Who are you...?

Mainly lurker. I am 42, live in Portland, OR, am a SAHM with a wonderful son who is 2. I cook three meals a day for our family and bake mainly desserts for parties and my husband's office (requests). I like to bake and haven't done as much of it in the last couple of years but since DS is becoming more independant, I can spend time baking again.

We are considering opening a business as an outlet for my cakes and desserts. So a lot of what I am doing now is experimental.

-L.

"Serious amateur" cook and baker (except I don't take the "serious" part too seriously). W.r.t. baking, it is mostly bread, mostly whole-grain, mostly sourdough, though occasionally I use a little white flour and/or some yeast. I have my own grain mill and bake with various grains. I built a steam injection system for my home oven (which I'm am currently in the process of upgrading by replacing copper tubing with stainless steel and silicone).

I often bake sweet things as well, mostly for special occasions. Cakes, pies, cookies, pastries, etc. I'm better at bread, but my other baked goods are improving.

I'm looking for anything that can help me get that extra 1% in my results, plus to share what knowledge I have with others. If someday I become independently wealthy, I may open a bakery/restaurant, but I would hate to be in that business if I had to depend on it for income.

I just started reading rec.food.baking again recently, though I have popped my head in here from time to time in the past.

I'm in two professions. I'm an old time computer programmer with one foot still in it to pay the bills, plus a caterer and small producer of cured and smoked products. I recently bought a property with a second kitchen that I'm in the process of getting certified.

As to rfb related stuff, I'm happy to say customer demand for breads and other baked goods is coming back after just about disappearing during the Atkins craze. The great baked goods drought of 2003-04 is just about over, and I'm thankful that I get to bake in quantity again.

The info I look for tends to be the more detail oriented material that's hard to find in most textbooks, the usual source for 98% of my information. I especially like hearing from professionals because the information tends to be both rare and useful.

Like your blue cheese dressing recipe, among many items. It's still a hit with the crowd.

On Wed 18 Jan 2006 07:55:29p, Thus Spake Zarathustra, or was it Reg?

Can one of you post Bob's blue cheese dressing recipe?

TIA

Re the original question...

I'll be 61 next week and I've cooked and baked since learning all the basics at home. I have a Southern heritage and many things I cook are influenced by old family recipes, but I frequently try new recipes from many cuisines. I consider myself an expert pie baker and I'm more than competent at bread and cake baking. Still, there's a wealth of knowledge and tips to be gained from reading a group like this...real practical experience from posters at all competency levels.

My oldest granddaughter has decided to do wedding cakes and other celebratory baking and asked me a lot of questions about getting started. My first bit of advice was to tell her to get a job in a place that does something like what she wants to do. Otherwise, it's guessing. And a good way to lose a lot of money. She's been to culinary school and has a notion about commercial versus domestic cooking, but she asked me a lot of the wrong questions. Premature stuff - what kind of pans should she buy, should she offer delivery (!), how much staff should she have...? We talked about kitchens, storage, budgeting, inventory, pricing, staffing, etc. I deliberately befuddled her because, while it's good to be upbeat and energetic, it leads to a false sense of security. I tried to give her a sense of what she doesn't know and needs to research.

Check the health department laws where you are before doing any baking for money. Check local prices and charge more, not less. You're making a premium product and people should pay for it. You can't be bashful about money. I know about all these pitfalls because I've fallen into them at one time or another.

Good luck with it.

Pastorio

I'd be interested in hearing more about this. What kind of oven? How does your injections system work? Hardware?

The industry joke is: "Do you know how to have a small fortune in foodservice? Start with a large one."

Pastorio

What sorts of products?

What do you bake, mostly?

What areas are you most interested in getting more info in?

And idiosyncratic. I've had to unlearn a lot of stuff in recent years. Things I "knew" from school or old-timers who told me their versions of culinary truths. Along comes some of the good food scientists and blew away the cobwebs. Harold McGee, Shirley Corriher, Russ Parsons and a few others. And others who are good researchers and present the works and words of pros, themselves and others - Bernard Dupaigne, Maggie Glezer, Nick Malgieri, Alford & Duguid, Carol Field, Berenbaum. Wayne Gisslen's baking books.

Been a while since I posted that anywhere. Reminds me to make some; been a while for that, too.

So simple when I do it at home - any blue cheese, crumbled, heavy cream whipped to soft peaks, stir together and rest for a few hours or overnight. Viola.

Pastorio

Thanks, Bob. It's pretty much a pipedream now. I may initially just sell to my friend who has a restaurant downtown.

-L.

