(no subject)

[elfs]

It has been a quite couple of days here at the Villa Sternberg. Friday came and we attended the Elementary Play at Kouryou-chan's school. Kouryou-chan had declined to participate, so I wondered what the point was of going, but in the end it was good fun and the kids did well. They need to learn to Project! their voices, however.

I spent Saturday morning cooking. First pancakes for the kids, then bread for Oloteas. Y'know all those things they say about the precision needed to make really good bread? Bullroar. I wanted to make four loaves, so I needed twelve cups of flour. I ran out around nine and a half. I through in whatever I could find: a cup of whole wheat, rounded it out with a cup and some of pastry flour. I was low on yeast: I needed 10 tsp, I had nine. With water the right temperature I threw in the yeast and a pinch of sugar to wake it up, and let it sit for longer than was recommended. I forgot the salt during the initial mix, so I sprinkled it into the dough with every fold during the kneading. It took thirteen minutes to knead that much dough.

Bread and Fire
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

After all that, there was only one minor disaster: my oven isn't big enough to handle four loaves. The bottom two came out beautiful, the top two had their crusts badly burned. I did remember during the baking process to open the oven every five minutes and spritz a mist of water into the oven to give the bread a crispy crust. Still, cutting off the tops, the bread was still delicious. When I put it out at Oloteas the ingredients list read "Flour, Yeast, Salt, Brute Force." My arms were killing me after that. Yamaraashi-chan seemed unimpressed with the idea that in 100AD Rome was feeding a million people a day with that kind of muscle.

Oloteas was nice. Yamaraashi-chan's mother showed up, apparently because we let slip that we were going. When Omaha explained to Yamaraashi-chan what the Mayday jumping over the fire really meant, she decided she'd rather go back to the swimming pool. Kouryou-chan continually tried to give me a heart-attack by overexerting herself in the swimming pool. She's not drownproof and has zero bodyfat so she sinks like a rock if she runs out of energy.

I flirted (was it flirting? It felt like flirting) with a woman who was new to the whole place. We talked about poly and how it seems to come with expectations that people rarely live up to; even less so than the expectations of modern marriage. She had broken up with one of the stereotypical "they say they were poly but he had jealousy issues" relationships just recently.

Not much else to say. Life went on. Omaha's ankle went out and she skinned her knee and was in pain and grumpy when we got home. We were both so tired we went straight to bed.

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

See, now that's the kind of geekery I wish I understood better. Thanks for pointing me to that article. I have much research to do, I see. Still, I think I have enough experience now that I'm not gonna screw up a straight French bread or a bagel. I won't win any awards, but it's much better than anything you get from Albertsons.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

If you want some of the geekery behind bread baking, there is a book I picked up about two years ago, The Bread Baker's Apprentice, by Reinhart and Manville. It will lead you through ingredients, equipment, how to use baker's formulas, how breads can be categorized by the type of dough and how it's produced, procedures and techniques -- not the kind of 'down in the chemistry' explanations that you get from Alton Brown, but how and why different breads are made the way they are, which will give you a foundation that you can use to make pretty much any kind of bread you want.