A Bread Making Disaster of Sorts

You know I like...no...LOVE making bread. I have been at it for a while now...last year actually, and have had many, many successes. I make it so that we have our daily bread everyday as fresh as humanly and machinely possible. I bake every other day on an average and sometimes more often than that. Most of my loaves are hand formed and not confined to a bread pan, just shaped after the kneading and final rise and put in the oven at 400 degrees for about 25 minutes. That's it...no proofing of yeast, no exact measuring of flour, salt, oils and butter or water. I use a Bluesky 40 Euro bread machine to do the mixing then I remove the loaf and proceed toi use the folding method for 4 turns of 45 minutes each. l'viola! Bread. Using my current supply of ingredients it has been just about impossible to fail, good loaves with each baking cycle have been the result...until yesterday. What happened yesterday? A giant break with traditional success is what. The bread as made in the usual way...lets do it for you here:
1.25 cups H2O
2 cups Bread Flour
1 cup Semolina flour
2 teaspoons dry yeast
2 Tablespoons sugar or molasses
2 Tablespoons butter or Margarine or Olive Oil
3/4 Tablespoon fine salt
That's it. Nothing more, no seeds, no nuts, no wholewheat...
results...a brick, doorstop or bookend or wallhanging...but nothing to eat and enjoy.
Oh yes I am one to not throw stuff away...so I tried to pretend it was "alright" this morning when Kelly ask me for some to have her smoked salmon with...but the telltale density running throught the loaf told the tale...this is shit!
So today, an hour ago, I proofed the yeast to check if it was still with the living,
weighed the flour and much more carefully assembled the ingredients as I have never done in the last few months. We will see soon what hath my hard work wrought.
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Later...All ok, she is arisen! The proofing at 104 degrees F caused quite a foam after about 10 minutes. I added the other ingredients and turned on the trusty dough cycle of the Bluesky breadmaker. 1hr and 30 minutes later...I have a loaf of quite risen bread! Cool...now I just need to sneak it ever so carefully into the 400 degree F Champion oven (My Baker's Pride-like gem of 200lbs of cast iron and enamel coated with Nansulate) and wait 25 minutes for a result. Careful now...don't drop it! It's jelly like slack condition makes it quite a case for collapse if one isn't careful. A beauty! It's portrait is the image above...so my arrogance had gotten me away from the basics a bit too far, now I know better once again. Patience!
Bye for now!

Drugs, How Screwed Americans Are

So today we ran off to the local pharmacy with our little list of drug needs, we both are highly medicated in these our senior years. One of the drugs I take daily was just prescribed about two months ago after my run in with simvastatin side effects. It's name is Fenofibrate 160 mg tablets. In the US just before we flew into Paris I bought 90 tabets, cost? $142. Our Canadian supplier could not get them to us before we left thanks to my ineptitude at scheduling when I notice I'm once more in low supply. They would have been only $79. Today when C brought the tab box out from her many drawers chock full of modern drugs and thier equivelents she anounced the price for 30 each as $10.75 US. Thats $32.25 for 90 tablets 160mg each. Less than half the Canadian price and less than 1/4 the US price gouging. We are so screwed by these drug companies, it is infuriating to say the least.
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Home again I turned to my sourdough starters and had the requisite 2 cups of bubbly foamy "son" and proceeded to add flour, honey and finally water and salt and create a dough mass to await folding all afternoon long. The outcome was 2 loaves, one baked on a sheet pan, long and misshapened. The other in an iron pot with a lid as I've done before. Both came out beautifully, one went to D&W, the Scots and the other will be our sandwich loaf for the next few days.

