baking: does it come easily to you?

I'll give it a try! I've never put any thickener in apple pies; I just slice the apples very thin and layer them with brown sugar and cinnamon, and I always use very tart green apples, and it ends up juicy but not wet. But mine definitely have a soggy bottom; Bake Off would not approve.

Ideas on how to make chewy chocolate chip cookies? I remember an Alton Brown recipe that recommends using bread flour, ostensibly because of higher protein content, in which case, could mixing the a batter of all-purpose longer than is typical to better build up the gluten achieve the same result?

apparently resting the dough in the fridge for an hour or more makes them chewier but i havent tried it bc
i am too impatient & hardly ever rest my dough, also i like crunchy cookies anyway so

yeah the nyt choc chip recipe uses a combo of cake & bread flour and also recommends to rest it in the fridge for 24-36 hours... unsure which of those things contributes to the chewiness but i can confirm it's a v yum recipe.

i always rest it at least 24 hours but i'm not sure how much that contributes to chewiness, it's more of a flavor thing. chewiness comes from butter content and baking temp iirc. i always make this one: https://www.food.com/recipe/worlds-best-chocolate-chip-cookies-by-dorie-greenspan-332767

i would not suggest doing anything to develop gluten in a cookie

this is the best article about chocolate chip cookie variables https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-best-chocolate-chip-cookie-recipe#toc-giving-the-cookie-dough-a-rest

ah and it will send you straight to resting the dough, scroll up to the top of course

lol resting the dough is probably the easy tip that I wanted to hear the least because like Veg, I am very impatient. I'll try the Dorie recipe though -- especially since it uses whole sticks of butter (I don't like having leftover sticks).

Any no-bake suggestions so that I can avoid using the oven in the midst of summer?

this one is a classic & super easy

https://littlespoonfarm.com/no-bake-lemon-icebox-pie-recipe/

I love Little Spoon. I use their sourdough bagel and sourdough English muffin recipes all the time. (Well, not in summer, obvs.)

I made snickerdoodles with some gingerbread type spices and peanut butter and the inside turned green, lol wtf?

one time i made a pumpkin pie with soy milk and it turned out gray?!?!?! like a dang zombie pumpkin pie!

trying to imagine the taste of peanut butter gingerbread snickerdoodles and failing. gingerbread snickerdoodle, brilliant; peanut butter snickerdoodle, god-tier; peanut butter gingerbread snickerdoodle, my brain cannot knit these flavors together. were they good, aside from the unconventional coloration?

The texture was too dry and crumbly for snickerdoodles and the PB totally overwhelmed the spices, but they didn't taste bad by any means.

Also, they looked a lot like falafel, and the green seemed to get more intense with time. I'm pretty sure it wasn't mold because it didn't taste like mold (which I'm well acquainted with because I accidentally eat it a lot).

I know baking with walnuts can cause a weird green color sometimes (maybe when the batter is alkaline?) - maybe peanut butter can do similar.

Did you use raw ginger or spices?

Does bread dough rise at room temperature? How long must or can you wait before the dough spoils?

No yeast, I used baking soda.

All the spices were ground. I did add sage on accident.

The snickerdoodles started turning green overnight, and I'm pretty sure the green got darker and more vivid even after I put them into the fridge that day.

cursory googling suggests that baking soda can cause a reaction w ~sunflower seed butter~ to cause green cookies, so maybe it’s something to do w that type of reaction but other ingredients like whatever kind of peanut butter you used etc

I did add sage on accident.

“i didn’t have butter so I substituted some leftover crackers”

LOL come on now, I added those crackers deliberately.

you know i love it

Youn, yeast dough will rise at room temp, just slowly. I've done 48 hour cool rises with no problems and have always left biga (which is basically very wet dough) out over multiple nights as well. You mostly don't want it to dry out or for the yeasts to use up all the available sugars (when they will all die off).

Thanks! I took up making a few quick breads a while back but won't feel like I've begun to bake until I bake with yeast, can knead dough (to the transparent window pane test), and know how to roll a pie crust. I'm not so big on frosting, piping, etc.

It's great that breads change color with their ingredients. I love how walnuts can turn bread purple.

Well this was a fun rabbit-hole to fall down!

https://www.reddit.com/r/foodhacks/comments/b2yvun/interesting_fact_sunflower_seed_butter_turns/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbiEngKpVgQ

Both of those look like a spot-on cross-section of my 'doodles, and actually I just remembered that I scraped out some leftover sunflower seed butter with a new jar of PB, though I'm struggling to remember how much, anywhere from 25-75% of what I used.

I could've sworn that I've baked with sunflower seed butter before (because I usually buy that from TJ instead of PB) but now I'm doubting my memories! #lolold

i think i saw suggestions to reduce baking soda amts if using sunflower seed to counter whatever reaction but when baking goes beyond recipes into sciencey math equations i dip out, i like the science of the end result but if i need a calculator i’m baking something else

If it doesn't kill me and it doesn't taste bad, I can deal with the unexpected green.

