baking: does it come easily to you?

While eating it, we discussed adding ginger or lemon zest next time but I think it might overpower the matcha. But maybe will make the loaf just a completely ginger, lemon, tumeric thing instead. The ingredients were so easy and simple to whip together.

I am just realizing now that the matcha loaf may have kept us up last night.

Maybe.

I've read a lot of articles and forum conversations on the internet about baking bread now. there's the fresh loaf, which has a kind of gentle person-to-person bonhomie that used to characterize much more of the internet and now exists pretty exclusively on narrow-interest websites. not to be confused with the perfect loaf, which i'll come back to. i've watched a lot of youtube videos. i mean a lot. how to pre-shape. why these big caves appear just under the crust. how much to care about the proportions of your semolina / bread flour dusting mix. if that's how you're doing it, instead of cornmeal. or brown rice flour. some of the people i feel like i know. there's a guy on youtube who runs his own baking school in provence. he's got a whole series of instructional videos where he faces the camera, alone, beaming his signal into a harsh world, a mournful oryx supplicating to humanity. what has happened in his life? he probably used to be a research librarian. he took a hard left. now he's running summer classes with certification for future professional boulangers. and doing youtube videos. there's one video where a couple of other bakers appear and demonstrate their batard-shaping technique and it's practically mind-altering because it breaks the format (e.g. this guy, alone, just killing the game, the first couple of minutes translated into english, the rest not for some reason).

other videos are practically ASMR. amateur enthusiasts taking it to some realm of pure aesthetic. watch this video and tell me it doesn't have more in common with paint-mixing twitter accounts than laurel's kitchen.

and there's the perfect loaf. this guy. all his recipes have absurd ingredient measures, like 732g water and 39g rye. i would be amazed if he didn't have scrum-master certification. i'm pretty sure he's an acolyte of 'tartine bread', a book by superstar san francisco bread dude chad robertson. there seems to be a tendency with this style of breadmaking to head relentlessly for some vanishing point of high-protein, extra-strong, impossibly fluffy bread, with a lot of emphasis on how much 'bloom' you can get i.e. that thing where the loaf looks like it's exploding up through the crust and how nicely you can control the way it looks. which is fine, but there can be a kind of 'how do i shot windows xp install' vibe to it. and the perfect loaf guy (though he's far from alone in this) lays out these kind of reassuringly prescriptive recipes that tell you exactly what to do, step by step. but there are too many steps. kitchen temperatures, what flour you bought, and other factors make a nonsense of this kind of certainty. to be fair to him though, he's incredibly posi and encouraging in the comments and replies a lot, and tends to admit a lot more flexibility than his articles would suggest.

i've gotten into whole wheat (i.e. wholemeal) sourdough. it tastes amazing. it's the opposite of the aesthetic that's become associated with tartine bread. it doesn't rise as high in the oven. it's denser and has low strength, on account of all the bran in there interfering with the platonic ideal of long, straight unbroken gluten strands. but goddamn it's amazing to eat. so anyway, i'm reading up, chasing youtube rabbit holes, and lo and behold mr perfect loaf has a whole thing about whole wheat! i read it and it's not very enlightening. then i see he has another page about whole wheat sourdough and i happen across a hint of this guy's life. i love this stuff. when an internet-tipper illustrates their tip with an anecdote that reveals more about them than they realise. read the second graf of this article and try not to crack under the existential ennui.

i'm going to post the graf in question because maybe even the perfect loaf shall pass one day.

“Why don’t we ever have good ol’ sandwich bread?”, I heard my wife recently whisper to herself in the kitchen. This wasn’t the first time I’ve listened to such a statement, and scattered comments like these got me thinking back about that sliced bread I had as a kid. Nostalgia turned to motivation as I felt urged to develop a pan loaf with many of the same characteristics but 100% sourdough, and with somewhere around 98% fewer ingredients — you know, just flour, water, salt, and yeast.

TO HERSELF IN THE KITCHEN

The type of bread that I like is not anything like the type the bien cuit/tartine people love. I am very much a 'pas trop cuit' person. Your perfect loaf guy link did not come through. I am wondering who it is.

I have a bread person/friend that sublets my apartment and when I am there I sometimes feed the sourdough and hear all about the thriving population of ambient yeast now residing in a corner of my kitchen. Sigh.

https://www.theperfectloaf.com/whole-wheat-sourdough-sandwich-bread/

hmmm, bread people are a whole other thing. I have a circle of friends around r!ck east0n who is popular in the tristate area and who I am always amazed when I see him written up in big publications. But I kind of dig how previous ocd activities like record collecting have turned into bread or cheese making or wine people. It's the same type of obsessive focus.

indeed it is!!
i have no interest in cooking this way but other people obviously do! i hear there are pizza people as well as bread people.

Pizza people have it worse bc getting more heat than a residential oven is more critical to getting the results they want

bread baking is complicated! the Tartine Bread cookbook has like 35 pages of instruction (including pages of pictures) for making basic country bread. It's hard for me to believe in retrospect that my mother and father were so into the process. I guess you need a family of people to bake for to make it worth it

pizza person seems like next-level bread person

narrator: it is not actually complicated

however that didn't stop me from taking a day-long sourdough class at e5 bakery like the metropolitan dad i am

absurd ingredient measures, like 732g water and 39g rye.

