Geek with Knives: Techniques 206 and 207 - Country Bread

Ok, so my first post wasn't from the Basics chapter, but I have an excuse. I've been baking bread for a while, using recipes from The Fresh Loaf. Admittedly it was a different recipe and I've only ever done pan loaves, but I felt comfortable diving into the the bread recipes. Also, we needed bread.
As I learned from The Fresh Loaf, real French bread has just four ingredients, flour,water, yeast and salt. This recipe has exactly that, though in larger quantities then I was used to. I wasn't sure my mixer could take it, but then I noticed that Jacques uses the same mixer and my worries were lessened.
This recipe starts with proofing the yeast and mixing the water with 2/3 of the flour in the mixer, then adding some more flour, and then turning it out on to the counter to work in the the final amount of flour. After the usual kneading and rising, you have bread dough (if you want the exact details buy the book!). Thus ends technique 206.
My bread took quite a while to double in size. I think I killed some of my yeasties my overly hot water. I felt really bad about killing the yeasties because they make two of my most favorite things possible, beer and bread. I said a quick prayer for my yeast friends and moved on.
In the next technique, 207, Jacques shapes his dough into baguettes. I lack the proper couche and sticks to shape baguettes properly, plus I find baguettes useless for my family, so I shaped my bread into boules.
Now boules are supposed to be the easiest of bread shapes to do, so I felt they were in my grasp. I watched a few videos online (thanks Fresh Loaf!), and shaped my loafs into what I felt were appropriate boule shapes and left them to proof. When they (finally!) got to where I needed them to be I put them in the oven to bake.
Now this is where things go completely sideways. My earlier forays in to bread making taught me that professional bakers use steam-injecting ovens to get that really crisp crust, and the best way for a home baker to get that crust is to put hot water in to a hot bread pan when the bread is first put into the oven. This enters into my story because my oven was set up like this: bottom rack, bread pan, middle rack, stone pie pan, bread.
After setting things to baking and relaxing with my favorite yeast-based beverage, I started to smell something burning. I went to investigate and found that my bread had risen into the upper element of the stove. After a bit of swearing, I got the bread yanked out of the element, the oven rearranged and things baking again
The upshot is that one of my loaves came out with a "face" as is shown below.

Also you can see that the bread also managed to push out the back, rather than through the slashes I made in the top. I think I didn't seal my seams very well.
I did get one decent looking loaf out of it. Look at that one little hole!

Overall, the bread tasted really good and made great toast and sandwiches! I will have to keep working on this technique, the fam really liked the bread and with today's bread prices it makes economic sense. I will have to work on a whole wheat version, because that's what the Webb family is into.

Well that's it folks!

TTFN
Geoff

Geek with Knives - The start of my culinary journey

Late last year I began to take up cooking. Not as feed-myself-obtain-sustenance type of cooking but really learning how to cook.

I've been able to cook for several years. My mother made sure that i wouldn't starve when I got my first apartment. I can get myself through most recipes without too much damage to the kitchen (Shelly, my lovely wife, may beg to differ on this point). But I felt like I didn't know the fundamentals of cooking. The how and whys of cooking seemed lost to me. Cookbooks didn't help. They were full of recipes but no answers to the questions that I had.

One day, was reading The Amateur Gourmet and Adam mentioned that Tom Colicchio learned to cook from Pepin's "La Technique" and "La Méthode", not at a culinary school. Adam also mentioned that those two books had been combined and released as "Complete Techniques". At that point I had a flash of inspiration, (Adam also had the same inspiration) I would work my way through all 309 techniques in the book. If it was good enough for Tom Colicchio, its good enough for me.

So as a part of this blog, I will be chronicling my adventures as I try each of the techniques (including the one on brains). I will not be working them in order, though I will be emphasizing the techniques in The Basics first. I usually only have time for these pursuits on the weekend, so the postings will come about once a week.

Saw Vise Part #1

I spent a portion of the day making a saw vise. A saw vise is used to hold a saw blade so that it can be sharpened. My saws could really use some sharpening, I thought my arm was going to fall off after ripping two of the long boards. I made the the vise pieces from an old pallet that I took apart. The rest came from some scraps left over from my saw bench project.
So far things are looking good. I got all of the parts cut out and the joints cut out. I'll do the final fitting and glue up tomorrow.