Happy B-Day MacKenzie! and a Great Bonding Activity for Fathers and Daughters and Others

Today is our little 2 year old GC's B-Day. She is a most cute, most bright, most engaging little character. Born to Aimee and Joe she has her Mum's good looks and the energy of both of them.
Her sister, Kaylee, loves her dearly. She just about didn't visit this world though as her Mum developed Preeclampsia and it was progressing rapidly about 7 weeks from her Real B-Day to be. They used to call this condition something else but I've forgotten that too, precious...aging, just precious. Anyway here's a link to get the real low down on this most dangerous and potential killer of new Mum's and babies.
http://pregnancy.emedtv.com/preeclampsia/preclampsia.html
So they took the baby by C section and though small at 3lbs and with the effects of the preclampsia, hospital bound for several weeks, she is a wonderful gift today!
Anyhow we will all eat Pizza at Mary's Pizza Shack and have a cake and all the mess that means. Great for kids and fun for us too.
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The rest of the few days I've paused from the blog have been spent reading about sourdough bread, the starter in trivial detail and modifying what I am doing somewhat. I sent a self-stamped envelop to Carl' in Maryland and he's returned to me a small package of his live starter. It looked pretty flat in the clear plastic bag but once freed and into a small bowl, warmed a bit and with a tablespoon of flour and a slightly shyer amount of H2O added and mixed well it came to life, burp! That was 5 days ago. I've divided the Mum Starter in two, forming a working starter that will actually become bread while preserving the original Mum, it's safer that way and less likely to end up getting polluted with some other ingredient. Mum stays a virgin, get it?
The Baby gets played with and will become a loaf, not today but probably tomorrow after I feed it two more times. To get Carl's famous starter stuff here's what you do; go to his site, read the blurb and ship off your SSAE, you won't be disappointed. Here's the link:
http://home.att.net/~carlsfriends/
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Then yesterday...Audrey came over as Kelly left as I needed the help of a strong woman with the mattress swap onto "my" man-bed (HA!) to try out our old marriage-bed mattress instead of the one that came with the bed frame. Audrey dragged and I pushed, Ooof, up the stairs we went with it and plopped it down on the box springs and wow, what a difference! A decent bed! Any you know...I didn't wake up once last night! Not once! And that had gotten to be a regular thing. Mattresses make a difference. Then in an ultimate step-father - step-daughter bonding moment we took on the task of changing the oil in her Toyota Echo some 13,000 miles since it was changed last...by guess who? Yes, me. 13,000 miles no less! Synthetic oil it was but ever so black and well contaminated now. I found the drain again (it was a year ago since I climbed under the beast, cute as it is) and proceeded to use a breaker bar to get enough leverage to pull the damned thing loose again! Grrrrrr. Loose, I unscrewed it and placed the old black lid from a boat battery box underneath to catch the black goo in all it's glory. Soon it was well draining and...what's that? Oh no! A FLOOD of oily mess...EXON VALDIZ!!! In our driveway!!! Shit! Merde! Something! A bag? Audrey rushed off to get some plastic bags, the mess continued to pour out onto the concrete of our previously clean driveway. Another container (no), rags? (no), paper towels (no), damnit...what a mess...and it has to be stopped before it gets into the drain system and reeks havoc with the local sewer system! (Think EPA, Corps of Engineers, State Lands Commission, City Hall, Barrack Obama!) Oh my God, this IS a disaster. So cat litter to the rescue! Having moved the car down the driveway and into the street...yes,yes with the plug IN and the filter changed and new oil added, the now thoroughly blackened driveway is fully exposed for my dear wife and Republican neighbors to see! So for the next two hours we scrubbed (more bonding), power-washed, soaped, scraped and removed MOST (but not all) of the slimy black goo. Such fun on a Sunday afternoon. And along comes my sweetie Kelly, all cheerful and pert, took no notice of the dark stain and pulled her car right in and covered the 20 foot long spot. Nice. And she's not even mad. Bonding activities are so very rewarding.

