(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

[mousewrites.livejournal.com]

Oloteas sounds awesome. We're down in portland, and I haven't found a good group yet.

Re: bread: My husband is under the mistaken impression that "baking is too had because you HAVE to follow the rules." I'm going to make him read your bread account here. Perhaps he will try his hand at it.

Re: Poly; ain't that the truth. We've been together for 8 years, and over the years we've had a few partners who truly believed they were poly... until the green eyed monster showed up and ate their happiness. I think some people don't realize how jealous they can get. It's like we need a poly wading pool; give people a chance to get their feet wet.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

You're husband's not wrong, he's just wrong about the wrong things. Baking is a form of organic chemistry and it takes some experience to learn how to do it. That experience is about five or six loaves, really. It takes twenty minutes to put the stuff together and knead it until it becomes visibly stretchy without too much tearing. Sometime later it takes twenty minutes to bake the stuff.

It's a knowledge-based skill like repairing a car or operating a computer. Once you've got the fundamental down (and really, that's just a couple of loaves), you'll know what you can get away with.

The bread I made yesterday came out delightful: very airy and light. But, because I "pushed" the yeast hard by putting in even a pinch of sugar and letting it warm up for ten minutes instead of five, that yeasty smell that's a delight wasn't as pronounched as it could have been (especially if you do one of those no-knead breads that have become popular). I also knew to open the oven ever five minutes and mist the crust to make it crunchy.

Baking is a geeky skill. You don't HAVE to follow the instructions. You just need a little experience to know when you can safely deviate from the instructions.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

If you can plan ahead far enough to make up the dough a day in advance, throwing it in the refrigerator overnight to let it rise slowly before bringing it out and letting it warm up to complete the rise will improve the flavor. Another option is the use of a preferment -- variously referred to as a sponge, biga, poolish, paté fermenté, starter, etc. -- to allow the yeast and gluten network to develop before the dough is constructed, although the San Francisco Baking Institute, in their spring 2006 newsletter, had an article looking at whether preferments were overrated that you might want to look at.

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

One thing about spraying the loaves, though, is that it won't do anything other than lower the oven temperature each time you open to spray after the first ten or fifteen minutes. The steam at the start of the baking keeps the crust from hardening too quickly, allowing for maximum oven spring to get larger loaves, and gelatinizes the starch on the surface, which gives you the nice crunchy brown crust. However, in the last half of baking, you want a dry oven to dry out the gelatinized starch to form the crunchy crust.

Something you might want to try, if you have room for it in your oven, is to put a low-sided pan or iron frying pan in the bottom of your oven before you preheat, then pour in a half-inch of water after you put in your loaves; this will provide the burst of steam that will produce a good, crunchy crust.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. I'd never tried the spritzer trick before; I'd always used egg white to top the bread. The crust came out very thin and very crispy, so I apparently did something right and will try to do it right again.

For my next trick, I'm making Challah.

[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.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[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.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]