A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

What a pain in the ass. Bread baking is without a doubt the only thing I’ve ever done and lapsed from that was not “like riding a bicycle.” I had a broken oven in Brooklyn for the last two years leading up to my moving to Ulster County this April.

I didn’t bake over the summer because, well… it was hot and I wasn’t particularly interested.

Finally as the silly season approached we realized it was time for me to get on the stick. So I banged out a couple loaves and… they were awful. Positively abysmal.

No problem. Must be some simple tweak on my part. I’ll just…

crap.

I had failure after failure after failure until I finally decided to roll up my sleeves, forget I knew anything, and start from scratch. It took somewhere between 15 and 20 pounds of flour and a month to get myself even close to where I was before. But finally I can make a reasonable loaf of bread again.

I’m not back to where I was even. But I have the baseline down.

And boy, lemme tell ya, I learnded me a couple things.

10 years of baking notes were totally useless in this process. All the formulae for different loaves of bread, temperature of the oven and time inside, ingredient lists down to the gram… useless.

If you don’t have the “hand art” down, nothing else matters. Not one other thing. You can’t cheat your way out of knowing how dough is supposed to look, feel and behave. There’s nothing I can really write here that will tell you “how hollow” a loaf is supposed to sound when you thump the bottom to determine whether or not it’s time to come out (other than “if you’re not sure, it’s not done.”)

I’ve baked no less than 20 loaves of bread in the last three weeks, all (but for the most recent few) with exactly the same recipe, and only the last 5 came out as reasonable bread. (That recipe is a simple 60-3-3 with King Arthur Bread Flour, Fleischman’s “active dry” yeast, plain morton salt (fancy salt is a steaming bunch of bullshit) and poland spring water.)

I really do wish I could describe what I’ve done differently. I do. Baking a basic loaf of bread is something everyone should be able to do. It’s one of the most wonderfully satisfying activities there is. But I can’t.

I did experiment with the overnight retardation method as a way of removing some of the up front work, and had some success with that. This involves mixing the dough the night before, letting it rise (or not. I’ve had equal success both ways), then putting it in the fridge overnight. It lasts for days before you have to bake it (getting better all the time.)

When you finally decide to bake it (or some of it) you pull it out, form it, coat it with flour, and let it come up to room temperature for a half hour before popping it in the oven (it’s VERY important to score the top, as it will be pretty dry and won’t rise much until it gets in the oven.) Then, tada! Bread.

Frankly I think you miss out on the joy of kneading bread that way, but if it makes the difference between baking and not baking, well… there’s only one choice to make.

So now I’m basically back to baseline. The next legs of learning are going to be getting my sourdough chops and starting to build back up to more interesting ingredient combinations, though I’ll certainly focus more on the former than the latter. The idea that you can take one of the four ingredients OUT of the bread and make it substantially MORE interesting and rich appeals to my sense of minimalism in baking and other hand-art pursuits.

So, start by mixing 1 to 1 flour and water. every day, half it, then re-add more to bring it back up to volume. In a few days it’ll start to get bubbly. A few days after that it should be rising like it was pumped full of yeast. Hopefully by then I’ll have something interesting to post about sourdough.

o/

been busy.

will continue to be busy.

I hunted around for stuff in the boxes a bit today. My main goal was to come across the network backup drive I had that failed a while ago, which I did (power thingie still at large.)

During the search I came across a simple little usb hard drive. One of the three big ones I’ve had in the last four or five years. One I gave to Jenny a few years ago, but the other two should be kicking around and by all rights, should have some of the stuff that’s been “gone forever.”

So I plugged it in, fiddled with it for a bit, and it came online. 250g of my recent past. Old emails, documents, source code, download folders and, yes, pictures.

It’s not everything I was missing, not by a very long shot. But it had a couple of the shots that have been really driving me insane to have lost.

It took about four hours to sort through everything and copy it locally.

See, what I tend to do is have a “mpwilson” directory on my computers. On unixen this is brain dead, as a home directory is a home directory. But on Windows it can take some finagling to actually have it put everything where you want it to go. Then what I do is just back up that directory.

Sitting on this drive were half a dozen ‘mpwilson’ directories, all underneath directory names indicating their machine of origin.

But oh no, that would just be straightforward. there were, in turn, backups of directories in OTHER directories, leading to recursive nightmares full of recursive nightmares.

I made a little graph of which ones were where and by what age, and I created a directory on the local drive called “merged home backup” or something less goofy and certainly without any spaces in the name.

I started with the oldest, and copied them all, from past to current, over the top of their predecessors. So now I have a huge honkin’ mess. But at least it’s all there.

I set picasa loose on it and it started pulling up pictures and it’s face recognition went crazy. (Now THERE’S some technology from the future.)

