Thread 12 - TalkLair: “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.”

[Kucinghitam]

(Previous thread 11).

The days are gradually growing longer, but the worst of the winter weather is not yet behind us. In the TalkLair, we remain hunkered down keeping cosy and warm. The hearth is glowing, the walls covered in dubious artwork, books by non-approved authors line the shelves, rugs are down on the floors (and assorted pets curled up on them).

We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

That is ordinary strong flour, though, right?

It is. We used ordinary strong flour from Sainsbury's.

I think I would go for quarter quantities and just make one, though. After all, the whole point of baguettes is that they don't keep.

We got our power back at 4am - hooray! I have saved that no-knead baguette recipe so thanks for that.

Glad your power's back on@Britinme and hope you both warm up quickly.

Just considering that baguette recipe. In the vid, he's placed two sheets of grease proof paper over the oven rack but it's not enough to stop the bread sagging between the more widely-spaced bars of the oven racks we have. I tried this once and it resulted in corrugated bread, but using a baking sheet worked fine.

Sharing this rather spectacular example of a magnolia specimen I passed today. I presume it was planted in the 60s when the estate was built.

Good point. I think I'll be going with parchment on top of a pizza stone.

That's a good idea. We have a pizza stone and I'll give it a go next time I make this bread.

That magnolia tree is like the one in our garden. It's about 40ft wide and looks glorious in full bloom, but it's a pain to clear up all the petals and leaves.

That’s a gorgeous magnolia!

I stopped putting parchment on my pizza stone as I noticed a burning smell. I googled and it says you're not supposed to as the stone gets hotter than the max temp the paper can cope with

That's a good point, @VictorianBigot maybe a sprinkling of semolina would be better.

What a magnolia!

It's quite something, isn't it?

I suppose it depends how hot your oven gets, but all I can say is that I have used parchment on a pizza stone successfully in the past, for pizza and also bread rolls. Of course both are high temp, short duration. The parchment box says, safe up to 220 deg. And you'd imagine there'd be a bit of a safety factor built into that.

@duc748 did you have the oven on 220C for the bread rolls? How did the bottom of the rolls turn out?

That is a magnificent magnolia!

I worked as a registrar on Saturdays for a while. I never officiated but was in charge of the certificate and signing so was always in the service. While I was there we had one couple who brought in a couple off the street. It was lovely.

Yes, all good, Veg.

This is what the Internet should be full of, instead of all that other miserable shit.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5036504-to-bring-the-fish-doorbell-to-your-attention

That's really rather marvellous.

In less good fish saving news, the coolant intake for Hinkley Point C was to have a fish recovery system, that was scrapped. I did months of survey on that.

Love the fish doorbell. Last year I sent the link to a friend who's a lock keeper on the Thames and made the mistake of asking if her 'canal' had a doorbell. Got quite the response - 'It's the Royal River Thames, daaahling'.

Ta da! 😀

It feels better than it looks! I thought the difficult part would be the scraping it out of the bowl and forming the shape, but in fact that was easier than I expected. I thought my dough looked wetter than his (although I'd been precise about the quantities), but in fact it was pretty easy. I did it on the worktop, and used a combination of a demi-lune and a silicon spatula. Baked for 15 mins, then turned for another 7, then taken out of the oven and excess flour brushed off the base, and turned over and baked the underside for another 4 mins.

That looks good. Has it got bubbles?

Yup! 😄

Phwoar, result!