My response to that is. When did they last calibrate their scales and do a gauge R&R study?

<3

The most Ed response possible <3

My bf got Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast for his birthday and the giver SWORE that her bread came out perfect on the 1st try using the most basic recipe in the book. So let's hope he finds a way to get the good rise & texture he wants and stops baking overly dense doorstops and throwing them away.

I could launch a YouTube channel using six sigma black belt statistics to critique YouTube bakers but I think it would be both unpopular and trolling. I’ll stick to my half arsed sake reviews in Japanese in insta.

Also not exactly critiquing from the high ground of scientific perfection in baking here.

flour the paddle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZnS77l79PY

to speed up my levain build i've taken to starting up a movie with a particularly intensive video codec on my mac mini and putting the bowl on top

however the legendary e5 bakery in london takes the opposite approach. they retard their levain build in the fridge for 24 hrs!

what movies does your levain like best

Pizza people have it worse bc getting more heat than a residential oven is more critical to getting the results they want

― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), Sunday, September 15, 2019 10:56 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

i know a pizza person and he had all these techniques to max out the oven in his old apartment. one time i was over there and he set off the smoke alarms and got a decent-sized high rise evacuated.

then he moved and bought this propane-powered outdoor oven with a rotating surface and a flame jet thing to char the crust.

basically pizza people are out of their minds.

Made apple cobbler last weekend, so easy, so good

I made this Instant Pot cheesecake this weekend (still need to top it with ganache) but as Paul Hollywood say, I got the taste bang on but the texture is curdled. I'm looking online for reasons why that happened -- did I overbeat the batter/eggs? I suspect that my wet ingredients may not have been room temperature (left them on the counter for maybe an hour?).

I would never machine beat cheesecake ingredients as the recipe advises. Gentle folding is always the way to go.

i use a mixer on the regular, havent had any isses. plus my puny dinosaur arms could never hack handmixing lol

maybe your cream cheese and/or eggs were too cold? cheesecake ingredients should be room temp - especially cold eggs can make the mixture seize & curdle

We made yogurt biscuits (ie American biscuits) the other day and they turned out well. I also have a recipe for yogurt pancakes, and I'm excited about being able to make these things on a weekend without having to leave the house to buy milk (which we never have around, unlike yogurt).

I forgot to mention that this was my second time attempting the recipe, and the texture was much smoother the first time (and I'm pretty sure I used an electric hand mixer then as well). Sounds like ingredient temperature is the leading culprit -- though the thought of leaving dairy products (esp. yogurt, which I subbed for the sour cream) out on the counter for 2 hours sounds dodgy.

Cultured dairy has already been left out

The live acidophilus cultures introduced into previously pasteurized milk should pre-empt the niche that any 'wild' bacteria might try to muscle into. Then you're going to bake them, too.

leaving dairy out on the counter for many hours and then eating it only makes you stronger. I've left cheese out for days (on purpose) and it's fine.

Did you use the same berry jam both times? At first I was thinking some acidic thing was making it curdle.

I've left pizza out overnight and then had it for breakfast the next afternoon many times and I'm fit as a fiddle

Is quiche Lorraine considered baking? It was gooooood

i took a macaron class once and I remember them saying a lot of people in the US have difficulty getting it right because they refuse to use aged egg whites and it's pretty important when making macarons.

i have left cream cheese out on the counter for an entire day & lived to tell the tale

you can get eggs up to room temp by putting them in a bowl of warm water for 10 min

how tf do you age egg whites

People get so paranoid about food existing outside of the fridge for any length of time, unless it's moldy, it's fine imo.

there seem to be different methods online, but basically just leave them out for a couple of days.

xpost yeah cheese is a lot better when you can leave it out for awhile until it gets "sad". refrigerate, repeat, refrigerate, repeat. Eat.

Did you use the same berry jam both times? At first I was thinking some acidic thing was making it curdle.

Actually I'm not. I used a rasp jam the first time, this time I'm using a cherry jam.

unless it's moldy, it's fine imo

For most of our evolution humans were required to distinguish between 'safe' food and 'bad' food, using only our sense of smell, taste and visual clues. Turns out, we're like most animals in being pretty good at it. I would say that visually perceptible surface mold is just one clue and often not the best one. But when you use all the clues provided by your senses and trust your innate responses to them, you'll be spot on 99% of the time.

After a night chilling in the fridge the texture has gotten smoother! Yay. Still, next time I’ll definitely make a point to let the ingredients warm to room temp.

unless it's moldy, it's fine imo

if it's moldy, cut the mold off; it's probably fine underneath

words to live by

my neighbor gave me some sourdough starter and i baked my first loaf this weekend. it turned out pretty decent for a first try, with a refrigerated starter and the most basic recipe possible basically (pics here: https://www.instagram.com/p/B4sdOHRlbN6/). i don't want to get crazy about it, like measuring out very specific amounts of ingredients as mentioned above, but i'm looking forward to experimenting.

for now i want to get the flavor more sour and the inside less dense. then move on to different ingredients/flavors.

wanna share your recipe?