Sourdough Adventures or The NHL and I

http://www.nyx.net:80/~dgreenw/sourdoughfaqs.html

The National Hockey League and I have ONE thing in common, we both have PUCKS.
Yes, they use them on ice, hitting them with sticks into a small net, big men dressed in huge over sized costumes do this to a paying audience. I, however, have learned how to MAKE PUCKS and I'm damned good at it too! It's called Making Sourdough (insert ANYTHING) Sandwich Rolls. The end product could easily replace a NHL Official Game Puck if it were the right color, black...which I can do mind you.
Sourdough is the subject, if you are a baker you know of what I am speaking. I live in San Francisco, the best breads baked hereabouts that fetch GOOD money are Sourdough thises and that's. The Puck cokes in when one is not patient or has not the needed experience to accomplish the task. Mainly it takes patience. Not Hockey, no one is patient there at all...they hit each other for chrisakes, tear out hair and knock out teeth! My Pucks could do the same believe me. I am, if nothing else in this Life, PERSISTENT. I made my own sourdough culture about 2 months ago now and have been baking breads, normal yeast breads and flat breads in the ensuing time. I made Sourdough Sandwich Buns a week or so after creating the SOURDOUGH STARTER...a joyous chemistry and biology experiment if there ever was one.
It goes like this:
Use a non metallic bowl, into it place the following 2 ingredients:
A cup of bread flour (I like the starter's final consistency better)
A cup of water (tap water here please, no mineral water or bubbly crap of any kind)
Cover with a piece of light cotton cloth or a piece of cheesecloth. Allow to sit open to the air in your kitchen, how long? As long as it takes to become a foamy, bubbly sour and alcohol smelling goo. You now have a Sourdough starter. Fancy huh?
Not very and the results can be stunning or...Pucks!
So, where's the yeast? you might ask, knowing that w/o yeast bread will not exactly be eatable...useful for hockey, baseball or frisbee, you get the idea. Well...yeast is all around you, spores, the Brits call them "bits"...so yes, yeasty bits are all around us, all the time...in the air no matter how fresh it might be. Molds, bacteria, yeasts, birds, flies, bats, flying squirrels, helicopters...all in the air flying around. Some of the smaller ones...the yeasts, bacteria and molds will fly right through that cheesecloth onto the surface of your fine starter mixture and set up a small homestead for themselves. Not knowing about birth control or perhaps because manufacturers haven't come up with rubbers that small...they reproduce at an alarming (18 - 24 hrs!) rate and do IT over and over again, consuming the flour as food and giving off (pooping I guess) alcohol (hooch) and carbon dioxide gas (yeast farts). There you have it, end of science lesson for now. Trust me, there's more of this exacting science stuff but you'll have to wait a bit. Here's a web site if I bore you too much:
http://www.nyx.net/~dgreenw/tableofcontents.html
Basically that's all you do to get it started, but there's more...lot's more, don't be scared now, it's not bread yet!
Ok, so you've let the beast (the starter) chomp on flour overnight or all day or both. Now remove 1 cup (8 oz, 1/2 pint, 1/8 kilo) of the foamy bubbly stuff and either use it in a 1 lb loaf (small) recipe or toss it down the drain. Flush. Now,
add back one cup of flour and one cup of water and mix well. Cover with the cloth again and wait another 18 - 24 hrs. Now...you can either put it away for future use in the refrigerator (yes it freezes well too) but before it can be used it MUST get back up to room temp. When refrigerated feed weekly else the little yeast, bacteria and molds get all skinny, stop farting and your culture will settle into a boring long winterized period, not dead but not active, no sex, no fun even for these creatures. Now to make a loaf of sourdough bread from your actual home-made starter.
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Remove a cup of starter from the goop you have on hand...the momma starter. Put it aside for a minute and feed Mom...1 cup of water, one cup of bread flour.
Now put your cup of starter in a bowl and add:
1 1/2 cups of flour, 1 cup of water and mix together. Cover the bowl and let this mess work for 8 -12 hours. Get busy...NOW! (Start this in the morning and you'll be able to take an afternoon nap, else...
When the surface of your new batch is bubbly and has an odor like vinegar or alcohol and is quite pungent...you're ready to go! This is the stuff the bread is actually MADE FROM. The Child from the Mum.
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The MUm is now eating in the refrigerator while the child is hanging out in the kitchen alone...except for you, Babysitting. The child is growing and will soon be a frothy, bubbly, awful looking mess with a clear liquid (hooch) on top of the doughy stuff. This is good. Once it is at this stage you can begin making bread...did I say that before? Hmmm
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A Real Actual Sourdough Bread Recipe, call it Dad.
In your finest clean and wonderfully deep mixing bowl combine the following from your store or larder:
1 cup (8oz., 1/2 Pint, 1/8 kilo) Child Starter Stuff.
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups Bread Flour ( NOT All Purpose!)
1/3 cup warmish water
Mix, fold, spindle and mutilate til is a nice firm loafy thing. Knead for 10 minutes. Put it in a butter greased (ok, use Pam if you wish! Jezzz) bowl.
You want the dough a tiny bit sticky...not a lot sticky but just a surface stickyness that doesn't stick to you finder like goo does but is still unwilling to let go of your finger without sticking...got it? It's hard.
Shape your loaf into whatever form you like, Sandwich buns shape is nice and makes a lovely Puck too! Or a loaf, round just sitting there or in a loaf pan. Cut it, helps it to form a decent interior and fill out the mold if there is one.
Allow to rise...now that is a sentence and the basic reason why my first efforts at making eatable hockey pucks turned out the way they did. This homemade culture is slow on the rising, yes...they eat and they fart but it takes time and temperature...
80 degrees F (26 degrees C) is a nice temp for the rising cycle. How long? Til it doubles! Not triples...just doubles and it could take a long, long time poopsie. Depending on many variables it could double in 4,6,8, 10, 12 or even 24 hours! That's the reason my batch went to hell and created bookends, doorstops and hockey pucks. I wasn't patient enough! You MUST be patient with this sourdough bread making.
It works when it works and takes time. Get started NOW! Then a nice red wine and maybe a risotto with mushrooms would be nice. Comfort food for the baker.
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The Quiet Before 2009