Tomorrow I’ll traipse through it all and start to really figure out where things are and ought to go. But one thing struck me.

I’d forgotten how cute she was.

Only two weeks until Christmas? It’s amazing. It finally hit me last night that there’s no WAY I have enough time to do everything I wanted to do. Here I’d been sitting, planning this all out in my head, merrily thinking about how nicely it would go along; “preparing to prepare” as it were.

So, after the “oh shit!” moment I had last night I woke up with a vengeance this morning and headed down to the basement. My ears are ringing from the power tools, but it’s getting done. I’d be more specific but this thing cross-posts to facehole and twitter, so that’s right. out.

While my hearing returns to normal it’s time to redirect my effort to the kitchen. Unfortunately between the flood this summer and a backup drive failing a bit before that, I’ve lost a couple of my confectionery recipes.

Most notably a creme filling for tempered chocolates. I had a basic vanilla filling (which I did horrible things to in turning it in to a ginger creme) that was exceptional. It was made with flour and cooked in a sauce pan. Unfortunately I have no idea what it really was. A custard? Could it have been anything else? I have no idea and the clock. is. ticking.

At least I can peel and cook some of the ginger in preparation. That also gives me the ginger syrup.

Biggest problem so far (aside from losing that recipe) is that fresh ginger root up here is hard as hell to find, and when I DO find it, it’s close to $3 a pound, instead of the $1.25 or so from the asian market on Atlantic avenue. Plus the quality is only so so and no supermarket has very much of it at any given time. So I only have a little over three pounds (need closer to 10.)

le sigh

Back to it.

o/

…is something I’m not going to post.

Sorry Cigar Asylum dude ;)

The awesome…

Let the job hunting commence!

In the meantime, sitting at the computer all day, I realize I need something to keep track of my crap. Contacts, schedule, things like that.

I’ve got the lightning scheduling add on to Thunderbird, so I’m giving that a shot. But it wraps so much up into a monolithic application that it’s frustrating. I want the desktop environment itself to be more interactive and immersive about how I’m going about my day.

It could just be a matter of using win7s widget thingies, who knows. But I keep coming back to my “desktop server” idea. Though as time goes on it seems more like “series of scripts running on the desktop with a database and web server kicking around in the background.” So that may be a bit easier to implement.

Time to start noodling around I think.

…and even my job here!

So yes, today is my last day. Right now my primary motivation is getting to the Patriot Saloon, chillin’ with Patience behind the bar (err… that is chillin’ while Patience is behind the bar.) Then maybe I’ll hit another stop in Midtown on my way back home. I’ll get home (which hopefully will be uneventful) and go to sleep.

Then I’ll let the naked terror of my situation start to sink in.

Here’s a disturbing piece of hilarity:

(hat tip to Velociman)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone o/

This was going to be the follow up to last night’s post. But (ok, well technically it is, but… oh nevermind, keep reading.)

I got home tonight at about 9:30 and was not about to spend 4-5 hours screwing around with dough.
So I’ve opted for another tactic.  I’ve added the rest of the ingredients as I mentioned yesterday, but instead of letting it rise normally I’ve put the bowl in the fridge.

Doing a retarded overnight rise was going to be my next run through (and it may be yet. That’s worth doing in isolation. The difference is noteworthy.) But fatigue and an 11 hour work day with almost six additional hours of commuting has gotten the better of me.

But tomorrow I’m working from home, so I’ll be able to have some fun with it.

Skippy over here was knocked for a loop on his subway ride to GCT tonight.

So last time I went through a simple 60-3-3 bread.

What that means, I glossed over entirely to satisfy my smug sense of smugness.

Simple unenriched breads have precisely four ingredients:

• Flour
• Water
• Yeast
• Salt

When you measure by weight (as you should all be doing) you can express those basic ingredients and their proportions with percentage of weight relative to the amount of flour you’re using.

For instance:  A cup of flour is about 140 grams.  A single loaf of bread is about 3 cups, 420 grams of flour.

So the recipe from last time is a 60-3-3 because “given the amount of flour, there is 60% of that weight in water and 3% each of yeast and salt.”

We wanted to make one loaf so that’s:

• 420 grams of flour
• 252 grams of water
• 13 grams of yeast
• 13 grams of salt

I’m sure this seems like an unmitigated pain in the ass.  But think about what this affords us.  I want 2 loaves or 4.  No guesswork. No referring to formulae or recipes at all. Just “4 loaves of 60-3-3.”

Now as for this specific formula, 60-3-3 makes a pretty run of the mill bread.  Nothing wrong with it at all. It’s the kind of thing I make most of the time and it’s a spectacular base to get good at and use as a launching off point.  Plus you always know what you’re getting.  It gives you that foundation that frees you to experiment.

