tekobo

Funny you should mention mashed potatoes Tyrus. I wondered who @Saucier was and so I went and looked up his profile. One of his previous posts was about cooking potatoes for mashing sous vide. That had never occurred to me but the logic of cooking veg sous vide and keeping the nutrients "in" makes perfect sense. Welcome back @Saucier. I look forward to reading more of your posts.

I agree. Learning to make bread takes time and, just when you think you have a good formula, it kicks back at you. Made some buckwheat bread at the weekend and I wanted to cry when it came out, mostly, flat. The good news is that my guests didn't care and wanted to know where I'd bought it! @Pequod, thank you for sharing your rich seam of references. I am already enjoying the read and I'll hopefully learn a lot.

Thanks. I love pasta made with 100% extraction flour but have been a little less adventurous with bread, sticking to Chad Robertson's ever more complicated/varying mixes of high extraction, whole grain and bread flours. Do you have any idea what colour the wheatgerm is? I have assumed that if I simply sift out the brown bran I must be retaining the wheatgerm but that assumption could be completely wrong. Do you have a go-to recipe/hydration level for using 100% extraction wheat flour? I also seem to remember you saying you used a modified Tartine no-knead method. Care to share?

I have been meaning to ask about wheatgerm. A number of the Tartine No 3 recipes call for, say 70g, wheatgerm alongside 500g of high extraction flour. Given the fact that I am milling my own flour it seems to make no sense to be buying additional wheatgerm when the flour that I mill will contain wheatgerm in any case. Thus far I have got over this hurdle by sifting the bran out of my milled flour to get to about 85% extraction. Where the recipe calls for wheatgerm I simply use more of this high extraction flour. What do you think? Should I be looking to buy wheatgerm as well?

Hi @Pequod. Did you ever find the Einkorn recipe you were looking for? I have just ordered this book if you are still interested: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0804186472/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_n0UuEbP9XVG0K

That looks great @Basher. I have finally got my leaven to float reliably and look nice and lively. I have been trying a different loaf from Tartine no 3 each week and I find that the high hydration doughs end up a little flatter. Still tasty but not that plump look that you got there. I think I have had most success when I have refreshed the starter twice and then made the leaven. Will experiment more to see if that is indeed an important factor.

Well done! Sounds like an epic effort. What did the punters think of the pork?

Rumbled! You identified my underlying motivation. I am a roast pig girl and don't much like pulled pork, hence all that distraction activity around crown joints and such. Happily for you, other more sensible people turned up to give better advice. I like this idea @Basher. As you say, no chance to move grates much but it sounds like a good way to vary the cooking times. Only challenge would be how to get the crunch on the roasted joints. Maybe put them in close to the end and raise the temp once you have taken out the pulled pork joints? Help! Didn't realise the choice round here was pix or death!!

Yay. I went to Abidjan on a school trip for French language learning when I was about 14. I was amazed that people actually spoke this language that we were being forced to learn. Set me off on a lifelong journey to learn languages and the food was good too. I am interested in the pork and gruyere dish. I remember eating fried plantains with hot sauce by the road side when I was there.

Hi @ZooBeeQ. Some options: When I say hot and fast for leg I mean cooking max 4 hours and aiming to make crackling of the skin. I think the usual US low and slow ends up with something akin to pulled pork. Here we are looking at sliced meat, particularly if you de-bone the leg and tie the joint. I haven't tried any of the recipes on the links that follow but they are typical of what I would be looking for. So.... for roast leg of pork you could use a recipe like this one: https://www.olivemagazine.com/recipes/meat-and-poultry/roast-leg-of-pork-with-perfect-crackling-and-ambrosia/ for the mid section, loin join you could go for a fancy crown: https://cookthestory.com/pork-crown-roast/ or for a guard of honour: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/double-rack-of-pork-with-burnt-orange-caramel-pan-sauce-368932 I am sure that is all too much work when you have so much to do. Good luck with whatever you decide to go with.

Hi there @ZooBeeQ. First, commiserations. A big job for a chilly day. If you are going to have to chop it up then I would go for cooking the different parts of the pig differently. Low and slow for the shoulder and hotter and faster for the legs and mid section. See @Basher's recent post for a good looking pig head. Good luck!

