WOW. The world appears to be going to shit, but what is actually happening is that we’re seeing everything under a microscope now. That racist, rapist President? He’s also dumber than rocks. Or Jim Jones reincarnate, I can’t quite tell and am trying not to dig too deep. Trump is to humans as particle board is to teak. But that’s actually maybe too generous to Trump.
What have you guys been up to?
I’ve been wandering around making food and cleaning up. I feel like I never stop cleaning up. Charlie is shedding non-stop right now and I spend ten minutes brushing her and then vacuuming, only to start to make breakfast and notice hair all over the countertops and take a big gasp in in frustration only to suck more fur into my mouth. It’s obscene. Last week I took a drive to a park by my old apartment and I saw a man shaving his dog in the park. I took a picture because S always jokes about shaving the dogs. Then I realized I had misunderstood; he was only actually BRUSHING it. I laughed harder. There must have been five gallons of fur floating around the park. Ew.
Since getting back into writing via this, I’ve started obsessively documenting stories I’ve been meaning to get down on paper for years. It’s been liberating.
I feel like I’m on a phone call. What else? What else has happened? Everything and nothing?
I had a pasta making zoom call with friends and learned how to make water+flour pasta shapes. That was amazing and very confidence building. Especially after all of these sourdough fails ahahahaha ::crying::.
I’ve read some really good books. Uncaged by Glennon Doyle. A Maurizio de Giovanni noir novel translated from Italian. Chaos by Tom O’Niell. Reread Lizard by Banana Yoshimoto.
And I’ve made food. Endless food. I feel really blessed, truly, by the amount of food. Chicken soup once a week. Cassoulet. We had bagels and lox last week from our favorite bagel shop. So I’ve been laying off making sourdough.
But yesterday, I got the itch again. I checked all of our starters and realized that none of them were ready to go, and were probably dead. So I put out an ISO on our neighborhood forum and within second a neighbor responded. I promised to trade some Meyer lemons (our tree is STILL popping off) and just a few hours later I was in business with a bustling starter.
I decided to find a new recipe that was “zero fuss”. I wanted very clear, very complicated instructions for something very simple and I found them. This woman’s recipe is over-detailed in the exact way I needed. Right down to her recommendation to grease the knife before scoring the bread (and how deep to score it) she gave all the hot-fire tips for a successful loaf. If only I had read them all in the first place. Oops.
The one tip I missed was to use bread flour. Which I don’t have. I made my dough with a random mix of what I had left in bulk bin bags and topped it off with AP. I think in her notes she says specifically not to use heavy flours but TRY AND STOP ME.
S had made some corned beef over the previous few weeks and we had discussed how nice it would be to have a fresh home-loaf to go with my homemade sauerkraut. So I got to it and was excited to work with a starter that was way more active than any of the ones we had made from scratch. I feel as though I were maybe, too confident with this starter.
Bread mixed I threw in the fridge to rise overnight. When I pulled it out this morning it had not risen more than a millimeter. Convinced it just needed some warming up, I let it sit for a few hours before continuing the “folding” process. I reread the instructions from Sylvia Fountaine. “Do not use alternative flours as you will get a dense bread for your first try and I don’t want that for you”. Welp.
I MAY have cried a bit. S may have had to prompt me along, “What do we say to our hormones? No thank you…” for some laughter.
I had a fit, and maybe another, and decided I would try to start another dough, just with AP this time since bread flour is all sold out. I would throw out this dough that had been rising overnight…..but I couldn’t. For scientific reasons, I needed to try. So I folded and put it in its’ final rising shape and then started a new dough.
I baked it a few hours later and WOW. Best loaf yet. Still not quite right, and the flours were definitely too heavy and lacking the right amount of gluten to gain a large airy crumb. But the crust was right, the look was right, the smell was right, and the butter was of course, right.
The next loaf went in several hours later…9pm to be exact…and I was wildly hopeful that it might be a success. When I removed the dutch oven lid 20 minutes in, the top of the loaf had a lovely little dome and was lightly golden. Another 15 minutes baking and then an hour to cool. When I removed the loaf from the oven it still felt a little too heavy to be a good dough….and yet…
IT WAS PERFECT. I SQUEALED. The dogs were very amped to figure out what was going on and were circling like sharks as we shmeared the butter and jammed bread in our faces.
Changes?
- Bake in a dutch oven, at 475F for 20 minutes with the lid on. Then remove the lid
- Lower the heat to 450 for another 15-20 minutes until crust is golden
- When you score the bread, do it with an oiled knife, and score it quite deeply
- Don’t fuss over the bread
- Use some real basic high-gluten flour for easy success.
Et voila!
Love,
Julianne
itinerant gastronomer 