So today’s start was a bit different.  I’m using the same formula and quantity, but I’m changing process.  Process is, hands down, entirely more important than ingredients.  Seems ludicrous but you can take those four ingredients in exactly those proportions and produce WILDLY different breads, in taste, appearance, texture, everything.  And you can do this by changing things that seem not to matter. 

What I’m doing is building this bread over two days, making a pre-ferment as a first stage and letting the yeast grow for 24 hours or so, before adding the rest of the ingredients and then treating it like I’d just mixed it all at once right then.

So how do I do that?  In making a preferment I like to keep it simple.  The more I have to remember the more I’ll forget.

Salt, among other things, tends to make for a relatively inhospitable environment for yeast.   Not enough to do serious damage of course, otherwise bread recipes would fail just about all the time.  It certainly needs to be there (you only forget salt in bread once.)  But why make the yeast work harder than it has to.  So I leave it out of the preferment.

I’m left with flour, water, and yeast.   I want the yeast to grow, but I’m going to want to add flour to it tomorrow (along with the salt) to give it some final oompf before baking.

The preferment procedure, in special “so easy I don’t ever forget it” form is this:

1. Calculate the proportions and quantities of the finished dough (as though I were making it in one shot.)
2. Use a quantity of flour equal to the quantity of water
3. Add all the water
4. Add all the yeast.
5. mix and cover.

So we have a single loaf 60-3-3, which as we saw above is 420-252-13-13 (flour, water, yeast, salt.)

Given the above steps that means we’re going to put the following in a bowl:

• 252 grams of flour
• 252 grams of water
• 13 grams of yeast

Mix it up, cover it and let it set.

Tomorrow we’ll add:

• 168 grams of flour (420 – 252).
• 13 grams of salt.

And then take it from there.

I asked myself that question, as I try to every day.  Usually the answer is “DAMMIT!” as I get up and do something crazy in the kitchen or down in the wood/machine shop.

The kitchen aid is going now with a basic bread dough.  For some reason baking bread isn’t like riding a bike.  I’ve lost it almost entirely and I’m here to tell ya, I used to be pretty damn good.

So going back to basics I measured by weight and came up with:

420g All purpose flour (king arthur, which has the approximate protein content of other brand’s bread flours.)

252g Water (tap.  We’ll see how that goes. I suspect the water in this place is hard enough that it interferes with the baking process.  This in part tests that.)

13g Yeast

13g Salt

That’s it.  The only four things you need for bread (and if you’re making a sourdough you can legitimately say “you didn’t add any yeast” as I do.

I added the water cold and it’s 4:59 now.  We’ll see what happens.  It will probably take quite a while to rise.

Experienced bakers will recognize this as the one loaf 60-3-3 formula.

I have to go set that to rise as I can hear the kitchen aid starting to complain about the strength of that dough.

… couple hours later …

Ok, that rose nicely in a hot water bath.  I pulled it out of the bowl (came quite nicely) and folded it two ways before putting it on a greased pan.

For a final pre-bake rise I took a large bowl and filled it with hot water, then placed the pan on top of that, turned a bowl upside down on top of the dough, then put a towel over THAT. (makes more sense than it reads.)

Left it there for a half hour, preheated the oven to 375 and in it goes.

…

Ok, because of the residual water on the bottom of the pan (from the steam of the water bath) the pan popped in to shape when it got hot enough, causing the final burst rise to collapse somewhat.  NOT a big deal, it was a little more dense than I like.

I pulled it out after 45 minutes or so (lost track of time) and it ‘thumped’ very hollow.  I let it cool completely (the toughest part of bread baking, keeping your greedy little hands off of bread that’s still hot.  Seriously, let it cool to room temperature if you care about the result.  It matters quite a bit.

Finally bit in to it at about 10:00.  It’s amazing how creamy it tastes, for an unenriched bread.  Definitely a solid success.  Time to stop using volume measurements again.  This was almost too easy.

Next will probably be the same thing as 2 part assembly with a preferment.

It’s 10:52 as I type 10:52 and I’ve just gotten out of the shower and plunked my diminishing arse in to bed.  I looked at my phone, which in 6 and a half hours will serve as my alarm clock, and saw three missed calls and two voicemails from a coworker from the last 20 minutes.

This isn’t news.

I’ve been working since a little before nine this morning, scrambling to get a project release-worthy two days before release.

Now, if I were to read that on a professional developer’s blog I’d be shaking my head in disappointment.  Fret not, when I hit publish in a few minutes and go to read it myself, I’ll be doing the same thing.

My piece of this pie is about a thousand lines of perl that tie together several other scripts and transfers files all over hell’s half acre.  Why, you might quite reasonably ask, wasn’t this tested before?