After Christmas...what? Currently the scene in the US is everyone has quit buying anything but food and gas to get to work. Christmas sales were a bust according to the newspapers and CNN and the Black Friday of two days ago came and went similarly.
The average American has no where to go but up now, as we live in DOWN. Kelly and I are working on the little house, putting it back to a decent condition in order to rent it again. We were going to move in it but that was nixed by our ever thoughful Audrey who said to us "How will you fit?" She was right of course, it has about 1000 sq, ft maximum and we live almost within the confines here in The Swamphouse of 2500 sq. ft. with furniture to match. What with storage fees for the excess and stuff we won't/can't/shouldn't sell there's no payoff that's positive that she could see and she's right. Thus we are hard at work scraping off layers of paint, patching nail holes and caulking tub and showers and sinks. Next comes painting of the woodwork and the walls to suit her...yes...Audrey wants to live in it! How the heck did this come about?! I dunno but that's the way it looks today. I think she'd really like it too, she'd be surrounded by our friends Jane and Wayne, Bob and Marsha and the denizen's of the Olde Town area such as they are. The date? 1 February, a bit over a month off. Meanwhile...work goes on.
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My bread was a hit wherever it found itself, people really liked the nuttiness and crunch of Lute's Nut and Whole Wheat Bread. I delivered 5 loaves on Christmas Eve and heard nothing but praise afterwards. Amazingly simple this bread for something that tastes so complex. Today I made an Oat Bread for our neighbors across the street and for Jane. The second one is in the bread machine now on dough cycle. It takes a couple of hours to go thruogh 2 rises and the kneading it requires before I can turn it out, shape it and pop it lovingly in a 5X9 tin for baking. It is good bread. I've ordered some high gluten bread flour online and will have that to experiment with someday real-soon-now.

Roast Turkey! No...BBQ Beef! What? Outrage!

