A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

I’ve known about this for a dog’s age. But I’ve always assumed that everybody else knew too. Just in case, here are two awesome “German guy doesn’t understand” videos.

I mentioned at some point, probably towards the beginning of last week, that I’m working at coming to sourdough from “the other direction.”

I’ve been working with a “no knead” technique of keeping dough retarding in the fridge, and letting the initial rise in the oven take responsibility for it’s final rising action.  It’s been working very well in general.

But I’m really unhappy with the crumb.  The crust is delightful. The crumb is just too tight for my liking. It’s fine. Nothing normal people would complain about. But I need more.

So I’ve been experimenting a little bit with final rising, oven temperature and such and I’m just not getting far.  A couple things seem to be working a little, but not enough that I can say what they are.

However.

The flavor of the bread I’m coming out with is improving markedly with every single loaf. I’m really quite surprised.

The general procedure that leads to this almost looks accidental, but that it’s exactly what I’m driving for.

Take a double batch.  Mix it (just mix it. Don’t worry about kneading it.) Let it rise in a bowl for a while and then put it in the fridge.  Wait a couple/few days.  The longer the better up to at least a week, though I assume you could get away with more.

Take the bowl out, and split the dough in half.  Bake half of it as described elsewhere.

The other half goes in a mixing bowl in which you put another single-batch of ingredients, thereby replenishing the dough.

Then repeat the same way you started. (let it rise, back in fridge, etc.)

That all is well documented. No rocket surgery there.

So then what’s all this crap about sourdough?

A sourdough bread is a bread made with “naturally occurring” rather than commercial yeast.  If you mix flour and water together and let it sit, it will start getting bubbles after a couple days.  Split it and replenish it every day and soon you’ll have sourdough starter.  Where’d the yeast come from?  Ah… therein lies the magic.

Then you use a portion of that starter in your bread recipe, and don’t add any yeast.

I’ve never really been able to make that work.  The proportions and procedures have always been just a tad elusive.  I wondered to myself, I wondered… “Self?  What if you just made the whole damn thing sourdough from the get go?”  I just couldn’t see a reason why it wouldn’t work.

So in addition to the procedure I described above, I’ve been making one additional modification.

With every iteration I’ve dropped the yeast I’ve added by one gram.  So a 60-3-3 with 420g flour ends up with 13 grams of yeast.  I’m now down to 9.

I believe that what this is doing is transitioning to naturally occurring yeast, rather than having the dough start over from scratch every time.  Though it is possible that once I started with commercial yeast, that it’s simply the same strain from thereon out. I don’t know that much about the biology of yeast.

But what is undoubtedly happening is the flavor of this dough is maturing and strengthening.  It doesn’t taste like a sourdough by a long shot and indeed I think it will be a couple weeks beyond the point where I’ve completed weaning it off of commercial yeast before it does.  But there’s a flavor there that just can’t be achieved in a single baking cycle.

It’s really quite something.

Now I just have to figure out how to get an open crumb.  I’m thinking I’ve got some more playing around to do with the oven temperature, baking surfaces, hydration levels and protein content of the flour I’m using.  I’m very happy with everything else about my bread so far.

epic.

I’m taking all advice on gotchas and the dark occult corners of C++ as they show up in interview tech outs.

My C++ skills are solid. I’m very confident. But I also have a history of choking on tech outs, then spending days screaming at brick walls because “I knew that.”

I’m working on a nice happy pure c++ threaded and networked app to keep my chops up. Not much of a challenge. But I’m not sure it’s going to be enough.

So what’s the nastiest, gnarliest C++ question you’ve given or received in a tech out?  Come on. Let’s make a list of these.

Ms Powell inspired me, as is her largely unwitting wont, during a brief conversation we had on Twitter yesterday to put to pen a couple threaded topics that have been on my mind.

I lend my hand every year to preparations for a Christmas Eve party.  We pull out the stops and, for a crowd upwards of twenty adults (and attending cherubim) we pump out dish after dish after dish until people are begging us to stop; tearing up as they stuff more elegance into their gaping maws.  Among the attendees for the last couple years is a romantic interest of an extended family member.  He’s six foot one, thin (gaunt really), wears Elvis Costello glasses, pops his collar, and is completely translucent.

He may be the single dullest person I’ve ever been in a room with.  But he may be the most interesting. Nobody knows.  Nobody knows because despite the seriousness with which every one of the adult males in attendance has taken it upon themselves to try and engage this fellow in conversation, we have all failed utterly. 

Nobody knows what he does for a living, what he’s interested in, what he listens to or reads, if he CAN read or where he lives.  He evades polite conversation like a mime.

