. Just not a fan of the texture.
Desserts that make me go meh:
Red velvet cake? I mean, it usually tastes OK (vaguely reminiscent of malted milk, like Wendy's frosties), but I always feel odd eating so much food coloring.
Sock-it-to-me/7-up/insert soda here cake. Common in Southern cooking, and almost always too sweet.
Re: buttercream icing: unless you had it on a homemade cake or cake from a wedding party, it probably wasn't made with real butter. 'Buttercream' icing made from vegetable shortening is pretty disgusting.
I'm surprised so many people here don't like tiramisu, but I've had my share of bad tiramisu. I'll second the cannoli though. Highly overrated and just not that tasty.
Paper or Canvas? (Adios, Plastic)
CookiePie, on corn plastics (also called PLA) it's not as good as the propaganda. Sure, they are compostable but it requires a special process that no backyard will approximate and few towns or cities have in place. So, it's a contaminate to composting but also one to plastics as it can't be recycled and indeed ruins recycling efforts of plastic.
According to a biodegradability standard that Mojo helped develop, PLA is said to decompose into carbon dioxide and water in a “controlled composting environment” in fewer than 90 days. What’s a controlled composting environment? Not your backyard bin, pit or tumbling barrel. It’s a large facility where compost—essentially, plant scraps being digested by microbes into fertilizer—reaches 140 degrees for ten consecutive days. So, yes, as PLA advocates say, corn plastic is “biodegradable.” But in reality very few consumers have access to the sort of composting facilities that can make that happen. NatureWorks has identified 113 such facilities nationwide—some handle industrial food-processing waste or yard trimmings, others are college or prison operations—but only about a quarter of them accept residential foodscraps collected by municipalities.
Then there's the issue that more and more people are allergic to corn (which some tie to the genetically engineered strains that have appeared just in the last decade or so) and these plastics are literally deadly to them (which can be ironically unfortunate if they go to the hospital for ingesting food that wasn't supposed to contain it and end up worse because of all the corn derivitive contaminated equipment and medicines there.
The GE corn also requires intensive chemical inputs just to grow which are leaching into our groundwaters and oceans creating other issues such as dead zones which are destroying marine life (including seafood).
Help, I am dating a vegetarian!
i love lorna sass's vegetarian cookbooks, and if the tassajara recipe book is still in print, everything i have ever made from it has been delicious.
Question of the Day: What's your favorite doughnut style?
please , can anybody help me, since Hurricane Katrina, I had to relocate up north, i miss my apple fritters soooo much from tastee donuts,
Does anybody have recipe?????????/ thanks
Question of the Day: How clean obsessed are you?
At home, I'm a little clean obsessed, but I am indeed a very messy cook. I consider messy and dirty two totally different issues. Now if you leave the mess sit and don't clean it up in a timely manner, it then becomes filth, in my estimation.
We dine out alot, so at some point I force myself to become oblivious to small things or I would be dining at home much more frequently. My first observation at the table is generally that of the silverware. If they are not immaculate, I ask for new. Next is the glassware, which is very obvious if not spotless and free of any gunk. It has always been my contention that the mark of a good restaurant is the cleanliness and tidiness of the restrooms. If they don't care that there is a layer of fuzzy fur on their plastic flowers and wet paper towels are overflowing onto the floor then they are not apt to pay attention to detail elsewhere either. It never occurred to me to accidentally walk into the kitchen, but that is a great idea.
This thread brings to memory very bad experiences at TGI McFunster's. Repeated, heinous experiences. I used to live fairly close to one, and it was one of the more "upscale" restaurants in the area. haha... Nonetheless, dining companions were constantly insisting on the place for convenience. One time, I found a plastic wheel from some sort of kitchen implement in my spring roll. When I complained, to their credit, they did ask if I would prefer some cottage cheese or applesauce. Then another time I ordered a BLT and the B was raw, never having seen the inside of a skillet. This is the biggie - another time I ordered a shrimp cocktail and pulled a piece of raw chicken out of the bowl. When I complained, they offered to bring me another app, so while I was waiting, (watching my companions enjoy their food and the servers go in and out of the kitchen), I could see the servers sitting on the food prep counters in the kitchen. Three of them SITTING on the counters!!! Why don't people notice that the food there tastes like a_ _?
Question of the Day: How clean obsessed are you?
In perspective; eating bad food may give you a case of the runs in the short term, but over-eating good food will terminate you in the long run.
Question of the Day: How clean obsessed are you?
Yeah, it's worth the risk. I've gotten sick once or twice, but that is bound to happen. One time it was from a local pizzeria that I've frequented for years, and another time it was from chicken teriyaki prepared at home by a relative. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I believe regardless of how careful I am, food poisoning is just something that happens from time to time.
Of course, if I see something that doesn't look or smell right, you can be sure I won't be putting it in my mouth.
Question of the Day: How clean obsessed are you?
You don't need to be clean-obsessed to have a problem with Di Fara. OK, he makes pizza bare handed. But he also makes change bare handed, and then uses the same hands to sprinkle freshly cut (and presumably unwashed) basil and extra cheese on the pie, after it comes out of the oven.
Everything you can see in the visible prep area looks dirty, and the walls of the restaurant have dust so thick it looks like fur wallpaper.
Feeling brave, I ordered anyway, 3 days later, no evidence of intestinal disorder. The pizza is good, $20 for a not very large pie, but anyone using the same ingredients with a thin crust could match it. Why reward a restaurant that is compulsively unsanitary?
Meat Substitutes-Which do you prefer?
Quorn is pretty yummy.
Meat Substitutes-Which do you prefer?
Don't forget falafel. So, so easy to make, a delicious treat whether you're a veg-head or not, and an excellent source of protein.
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i grew up eating this stuff. it's best served with salt potatoes.