Back at it

It seems that about once a year or so, I get the bug to do something more creative. Judging by the dates on the previous posts, that time has come around again.

This year is a bit different though. About four weeks ago my Grandmother passed away, and this past week I went down to here house in Los Angeles to help my father settle the estate. A couple of things really hit me. The first was how much useless stuff we seem to accumulate in this life, the second was the only stuff that anyone cares about is the stuff we create.

My grandmother was a painter, though I think she enjoyed the study of art more then the doing of it. She had a number of canvasses through out the house. Hardly any of them were signed. I guess she knew who painted them, so why sign them. I personally think that is a mistake. Those paintings were a part of who she was and those who look upon them should know who created the, We should leave our mark upon this world, and be acknowledged for it. I hate the idea of passing through this world without a least an acknowledgment of my part in it.

My grandfather was a photographer. Grandma still had all of his old camera and darkroom equipment in the closet off the study. He also had a bunch of photographs of his days during World War II. In addition he had a ton of old family photos and slides of his travels.

The short of this is that I took for myself some of Grandma's watercolor equipment and Grandpa's camera and darkroom stuff. I want to use it to pursue the creative and artistic sides of me. I plan to spend a little time everyday expressing my creative side, whether it is drawing, painting, photographing or simply writing in this blog. Fifteen minutes everyday, that is my plan, hopefully something good will come of it.

Playing with pinholes

Pinhole cameras that is.

I've wanted to play with pinhole cameras for years, but I never got started. The mess and expense just seemed too far out of reach. A few weeks ago I saw a video on the Makers vlog tthat made everything sound so simple that I decided to just dive in. I gathered up a shoe box, a soda can and some black duct tape and got to work.



In about 15 minutes, I had a camera. I darkened the bathroon as best I could, loaded some photo paper into the camera and headed into the world to make art. After making the exposure, I mixed up the chemicals and developed the photo. I was amazing to see the image come up in the developer. It actualy looked like something. Not great art by any means, but a recognizable image. My dauther Sabrina, and I spent the rest of the day running around taking pictures and playing mad scientist in the darkroom. Here are two of the images.




During the week, I read all I could about the subject. I learned that I should really create an exposure chart for my camera. Normally this involves measuring the pinhole diameter and doing some calculations. Since I didn't have a slipe projector or scanner to help me meacure my pinhole, I decided on an alturnative method.
I took a series of exposures and deturmined that 30 seconds was optimum for that day. The day had a sunny clear sky so using the Sweet 16 rule I figured my camera is about f/185. So far my method seems to be working. Here is the output from those tests.

Building games with Phrogram

I've been playing with Phrogram for the past few weeks. I absolutely love it. I've been a software developer for many years now, and I've always wanted to create a game to play with my children. I've done simple stuff like a math game to help Sabrina with her multiplication, but never a full on graphics based game. I guess that my time for programming projects outside of work is so limited that I really don't want to spend hours spelunking the depths of DirectX, just to create a simple game. Phrogram takes care of all of the DirectX stuff so I can concentrate on the game itself.

When I was younger, I had an Atari 2600 (Wow, am I dating myself). Each Atari game console came with a game called Combat. I loved Combat, especially the tank games. Each player had a tank and you roamed the screen shooting each other. My father and I spent hours playing together. So when I found Phrogram, Combat was the game I wanted to create.

Within a hour or so, I had a joystick controlled tank that you could move around the screen and shoot at a target. Remember this was a new system for me to learn and that hour includes creating my tank graphic. Try that with straight DirectX!

I had a problem though. Phrogram only supports one joystick. What was I to do? Create an AI of course! I did some research and was starting to write the code when Phrogram suddenly came out with support for multiple joysticks. Happy Day! I hope to have the game finished up this weekend. I'm still going to build that AI though.

In short, Phrogram is gets you huge bang for your buck. If you want to create some games without a huge time investment, try it out.