The #$$#@! Stove Story, well it goes like this...I personally with malice and forethought killed the lovely self-cleaning GE Signature in-wall stove by totally FRYING it's gas igniter device to the point it could not even be replaced! No shit! The self=cleaning feature always worked so well, I didn't do it often but maybe once every two months. I LIKE evenness in stoves so had inserted a large 18" square 1.5" thick ceramic kiln shelve as a heat sink. I did this on the very bottom and it was the maximum size I could fit in the box that was this particular stove. I enjoyed it very much as it was capable of >500 degree temps within a 1/2 hour and at that temp I could do quite good homemade pizzas and breads. The large ceramic surface was the cooking surface and heatsink for the oven little did I know that it had blocked the heat vents from the gas burner underneith. I used it often and did the self-cleaning feature about every other month to cleanup my messes. Last March I made a terrific mess in the stove with a lassagna thaT OVERFLOWED IT'S DISH and thus did a cleaning cycle afterwards, the one that fried the ignitor and left the stove unable to light at all. Damn. I called in a repair guy when I couldn't free the ignitor from it's receptacle. He worked for 2 solid hours trying to extracate the bloody ignitor thing to no avail. I paid him his 70 dollar fee and gave up on it. So we went to France knowing we would replace it when we got back. In the first week of October we orderred a new replacement oven, one very similar to the now dead GE only made by Maytag. It was to come from Michigan. It arrived about three weeks after it was orderred and upon Kelly's inspection the rear corner was bashed in, not just a little, it was totally uninstallable. So we refused the thing after calling the company and reporting the damage and the trucker left with it. Goodbye stove, goodbye pizzas. The company reassured us that a new one was being orderred and we would see it in about three more weeks...in time for Thanksgiving. Sure I thought and thus planned the meal I told you about BBQ'd beef instead of turkey. Time went on, two then three weeks and then another big rig arrived. This time was different, the driver saw the box from the hydralic lift gate and said himself..."You gunna refuse this one too I imagine", sure enough, the entire front end, glass doors and all were smashed and hanging inthe crate. Shit. (French word Merde...mare-duh). So I signed the slip of paper he presented and wrote as I did a few weeks before "Refused" across it. This time I called the company and asked them to personally inspect the bloody thing there before it got here...and double crate it and I would happily pay for such, the reassured me that the WOULD do these things THIS time and here we are. I will BBQ the beef tomorrow and hope the damned thing arrives sometime before Christmas in one piece. We shall see.

Bread Making Madness

I grew very tired of 4 dollar whole wheat bread at the supermarket. It was preposterous. So we checked out bread machines on the good ol' iNet and learned quite enough to make a sound purchasing decision. We struck out to search the local used goods thrift stores for a suitable one in good shape. The first we went to had none, not a one...the next had one but it looked like it's best baking days were twenty years ago so on we went and at the lovely Thrift Center on West Texas Street in Fairfield we found one that looked as though it had never been used! No manual but we figured correctly that the manual would be available on-line from the manufacturers site. Kelly then found a dynamite whole wheat recipe and away we went to make delicious, homemade whole wheat breads for far less than the 4 dollar price the market wanted. Cost per loaf, about $1.35. Cheap these days.
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Then I gre curious about the making of sourdough breads. Why? Well here in The Bay Area sourdough bread is endemic, found everywhere in all kinds of forms, bagettes, rolls, pizza dough, bagels (really!). Thus I have undertaken the creation of my own starter ( 1 cup of bread flour, one cup of water ) and at this very minute have the beginnings of tonights hamberger buns becoming dough in the bread machine. So far it looks good, nice round all togther wonderful shape. Next to allow it to rise in the machine, drop it out, shape it into rolls and bake. We shall see. Sourdough, according to experts, takes much patience, more than ordinary bread making as the yeast is slow to burp thus making the bread slow to rise. I'm going to let it rise in the bread machine itself as it maintains a warmth that is beneficial to the rise time. Home after a quick trip to the store and a round about town to check out foreclosure-looking sales posted on houses...not many about at this time. The dough just sat there while we were gone, I saw no doubling or maybe even 10%...but it is pretty and I hand cut the dough into quarters and formed them to make hamburger buns, we shall see. May be hockey pucks when they are baked.
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Sometime later...
We have hockey pucks! Rise? What rise? Except one that had trapped air in it and blew up to a small round object that looked deceptively like a loaf of bread sort-of.
Alas upon sawing it open the hole was discoverred and the texture was that of so much flour and water cooked to a consistency of hard rubber. So much for sourdough bread making for the Unthanksgiving lunch upcoming this Sunday. Back to whole wheat for now.