Extra Schmaltz!

So I've posted a few bread recipes here, but this post is more about my technique, since I've gotten it down to enough of a science that it makes less mess than most bread recipes, and the results are always really good.  I personally do not find "no-knead" recipes to be any less work than "kneaded" recipes - you usually have some step that involves scattering corn meal across half the kitchen, and dish clothes covered in bits of dough. This recipe requires very little kneading, but a lot of time (really, benevolent neglect). However, if you're gonna be home anyway, it doesn't require much effort, so I often make this on a Saturday while grading. I got the basic idea for this approach from a couple books on bread baking. The main thing is that everyone seems to agree that a wetter dough tastes better, has a nicer crumb, etc in the end, and so my approach aims to make a wet bread dough with almost no interaction with it using my hands, and to

This is a really just a tiny useful technique thing, but we find it really helpful in our house. Whenever I used to make chicken broth, I would wait till it cooled, then find old tupperware, jars, etc to put the broth in. The problem is, I mostly use broth in small quantities, so it was a pain to thaw just some of that broth for use. What I do now instead is to pour the broth into a muffin pan, clear some space in the freezer, and then leave it to freeze overnight (got the idea from lifehacker or somewhere online). In the morning, I put about an inch of hot water in the sink, set the muffin pan in the hot water until the broth chunks are loose, and then use a chopstick or butter knife to remove the chunks, which I store in a plastic bag in the freezer. For my muffin tin, they're almost exactly 1/2 cup of broth, perfect for use in sauces and similar recipes. Here's a fuzzy picture of some of my broth muffins: