You may have noticed a dearth of posts recently, that's mainly down to my playing with Wordpress as a potential new vehicle for my blog. I want to do a little more with this site than I did before, so the decision is as much driven by the availability of plugins to add toys to the site as it is the wealth of wordpress themes which are available.
"Ning confuses me". Me too. Although I've found something pretty cool. When you do a community search for Bread, the first community you find is one about breast enhancement. Random!
Most of the bread we eat is home baked. There are two reasons for this. Firstly I enjoy making bread, it's just plain good fun. Secondly it tastes better, a good sourdough just can't be bought around here - you have to bake it yourself.
One thing you notice with homebaked bread, even with a robust sourdough, is that it seems to stale more quickly than a sliced white. There are a few reasons for this, mainly to do with strange additives which are in mass produced bread to make it seem fresher. You don't want to know about those if you eat a lot of that kind of bread, you'll just feel bad.
Bottom line is that keeping your bread fresh is a simple matter, boiling down to two simple rules.
RULE ONE : Fridges suck
Do not put your bread in the fridge. Unlike everything else you eat, which is preserved by the cool of the fridge, bread actually stales QUICKER in the fridge. It's all very sciencey to do with chrystalisation of starches. All you need to know is that bread goes stale quickest at 5'C which is probably exactly the temperature of your fridge.
RULE TWO: Plastic bags rule
In addition to the sciencey chrystalisation part, bread can dry out which makes it seem staler. Put your loaf in a plastic bag! The useful pic below should help you understand what this looks like!
Follow my two simple rules and your bread will last longer. I promise.
This week I've been trying a few of Boaters flavoured coffees. I usually don't like artificial flavours, but for some reason I'm getting hooked on these.
Might not seem to be an experiment, but honestly, for coffee purist freaks like me, trying Chocolate Marshmellow Coffee is an experiment and a half.
technorati tags:coffee, boaters, flickr
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This is the future. I honestly hope I never have enough free time to build one of these things, because I would. Oh yes I would!
Making plates every time you need them sounds like fun, but where does the left over pasta go? Appeals to the materials chemist in me though. A hack to make this work with old black vinyl records would be sweet though.
technorati tags:project, inspiration, cookware
Camcorders lying in cupboards are a waste of atoms AND electrons. So this afternoons bakeathon needed to be documented, speeded up, and shared with the world.
Here is the recipe:
5g fresh yeast (or about half a 7g packet of dried)
400 grams of water (or 400ml - its the same thing)
150g of Strong wholemeal flour
450g of Strong white flour
about 5g of salt
15g of olive oil (not your good stuff, just olive oil)
Mix everything in a bowl, knead for 10 mins, rise as a single lump for an hour, then proceed as shown in the video, raising the individual buns for about 30-45 mins depending on how warm your kitchen is.
Bake at 220C for 12 - 16 mins
(based on a truncated version of a recipe in the excellent BREAD MATTERS: The State of Modern Bread and a Definitive Guide to Baking Your Own
UPDATE - Dale over at embedmyvideo has been kind enough to put this up for video of the week. Go look!
It's been snowing for a few days and our garden is amazingly full of birdlife this afternoon. A few attempts with the SD9 to capture a decent pic have left me annoyed and frustrated. A quick surf for some bird photography ideas pops up a Make video for a webcam bird table recipe.
It may have to wait for slightly more clement weather, but I have to build one of these, push the feed through some image / face recognition software and play with recognising the robins from the finches. Flow that data into some tally software and I can build some cool bird table traffic data that even Bill Oddie would be jealous of.