I was waiting to see the olives being pressed! I guess it would have been a bit messy to be doing that in the middle of a busy restaurant. Where did you go in West Africa?

It took me a while to figure out what the prongs at the bottom were for and then I noticed the screw at the bottom and realised it is a bit like a vertical roti. I would like the frame and the ability to hook meat onto the top of the frame. My current adaptation when cold smoking ham is to use the half grate. This frame would improve on clearance and allow you to hang bigger joints in the KK. Below are a couple of hams, brined in beer and molasses for a few days and then cold smoked.

Ha. No I have not tried it nor have I run out of cupboard space. Looks suspiciously like a tagine and I already own one of those and don't use it very often. I do use a cast iron Dutch oven when I bake loaves indoors but I don't think I have done a comparison to see what it is like without and whether it is actually worth using the Dutch oven at all. One more burn mark from a hot Dutch oven and the time will be ripe for a test that allows me to ditch all such crutches.

I went hunting through old photos to find the one time I cooked a pig's head for dinner. It was 2008. Basher's point explains why four of us found this whole head daunting!!!

Nice looking cook @Basher. We found eating a half pig's head on a plate a bit daunting when we tried it but pig (or beef) cheek bourgignon is very good and chopped up cheek and snout meat helps to amp up the tastiness of home made sausages.

Looking forward to seeing pictures and hearing what you think of using soapstone in your KK.

Yay! Amping up the sour flavour is nice sometimes. I hope your friend appreciates the restraint that you have shown. I would have had to have a slice.

Curious. My instinct would be to try the soapstone out as a heat resistant work surface. Another potential way to use it would be to have a piece that you heat up and then bring to the table to cook on. Its heat retention would be a real advantage there. I am not so sure about cooking on soapstone in the KK. The time taken to heat up would see me choosing my cast iron griddle over soapstone. Having said that, a semi-circular piece could be fun. If possible it would be good to get a lip around the edge so you can cook without having stuff drip down onto the fire. If nothing else, it should be really beautiful! P.S. You asked whether it should go over the grill on your half grate or next to it. I would say next to it. Moving between the soapstone and the half grate bars would give you options.

Hi @coolpapabill. I just had to go and read up to find out what soapstone is. Interesting. It seems to be good with heat, either as a work top or as a wood burning stove. What are you thinking of using it for? Cooking direct on top of the soapstone in the grill?

Neat!

Happily, I think I may be able to resist this one. At least until you give me your killer argument for having one. I do already have a dutch oven that works fine for round indoor bakes.

P.S. This is a photo for @Basher. I looked up on the train when I went through last week and noticed where I was. For a meeting tomorrow I have been practising how to say Ystradgynlais.

Reading the FAQs that @Pequod shared, I now have a name for my "problem". I am moving from a stiff starter to a liquid starter and I may well not have got the liquid starter reliably rising and falling as it should. I am away for a few days now but will get to it when I have a few consecutive days at home to allow me to refresh the starter daily. I have to fess up to yet another new toy. I kind of backed into this one. A friend brought me a gift of some koji condiments over New Year's. They are made by a couple of Japanese women in London who turn up to market once a week with limited stock and shut up shop when it is all sold. My friend had to go early and lie in wait to get me some. Very very delicious. I don't live in London and don't have time to lie in wait so instead bought the Noma guide to fermentation. The conditions for making koji are very precise and I was struggling to figure out how I would get the right heat and humidity combination. I finally came across a post that recommended using an egg incubator or a bread proofer. Duh! A bread proofer was so obvious and so useful. Before now I had been running up and down stairs to the only room that had the right temperature for proofing in the winter. Now I can use the proofer for bread and, when I get to it, as a koji making chamber for the 48 hours that it takes. For once this was not a KK shopping channel purchase but good to have validation that both @Pequod and @MacKenzie have one of these. I got the extra rack so I could fit two proving baskets in there, one above the other.

Thanks Paul! Cabrito is great. My freezer is bursting at the seams at the moment but I see a goat in that 32's future.