And I guess I'm still falling down that rabbit-hole, the labcoats have looked into this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33401798/

one time i made a pumpkin pie with soy milk and it turned out gray?!?!?! like a dang zombie pumpkin pie!

I've been making pumpkin pie with soy milk for over a decade - works great as long as you use unsweetened soy milk. HMU if you want to see the recipe.

baking hive, i need advice!

i am relatively newly diagnosed w type 2 diabetes & am now at the point where i am managing pretty well

but loving baking as i did, i very much want to re-enter that arena again, even if it’s just for a christmas bake of some kind

i thought keto baking might be the go with erythritol as my sweetener & did a test-run lemon loaf bake last weekend w almond flour & granulated erythritol but it gave me suuuuch painful GI distress to such a degree that it’s clear that it is def Not For Me™️

does anyone have any recs for sweetener alternatives? or type 2 baking success?

Swerve is out since that is the same family of sugar alcohol, same w Allulose
monkfruit is out since that is mostly erythritol …
and most other replacement sweeteners aren’t very baking friendly so idk where that leaves me.

it seems like the way into this is prob ~low~ carb baking rather than ~no~ carb and just working w other sugars and almond flour … but so many of these websites are deeply unsatisfying in terms of actual baking and are so focused on the end result ~looking~ similar to “real food” that the process is a bummer & the end result taste kinda crap too

anyway … thoughts? suggestions?

Oh sorry to hear that! I didn't realize that Swerve is erythritrol, I use it regularly without incident but clearly different strokes etc. Would using overripe bananas be possible? Obviously that's sugar but also comes with a fair bit of vitamins and minerals, though you'd have to juggle proportions of the rest of your ingredients accordingly.

yeah swerve is like a combo of erythritol and other stuff

bananas may def be an option although i may need a few more tools since they do kinda limit you in terms of flavor

You can get pure monkfruit powder and liquid drops and I can attest it is a pain to deal with and you use such a tiny amount that it throws recipes off. I basically stopped baking when Mr. Jaq got the type 2 diagnosis so I wouldn't be contributing to his downfall. So now I bake favorites only very infrequently.

I do use Just Better fiber (corn based soluble fiber) in my coffee for the prebiotic factor but the bag says you can sub it for up to half the sugar in baking. So maybe it might be of use?

Hmm also maybe see how you respond to tapioca syrup or Vitafiber syrup (made from either corn or peas) - both much lower carb and glycemic index sweeteners with no sugar alcohols. You could bake with them if you reduce the liquid in the recipe you use.

thanks for the advice jaq! i will investigate those

it definitely seems like very infrequent “special occasion only” baking is going to be my new normal :(

One more: look up the various keto egg loaf recipes. You basically blend eggs and softened cream cheese into a batter. I've baked it in a loaf pan, sliced, toasted, and eaten with ChocZero maple syrup for keto french toast and baked it in a cast iron skillet with sausages dropped in and some mustard powder added to the batter for keto toad. Might hit some of the baking target.

oh interesting! thx

Is bread flour appropriate for quick bread (in this case a cheddar Jalapeno bread)?

sure, it'll work

Cream of Tartar, yuck.

I’m thinking of making my own sourdough starter but after some initial searching all the recipes I’ve seen say to start with whole wheat and feed with all purpose. Can I feed with whole wheat too? It’s all that I have.

Yes, it'll be fine!

Awesome, thanks!

have been preparing meals for my pops and his wife lately, she is gluten intolerant (sometimes she is tolerant I guess? she drinks beer so I dunno who knows) but I discovered Brazilian Sequilhos which has been a big hit, corn starch + condensed milk + butter

and then whatever else, have incorporated lemon/almond extract, and actual lemon/almond, tastes like a fancy sugar cookie, peanut butter/chocolate turns it into a more traditional cookie but anyway super simple and easy and delicious cookie base even if you don't care where the starch came from

Recipe pls!

worth experimenting with ratios but basically

1/2 cup room temp butter (~1 stick)
1/2 cup condensed milk (~half adorable lil can of the stuff)
~1 cup corn starch

350 for 10-15mins, 15-20 cookies

have been eyeballing the corn starch, erring on the conservative side yields a spread out/crispy caramelized edges thing while bumping it up makes a tighter dough, shortbread/Pfeffernusse territory

lately I split the dough in half, dash of lemon/almond extract/sliced almonds with a lemon juice/confectioners sugar icing on one pan and then vanilla extract/spoonful peanut butter/crushed peanut/chocolate on the other

So I figured I haven't done anything weird in a while, and so I decided to try to make chocolate chip cookies with prunes.

i would eat those! (i love prunes)

how did they turn out?

Texture was off and they weren't quite sweet enough, but not bad considering it's a first attempt! They weren't very airy so I'll probably reduce the number of prunes or bump up the baking soda. I was inspired by a base/crust I made once with prunes and walnuts, which I remember being pretty chewy.

Did you purée the prunes or just dump them in whole/chopped?