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
Blogged with Flock
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.
Bread is still king, but sometimes you need your flour to take a more sauce friendly form. Thumbing through Giorgio Locatelli (here) the pasta looked so good I had to make some. But how to dry it. A nice cantilevered arrangement of heat rack, wooden spoons and refridgerator worked pretty well.
Magnets are on my mind a lot justnow, as I'm looking for time and resource for a few projects that are rattling around in my head. Meantime the odd magnet google is all I get to do. Guess what I found! Pointless but fun, normal service resumes next week.
Randomly surfing for bready inspiration I found old school sensible cooking from Deliaonline.com somehow irresistable. Especially when the intro to one recipe starts "The poet Pam Ayres once said... ". Joy. Her wholemeal loaf has the most bizarre first step ever - warming the flour in the oven. Why not just add hotter water before the yeast is added?
Resistors, I knew all about them 15 years ago. Shout a stream of colours at me and I'd be shouting it's rating back at you before you'd had time to check your book yourself. Nowadays my brain is too full, too tired, or (more likely) too lazy. I'm also too lazy to pin something on my wall as a quick reference. Well, actually I'm not - I'm just too lazy to actually get around to making one, printing it off and THEN pinning it to the wall.
Thankfully a nice, colourful, reasonably pretty printable calculator just went up at the make blog. The maker has a pretty sweet fluffy blood cell on his blog aswell. Trust me - it's cute.
Link>> (via>>)
Another recipe based on Bread Matters, Arkatena bread is a taste sensation. Dense, but with a 'holey' texture as you can see below, the perfect soup bread.
Not one of my own, but this has sparked a couple of ideas for me so I thought I'd share the link. MAKE blog has a link to a computer chip trivet. Just the thing for me to rest my red hot baking trays on after a hard saturday morning bakeathon.
The tiniest of tiny builds - a simple LED + battery spaceship. Excellent for pretending tiny aliens are circling your head in a spaceship with one huge headlamp.
LEDs were pennies each from a Hong Kong ebay seller, batteries were the same but from China. Much cooler stamps on the package from China btw.
Bread machines rule, but the bread has a habit of all tasting much the same. New year, new inspiration to eat healthily led me to buy 'Bread Matters' by Andrew Whitley.
Cracking book with a LOT of scary stuff about shop bought white bread. The following documents my attempt at Scottish Morning Rolls, which turned out tasty.
Very tasty.
This is barely a project - but fun nonetheless. Combine two cool things (well 3 if you include the fridge - although without an ice maker I doubt the fridge would pass the cool test) and 20 minutes and you have a cooler fridge.
The magnets have arrived!
3mm doesn't sound big, but these things are TINY. Excellent fun, but tiny. I spent roughly an hour trying to build a cube out of them - total waste of time. If I ever succeed I'll post pics. In the mean time - a magnetic snake...
