This is a big-ass pile of blue cheese I picked up at Sam's Club, and Boy, is it ever strong.
The blue cheese dressing at Emilene's has a very clean blue cheese flavor. I applied my finely-tuned analytical powers and discerned its components were most likely blue cheese diluted probably with milk, possibly with water. My friend insisted it must have mayonnaise because he used to make it at another restaurant where he worked years ago. Online recipes confirmed many recipes do indeed call for mayonnaise. Others called for sour cream. None that I read called for buttermilk. I tried all variations including my own mayonnaise but I kept coming back to the purity of Emilene's. The restaurant is known for its stark simplicity and for its fantastic steaks. There is absolutely nothing elaborate or even faintly pretentious about the place. Surely, I should error, if I must error, on the side of simplicity. Therefore, my new recipe for blue cheese dressing is 1) a strong blue cheese 2) milk. Here I used the remnant cartons of Half & Half, heavy cream, and buttermilk, but frankly, milk is just fine. I recommend it.
The pecans were heated for 45 seconds in the microwave to get their oil molecules jumping.
Frozen shrimp. Water brought to the boil then cut off. Frozen shrimp de-shelled and dumped in the hot water that was no longer boiling. I left them in too long because I was photographing these things. They curled, and that is undesirable. It wasn't so bad.
This is one of the sourdough hotdog buns. Apologies for poorly focused photo. It was the best of three. These buns are so good I can't stand it. Nothing should be allowed to be this good. They're kept in a bag in the refrigerator and refreshed with olive oil and a hot pan. I usually weight them with another pot just to make sure they're flattened.
I learned a trick about this sourdough that I'll do again. The trick is to refresh the starter overnight with faint heat to 95℉ or so 35℃ overnight carried over to a jar with the starter from the oven chimney that comes up through a back burner via a tunnel fashioned from a kitchen towel. That's a jar on the counter next to the stove covered with a towel that is also draped over the rear burner. The towel is puffed up to resemble a tunnel. The jar gently heats this way from an oven that is kept warm overnight. It's like a little proofing box. 'Sept differnt. Rehydrate the starter to a liquid sponge, levain, if you want to be French about it, If the starter is not bubbling by morning the you're probably going to have some trouble with it.
The trick is a trick, not a shortcut. However much bubbling active starter you have there, save a teaspoon and discard the rest, or put it back in cold storage. The meager teaspoon is what will be built up. Double the amount with another teaspoon of water and a teaspoon or so of flour. Mix and set at room temperature for eight hours. Try to train the starter for 8-hour increments. If the starter is slower than that, up to twelve hours, then just accept it. If it takes longer then consider a different starter. Now you have two teaspoons refreshed starter.
Eight hours later double that with two additional teaspoons of water + flour.
Eight hours later double with 1/4 cup additional water + flour
Eight hours later double that with 1/2 cup additional water +flour
It has now been two full days. On the morning of the third day, double the batch one last time by the addition of 1 cup of water + enough flour to bring the refreshed sponge to a wet dough consistency it should be sticky but not too sticky dough.
Allow the new flour 20 or 30 minutes to autolyse. Knead the dough and do the little stretchy-folding thing to form the buns. Allow a final rise, which experience has shown, should take 8 hours or so. If it's faster, fine.
That the last addition of flour is more than the usual double because a dough is being created and not a wet sponge, that is what made me expect the last increment would dampen the flavor so much that I would not even be able to tell that it is sourdough. In this I was wrong. Apparently the slow build up is sufficient time to build up enough acid to flavor the whole batch, which admittedly is still small. I am not certain it would be this strong if I had continued to double to four cups of liquid, and I am not certain this will work for every starter. What I'm getting at here is that I forewent the usual fermentation period that develops sourdough tang. Instead, this time, the slow build up from nothing nearly over a period of three days did that.
I was a little disappointed in the final rise, but I'll accept that tradeoff any day.
The Aerogarden with the greens is getting out of hand. I cannot keep up with it. I went in there and positively raped the thing tonight and filled a bowl with these greens. Tomorrow I expect I'll see new growth where I left little than roots to build on.
The other Aerogarden with the herbs is s different story. This particular kit was not successful. Neither was the replacement seeds that I bought from Park's Seeds. It's limping along, the basil and the mint are doing fine, but the rest is struggling and I am quite disappointed. Aerogarden is very good about customer satisfaction, but I was being an asshole that day and refused a replacement kit. So now I have a lot of basil and a lot of mint and very little else.
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