We started out being interested.  Anyone who shows up is met with a roudy hurrah, a smile and a raised glass as they walk in the door. People contribute color by their presence, so more the merrier. But now I fear we’ve given up on this fellow.  He spends hours keeping the children company, refusing all invitations to come sit with the guys for a cigar, scotch, egg nog, beer, ginger ale or fucking wine cooler.  It is now obviously active disinterest.

I now regard this fellow with nearly open disdain.

I was in a conversation with one of my best friends.  It was late in the evening, sitting on the porch with a fire going, deep in our cups.

We were talking about dating; more specifically about what Eddie Murphy refers to as “salad eating bitches.”  You know them (even if you haven’t dated them.)  People who are demure to a fault.

These are those people, like our buddy above, with whom you can have a conversation and learn nothing about them.

And I said “I don’t get it. You have to be excited about your life.” And I watched it hit him in the head like the proverbial diamond bullet, not doing more than giving voice to something that had been kicking around in his head, to be sure.  But doing no less than that either.

Now, it’s one thing to be shy; to be pathologically terrified of what someone might think if you accidentally say the wrong thing.  It’s sad to be shy and I spent years that way. I get it.  But at some point even the shy become comfortable enough to talk. So it’s that point where all this comes in to play.

People. You have to be excited about your life. I, for one, have ZERO time in my life for people who aren’t taking a big bite out of this world and coming away with something they’re interested in.  Before I get a lot of “well, not everybody is like you” (and I should bloody well hope not. This world would be in flames.) know that I don’t mean you have to be massively successful or great at what you or exceptionally worldly.  But be who you are and embrace your identity.

The second internet date I ever went on was with this fabulous woman whose name I probably forgot 10 years ago.  We only went out once, but I’ll never forget the evening as long as I live (the irony of “I’ll never forget whatsername” is not lost on me.)  We met at Cowgirl’s, drank ourselves stupid and could. not. shut. up.  We were wide-eyed and thrilled about everything that came up. We talked buddhism, astronomy, computers, all kinds of madness.  It was a wonderful time.

I suppose some people are just dull. I also don’t mean “everybody’s a unique beautiful snowflake.”  Well, I suppose it is true. But if you haven’t excavated that wonder within yourself then you’re just another ham sandwich with extra mayo and a lot of work to do in the mirror.

Ya know, you don’t have to be happy. But you have to take what is yours and embrace it. You’ve got to decide and discover who you are in this world, even if it’s only in your own head, and own it. 

I fear people are being taught all too well, that they should be humiliated at their achievements rather than humble about their place in the world.

This brings us tangentally back to the twitter conversation.

She had just said she was a great photographer and baker, which I applauded and added:

We’ve all got plenty of stuff to be humble about. But we fucking rock where we fucking rock. False modesty is for cowards.

Never let it be said by someone that they “don’t remember much” about you.

Back when I though a gaming blog was a good idea, I posted this. It’s just… well, watch.

If you’ve been following along my bread baking posts you’ll be interested to see this.

Below is a picture of two (well, one and a half *urp*) loaves of bread. I want you to look at them for a bit.

So what do we have here? The one on the right is a notably dark, relatively flat loaf, without much to say in the way of character. You can see the scoring expansion going across it. Generally the crust is pretty, but nothing to write home about. The rise is low and it’s not particularly interesting as a whole.

Now, what about the other one? It’s nearly exploded out of it’s scoring (which was done in a cross at the top and a few more short scores around the side as well) like something from Aliens. In fact it looks an awful lot like an Irish Soda Bread. There’s a lot of interesting variation in color and texture. It’s light and rose high.

So… why bother showing this odd couple together?

Because my chillins, they are the exact same loaf of bread. There’s nothing in them but flour, water, yeast and salt (65-3-3 for those paying attention.) The proportions are precisely equal, they were both baked in a 450 degree oven for about 45 minutes with a roasting pan containing 6-7 cups of water, on a non-stick cookie sheet.

Well that’s all well and good. But what about the inside?

So WHAT THE CRAP!?!

This is the difference a subtle tweak in baking process can make.

Both of these loaves are from a rotating batch of retarding dough in the “artisan bread in 5 minutes a day” theme (though with a tweaked procedure.)

The crappy looking (but perfectly fine eating, aside from being awfully dense) loaf I let come all the way up to room temperature before baking. The one on the left (the fluffy goodness) I did not.

In fact the rough (correct) procedure (once you have dough in the fridge and all) is:

1. Take the dough out of the fridge
2. form it on a well-floured cookie sheet
3. dust the top heavily with flour
4. set a timer for 20 minutes (do NOT cover the dough or put it in an unusually warm place, as you would for normal bread rising.)
5. when the timer goes off, start preheating the oven to 450.
6. pour a bunch of water in a roasting pan in the bottom of the oven (I generally use 6 or so cups of water.)
7. set a timer for 20 MORE minutes.
8. When the timer goes off, score the dough (razor blade is best.)
9. Put it in the oven.
10. set a timer for 45 minutes
11. at the end of that time, take it out and put it on a cooling rack
12. LET IT COOL ALL THE WAY DOWN TO ROOM TEMPERATURE!
13. Feast

The difference. The ONLY difference between those two loaves of bread is this:

Step 4 I let go for 40 minutes, and in a traditional “bread rising warmth” environment (read: 85-90 degrees.)

