Thundercow 7000

This is about making bread. Bail now if you came here looking for freaky boob porn.

I've been running a project for the past three months that has nothing whatsoever to do with historical figures, history, literature or history and literature or Leonardo Da Vinci. I have been BAKING MY OWN BREAD.

Yes I have. Every three days, just like great-grandma.

Baking bread is a thing that I've struggled with in days gone by. It's claimed that baking must be a precise art; and so The Biker invested in a remote digital read for our oven, and out came the measuring cups, the scale, the teaspoons and tablespoons. (If I had to cook this way for every meal I'd scream.) I've also been taking notes on my progress. A sample:

If you insist on enlarging these prepare to be disappointed. It's gibberish. 

What sparked off this this project was a search for a supermarket loaf that A. was not weirdly squatty, and B. could stand up to a messy sandwich without turning into mush. 

That quest failed because there is no such fucking thing. Modern supermarket bread is made with a batter and never builds much of a gluten structure = squatty, mushy bread.  Do not even get me started on the ingredients I SAID DO  NOT GET ME STARTEDOf course, this being Bellingham, we have lots of craft bakeries, but they want to charge $9.00 and up for a single loaf of bread?! which is highway robbery.  

I did the math, laboriously, and determined that if I used King Arthur APF I could make a loaf of bread for a buck fifty a loaf. That's probably wrong, but it's wrong on my side of the margin so I'll take it; because I spent way too much time trying to figure that out and kept getting different answers and I got frustrated and gave up. Anyway, at a buck fifty, no matter what it looked like, any loaf of bread I made at my level of skill in the beginning of this project would still A. fit in a toaster, and  B. hold a sandwich.  

To the Bat Oven!

Making bread is not laborious or frightening.  It takes me on average twenty dawdling minutes, spread out over the course of a day (this isn't counting cooking time of course, which I should not have to point out, but I did.) It involves no special skills or special tools whatsoever. No, the only difficult thing about making bread, as it turns out, is learning how to factor in Climate and Temperature, and developing something known as 'feel'.

Figure out your own caption. I got overwhelmed.

Some people are born with the knack. I was not. To me, wheat flour is as fickle as working with eggs. It's all been about learning when the dough is right, and the only way to do that is to simply forge ahead and make a metric shit ton of bread and pay attention to things like:

 

What time you want the bread done and baked

How long you need to 'proof' the dough

How to see and feel and smell when the gluten is well-formed, 

how much water the flour wants to absorb on any given day,  

how hard the dough wants to be kneaded, 

what direction the gluten fibers are going, 

what the weather looks like outside, 

the liveliness of your yeast,  

the temperatures of all the environments the dough will experience. 

Probably five or six other things too. 

And to make things even more complicated, I've been culturing a sourdough for the sake of flavor, and it's name is Dave. Did you ever own a Tamagotchi? Culturing a sourdough is exactly like taking care of a Tamagotchi. A suicidal Tamagotchi.

-oh wait you came here for freaky boob porn. Hang on. 

  

The thing is, every single loaf of bread is different. Every single motherfucking loaf. And this, my friends, is because of the damn weather. It has to do with the humidity, the barometric pressure, and the fickle whims of the gods, or France. Consider:

Some take only twenty-five minutes to bake, others forty. 

Some want to rise once (after mixing) and some twice. 

Some take all day to rise, others rise in twenty minutes. Or less. Or more. 

The amount of kneading varies wildly and can be subject to things like downward force, number of quarter turns, speed of kneading (!!!) or lack of proper protein strand development, 

Which could mean it didn't rise long enough  on the first or second rise, or that you kneaded to too long, or not long enough, on one or both of the rises, or that you didn't get all the strands of protein going the same way when you formed the loaf, or that you didn't slash the top of the loaf to prevent 'oven blowout', or not, or or or or. 

Or that you used too much sugar, 

Or not enough.  

Or that you didn't use enough yeast, 

Or that you used enough but didn't allow enough time for the rise - 

AND THEN WE COME TO THE SOURDOUGH COMPONENT which is like FUCK.

JUST FUCK. 

I have been having an excellent time and I am happy.

I am creating a recipe and using exacting standards, and I am winning the battle.  I've been narrowing the gap between expectation and reality bit by bit, every single loaf, detail by detail.  God there is a lot of writing involved. I do research. I read. I get to fuck around in the kitchen, and FRESH BAKED BREAD.  

 

In other news, I just found out that there's a lesbian bar in Bellingham. Dare me to visit.