It was…as far as I could.  However, there is a tremendous amount of administrivia associated with such a thing.  Filenames and directories, drop locations and credentials, database names and line endings.  Dozens of bits of minutia that can have rough place holders, but need to be in place in order for the thing to work.

The whole thing is a bundle of external operations.  I’ve mocked out what I could, but doing so assumes everybody else is right.

So for, and I assure you I am being quite literal here, four meetings a week, for approximately six weeks (might be five, but I think it’s closer to eight) I’ve been pestering people for the credentials, environment setups, the things I need in order to do a full circuit test.

All to no avail.

Last week we had an inter-team meeting that was partially a pow-wow to organize the release details for the release that’s supposed to be in two days.

Finally I said (paraphrased) “Guys look. We keep floating along like there’s not a problem. But this script hasn’t been tested all the way through yet.  I need credentals (et al) otherwise it’s just a bunch of mocked out system calls. I’ve been saying this for more than a month. Now what do you need from me to help get this stuff done, because I’m stuck without these details, both for test environments and production.  At this point I have to say, AS A MATTER OF PROFESSIONALISM, that we don’t go live next week, given the current state of affairs.”  I was getting a little warm under the collar, but I wasn’t being profane or even uncivil, nor was I calling anyone out.

I added “Does anyone NOT understand why I am concerned? I feel like it’s just me.”  Silence. Dead air.

Two instant message windows appeared on my computer screen (the meeting was a conference call) with various permutations of “GO MIKE!” and “EXCELLENT!”

My boss in a later team call said that none of this was such a big deal and we shouldn’t worry about it so much.  She specifically added that it was definitely NOT worth working late over.

So here I am, two days before release, having cut off (at 10:30) my coworker on the phone, telling him I’d try one more thing then go to bed, as it’s getting too late for this, having been at it since 8:30 in the morning.

Now what have I been doing all day?  Well, besides filling in details, I’ve been making buckets of last minute changes to accommodate the fact that other people’s scripts aren’t written to spec.  Filenames are different than what they told me to code to, datestamps don’t match.  In short there are a raft of simple normal problems that should have been caught and dealt with weeks ago.

In addition there have been two direction changes…today.  We’re not deploying in standard well-known locations, but sending the scripts to someone to run manually.  So all those sub-script locations need to change.  The algorithm for deriving a unique key was based on sensible, but incorrect assumptions. Why? Because when I asked “what’s the algorithm for determining the unique key I need?” I was met with silence.

And what’s going to happen when I go in tomorrow?

Prediction: “Mike, why are we having so much trouble with your script?  Coworker stayed up until one in the morning fixing your code.”

People, you tell me. Tell me what I should be doing differently.  This is a systemic problem at this organization. I’ve been fighting these battles since my contract began last February.  Yet I come off as a hothead.

So I found out recently that in the great NAS crash of 2010, I lost a tremendous amount of data that I was always sure existed in multiple locations. Not the least of this was most of my pictures.

I’ve been scrambling through boxes tonight looking for anything that might be useful, old cd-rom backups, old hard drives, anything. But I fear it’s really all gone.

Always keep redundant backups.

UPDATE: Well, I found a box that had four old IDE hard drives in it. I’m transferring now. God only knows what’s on them. Hopefully something. I’ll dump the entire things on to the local drive before indexing.

I remember the moving frenzy and how I threw out all those old unmarked cd roms I’d burned over the years. What a maroon.

So yesterday my brother was accepted in to full communion with the Catholic Church.

He was baptized, confirmed, received his first communion and then married; all in under two hours.

All within about two hours by two wonderful human beings, Fathers Barnabas and Bernard of the Capuchin Franciscans with whom he has a significant and deep connection.

Then doofus here had to give a toast.

I’d written it through a few times (3 1/2 really) and eventually I just tore up everything and winged it.

It seemed to be well received. But it was abundantly clear how blindly panicked I was about it, so it’s tough to sort out the genuine responses from the attempts to put me at ease about it.

I was talking with Father Barnabas who said that in his sixty years of being a priest, he had never seen anything like it.

Then we drank some mamajuana, smoked some truly incredible cigars, drank a little whiskey, ate a lot of food, talked a lot of nonsense and laughed an awful lot.

Still though, what an amazing day. I’m just glad I was witness to it.

“Throw yourself always upon the sword of life as though you were already dead.”

- Nyx Smith

From what is most likely the dumbest book I’ve ever enjoyed.  Haven’t read it in 15 years.

Ok, this is weird.

Today I’ve been getting hits for “Shuffling Squirrel” and “mucsle squirrel” which presumably is “muscle squirrel” mistyped.

People, they’re on the move and we have to be ready.

Since I don’t have a defense plan on file for a shuffling squirrel attack I’m going to default to zombie uprising contingency #4.

Battlestations people, this is not a drill.