We got two gifts in total. A vacuum cleaner and a pressure cooker. Both most welcome and the pc is still in use. No ’shower’ and only 8 wedding guests. Just parents, siblings and their spouses. DD got married during covid with the permitted 6 guests but a year later we had a party with 100 guests. They requested no gifts, just donations to two charities. The Italian side of the family found this diffcult to grasp and gave a lot of knickknacks they neither want nor need.

I've been reading these and all of trailrunner's post. They are just great. All the hints were great. I bake bread out of boredom, I rarely use a recipe, for better or worse and like the wet doughs as well as quicker higher yeast doughs for pizza. Someday I'll get that "super peel" with the cloth belt thingy. I am forced to pre-cook my thin pizza crusts without one- My favorite bread is an olive bread that is made locally in the East Bay and sold now only at the local Berkeley farmer's market- you can go to their bakery, and they will sell stuff to you, but it's not a store front, no sales help, no hours- if they are there they'll sell it to you- they're also fresh pasta makers- 'Phoenix Pastificio'- if you're ever in the area. I've never tried to make that bread, it's almost Holy to me...( although I know he uses a biga and those black Kalamata olives). It has a thin almost black burnt crust, with large ciabatta holes to the crumb and flavor to die for.

It doesn't take a lot more salt to increase the salt taste. I don't do Lahey, but I've adjusted the salt in numerous recipes without a noticeable effect on the rise. Yes, it's all chemistry, but there are a ton of variables, like the humidity in the air and flour, the air temperature, the liveliness of the yeast, etc., which aren't easily controlled in a home kitchen, and the bread still seems to rise and come out fine. That's why so many of the instructions for traditional breads rely on your assessment of the dough, how it looks and feels, rather than on a carefully measured equation with specific times, etc. It's done when it pulls away from the mixer, you have a well stretched glutenous ball, it forms a translucent windowpane between your fingers, it has doubled in size, it's brown on top and sounds hollow when thunked. So if you add a quarter tsp. of salt and it alters the rise time, big whoop. Just make sure it's the right size when risen, whenever that is.

I made another loaf of rye bread yesterday and forgot to follow my recipe carefully. It's a recipe that I made up myself, and so it should not have been difficult, but in my recipe, I call for 2 Tbsp of dried onion flakes, but I also say that I can substitute 1/4 cup of minced fresh onion and reduce the water by 2 Tbsp. Well this time I used fresh onion and forgot to reduce the water, and I perhaps added too much onion, but that is not a bad thing, although it did throw off the proportions of liquid to flours. Anyway, I ended up adding more than 1/2 cup extra flour to the recipe, which I think made it too large for my Pullman pan. That was okay because I forgot to put the lid on the pan for the second rise, and in one hour, the dough was way over the top, and so I had to bake it without the lid. It came out okay except the it has a very light and airy texture, and I wanted it to be a bit more dense. I did remember the salt this time, but I forgot to reduce the salt, and I really should have because the Reuben sandwiches that I made today were way too salty. I blame the pastrami for this, but if I had left the salt out of the bread, the sandwiches would have been perfect. I think I will purposely leave it out next time and also pay attention to how much fresh onion I use. I liked the bread without the salt anyway. Another thing I noticed was that I need to use a lot more flour here than in the desert in proportion to the liquid. I think the flour in the desert has less moisture in it and therefore requires more liquid. This is going to be a balancing act for me. Anyway, I find it easy to add salt to bread that has been baked but it's impossible to remove it after it is done. I used turkey pastrami, since Kevin won't eat beef pastrami, and this may have had some influence.