Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "trackback" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+trackback" bit from the end of the URL.
Flour Techniques
Lots of different uses of flour this weekend.
Last night I made a pound cake. I used my bundt pan, and the cake did not come out of it intact. Little patches stuck, even though I greased the pan carefully and thoroughly. I don't think I have ever gotten a cake to come out of that pan intact, in all the years I have had this pan (25 years?), and I've about decided that it is the fault of the pan. I think I even tried Pam, once, without much luck. I think it is time to invest in a new bundt pan (and not the cheapest one on the rack this time).
This morning I made biscuits. The pound cake recipe uses buttermilk, and I always feel bad about wasting the rest of the quart, but buttermilk is not something we ever had in the house when I was growing up. The same goes for biscuits, actually: I learned to like them at a restaurant that served them with honey. If my Mom ever served biscuits, which I don't recall, they were 'poppin-fresh'.
The biscuits I made came out pretty well: they were nice and flaky and puffed up so much that the ones on the outside of the group sort of toppled over. (I only used 3/4 of the bakingpowder called for in the recipe, to adjust for the altitude...) I ate some with butter and some with honey and a couple with both, and still have some waiting in the breadbox.
I have the week's bread rising now.
And I have fresh pasta cooking and drying. I decided that yesterday's red sauce deserved homemade pasta, so I dug out the pasta machine (which hasn't been used since before I started travelling) and the pasta drying rack. According to Mario Batali and various cookbooks, the ratio for pasta should be 100 grams of flour per egg, but I think that is sea-level, soggy-climate flour. The pasta came out OK, but was almost impossible to knead by hand.
I think I need to ease back on the flour next time, which won't be for a while: I'm going to be freezing most of these noodles. I'm cooking the angel-hair-like stuff that came out of the machine's cutter, and freezing the parts of the batch that I put through the fettuccine cutter.
I don't think I'm ready to try to make ravioli with the noodle dough from the machine. I need more practice before I will be able to produce wide strips of noodle with parallel edges. I'm going to shift the machine's storage location to a more accessible location, though so it will be used more often. Maybe I'll get to ravioli sometime this year....
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