The oven is a very cheap, low-end electric GE model, about 25 years old. I got the idea from newsgroups -- search for "pressure cooker steam injection" on Google groups, in this group plus alt.bread.recipes, rec.food.sourdough, and rec.food.equipment (I forget where I saw it). The idea is that you boil water on the stovetop in a pressure cooker, and direct the steam into the oven via heat-resistant tubing of some sort. You need to tap a pipe fitting into the pressure cooker lid and find a way into the oven -- all residential ovens are vented in some way, and that's the first place to look. In my case, the vent is underneath one of the back burners. It's a tight squeeze, but I managed to route some copper tubing through there and into the oven. My current problem is that copper tubing is actually only rated for up to 400F -- it doesn't melt when it gets hotter, but the end that goes into the oven is getting quite corroded now. I am going to replace it with a short length of stainless steel tubing (expensive, but takes high heat and doesn't corrode) for the part that's actually in the oven, and then use a length of high-temp silicone (food-safe, plasticizer-free, rated up to

The final results depend on the strength of the stovetop burners. My stovetop is cheap electric, and can't boil water as fast as I'd like. I don't get the intense burst of steam that you'd get in a commercial combi oven, but I do get much more than tricks like setting a pan of water in the oven. I can keep the steam going as long as I'd like (usually 10-15 minutes, until oven spring is totally done), and it does get plenty steamy in there -- I can see steam rising from the gaps in the oven door seal (remember, this is a cheap 25-year old oven) almost immediately after I close the door, and I definitely need to stand back for a moment when I open the door with the steam on. The bread also cooks faster, presumably because wet air transfers heat to the dough more quickly than dry air, or maybe because the air movement created by the jet of steam coming out of the end of the pipe turns my oven into a pseudo-convection oven.

Please note that all of the above is potentially dangerous and will void any warranties within 100 yards. I'm not advising anybody to do it.

When I have a chance to build or renovate a new kitchen, I've got my eye on the Gaggenau residential combi oven. Expensive, but much better than this mad scientist contraption I've currently got going. I think KitchenAid just came out with one as well.

My oven rusted and warped from trying to generate steam for baking. I just tossed a few ice cubes into the oven when I put the dough in. I should have just preheated a cast iron skillet and put the ice in that. I still think that the interior would have rusted, but that may have prevented the warping.

"Randall Nortman" schreef > > Randall Nortman wrote:

I'm a scientist. Cooking and baking are my creative outlets and alternate grounds for experimentation. For years I've offered bread of the month clubs and holiday breads for church service auctions.

I'm also the "resident nutritionist" on rec.food.cooking. All while the Atkins craze was raging, I disparaged the diet and kept baking. We'd been through this nonsense before, I knew folks would return to their senses. I hope that this time people recognize that there's a difference between "Wonder bread" and good, chewy, whole grain stuff.

I'm always on the lookout for new recipes. I don't have a bread machine, unless the Mighty Kenwood mixer qualifies.

Cindy

It is always good to know that there are some science minded people here......... the kind of individuals that I can easily relate with......

Many types of hot and cold smoked fish, various smoked sausages, pastrami, coppacolla, breseola, several fermented meat products. I'm starting to do aged cheeses but I don't think it will scale well. Not a bad hobby though.

Bread is the only thing I have any formal training in, so there's a lot of that. Many different types.

As far as desserts, mostly in demand are plain old pies, cakes, tortes, etc. Sometimes petite four platters. For myself I'm doing a lot of Pierre Herme recipes right now.

I'm constantly looking for information about packaging and preservation. It's difficult information to find, and much of it is geared toward large scale producers. For instance, I'm still trying to find information on minimum useful levels of nitrite in preserved meats. The maximum allowed levels are well covered in regulations, but not much info about quantity vs. efficacy, etc.

Also, in researching MAP I haven't been able to find much about if/how I could make use of it. Again, it's geared toward large producers.

Etc.

Food safety issues in general are important, and you've been a great help here. Thanks especially for posting things like this:

People don't believe me when I tell them the recipe. When you use a really high quality, non-UHT cream it takes on a new dimension.

.>Also, in researching MAP I haven't been able to find much .>about if/how I could make use of it. Again, it's geared

Reg, In our past meetings with food regulations where brief mentions of meat processing was discussed I remember that the amount of nitrite that is effective is less than half of the legislated allowed maximum level..Using just a third of the maximum level can confer the desired preservative effect and enhance the right color of the pickled meat. If you had to cut down the use of nitrate/nitrite ....don't use the nitrate but the nitrite...itself Sodium nitrate or potassium nitrate is reduced into nitrite by microbial action and that is where its preservative effect lies If you use the nitrate the recommended dosage is higher than the nitrite....

..Besides its not only the preservative effect of nitrite that is important but the other ions in the pickling solution. Meat preservation is a combination of many factors...that includes aside from ther formulations the nature of your raw materials, the equipments, methods used ...the level of processing etc

There is some websites that discuss the details examples of cured meat processing such as this

Lurking for ideas for simple/easy ideas for whole- grain milling & baking. Esp. cornbread and bread recepies with lots of cornmeal.

I love to design/build electronic/mechanical gadgets and am thinking of making my own toaster so I can control both temp & time. :-)

You have an electro-mechanical turn of mind?

That is talent that you have to nurture...

You will never know.....your electro mechanical bent might led you to a new invention ...

Therefore..... Keeps the spark of your ingenuity alive....nobody is too old to be an inventor.....

You doing research for an article again?

And you haven't been seen there lately, either. Dangitall.