That’s how sensitive this can be.

So why did that happen?

Here’s my hypothesis: 65-3-3 is a little wetter than the 60-3-3 I’m usually aiming for.  This means it’s tough to get it to rise “up” and instead it just sorta spills out.  Combine that with the fact that the dough has a dry ’skin’ on the outside, resisting it’s impulse to expand (with this method, expansion from yeast activity is mostly done in the oven.) My guess is that those few extra minutes allowed it to soften as it got up to room temperature and it rose by spreading (since it couldn’t lift.)  And, by the time it go to the oven, it just didn’t have enough rise left in it.

I could be wrong. But that all makes sense to me.  I keep repeatably tight watch on my procedure and ingredients.

This has been a perfect object lesson for me in the importance of keeping track of everything you do.  If I didn’t remember (read: if I hadn’t written down) that I had let Sunday’s loaf go the extra time (it was an intentional experiment) I’d have NO idea what happened and would be frustrated beyond all reason.

Success doesn’t mean shit if it’s accidental.

But making what might be the best unenriched loaf of bread I’ve ever produced?  Yeah. I busted my ass for that.

Delicious.

This, even fewer…

I suppose I should have some recapitulative blurt, seeing as how time has ticked over and all.  But I’m not really sure where to take it.  The last month has seen me thinking a lot about the past, as we look to our successes to validate our present.

You can learn a tremendous amount about people by watching where they get their stories about themselves from.  How far back do they go before they are lit up about their own achievements? Where are their glory days?

Fortunately different aspects of my life lead me to go varying distances in to the past.

As for work, well aside from the romance of having worked at IBM (which is 75% geek romance and 25% regret that I didn’t pursue what seemed to be negotiations for a full time position), I really only look back as far as 5 weeks to my work at JP.  It was insane in that I wanted to do so much more there.  I was obscenely underutilized, but the project was a waning “sunsetted” system so there was really nowhere to go.

Regarding “my personal life” (ahem), well… the less said about that the better.  Two starchy dinner dates in almost twice as many years. And THAT’S gotta change.

Most of my friends up here are married with the better part of a decade on me.  There’s just no cross-pollination of social circles going on.

But I’ve got to figure out where to go out here and what to do. It’s not like I can plunk my ass down in a bar and make small talk.  I DRINK when I’m sitting at a bar and there’s no subway that leads a couple blocks from my front door.

I did join a bunch of “singles stuck in bumblefuck” meetup groups and watched their emails go for a while before an ill-fated movie trip (which I may or may not have blogged six months ago or so. If not, I’ll get to it. It was a scream.)  So finally I got sick of watching this stuff go by and signed up to go on a “beginners hike” next week.

This is not to say that I’m a beginner. I spent a lot of time and energy trudging around the woods a while ago. But I don’t have any reasonable hiking gear, boots or such. So if I’m going to go in long underwear and jeans, I’m gonna have to settle for something easy.

So there’s that.

But, BUT!  From an artistic perspective?  I’ve now got a rudimentary machine shop and woodworking shop.  I’ve been baking like a fiend and spending an awful lot of my evenings and weekends covering myself in sawdust.

Once more gifts are made I’ll be posting pictures and details here and over on the respective sites I’ve joined for those crafts (Lumberjocks and bbs.homeshopmachinist.net).  I’m teaching myself slowly but surely and I’m making some truly godawful messes.

It never bothers me much though, being wrong on the way to learning something new.  Weeks of failed bread baking were just signposts on the way to remembering how to do it.  The buckets of sawdust I have and the really crappy jointing is teaching me more than “getting it right the first time” possibly could.

So in short?

Job search is a righteous bitch.

It’s WAY too cold to be sleeping alone.

But I’m making some really neat shit and it’s only going to get better.

Happy 2012 peeps o/

Here’s what came out of the oven today. It was a simple 65-3-3, half of a double batch mixed yesterday and retarded in the fridge:

As a part of my experimentation what I’ve decided to do is keep a double-batch in the fridge at all times. Then, when I take half out to bake, I mix in another single-batch to the remainder and put it back.

For the first few iterations (which I expect will be a couple/few days apart each) I don’t expect any difference in flavor at all. But it’s going to start to creep in there.

My thought is that I may then be able to wean out the commercial yeast, leaving a pure sourdough in it’s place. But we’ll see.

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.