The Bread Recipe

This recipe is a variant of the popular no-knead bread cooked in a crock pot recipe but has undergone a lot of tweaking to get consistent results and optimum crust, following a few months of experimentation.

I'm not in the habit of posting recipes on the internet, but I get asked for this recipe a lot, so I can just point people here when they come asking.

The original recipe as invented by Jim Lahey and propagated by Mark Bittman can be found here.

They call for 3 cups of flour, but cups are not a reliable measure and the hydration level matters here.

They call for 1 5/8 cups of water. Fine, but measuring to 1/8 cup in normal kitchen measuring jugs isn't easy.

The show 'America's Test Kitchen' did a segment on this bread. They claimed it was hard to get consistent results, so they reduced the hydration a bit and added vinegar and beer for flavour. To compensate for the lack of hydration, they had to knead the dough a bit after the first rise. Unfortunately, this messes up the glorious crumb texture, killing the random big holes that make the crumb so perfect. They also suggested heating the pot to 500F then reducing the oven to 425 when you put the dough in. That bit works perfectly.

I merged the two recipes and did a bit of pre-mixing to easily get the consistency of results that ATK stated is hard to get.

The Rules...

The pot
Use a big Le Creuset Style pot. Do get the metal knob. Le Cruset sell them. I don't think the brand matters. Steam is steam and dough is dough. Neither cares what brand the pot is.

The same dough in a smaller Le Cruset will not work out the same. It probably reduces the rate at which moisture gets out, because there's less volume of air above the dough and the dough is more spherical and climbing the walls, so there's a smaller volume to surface area ratio. The risk is that you get a grey, over moist, tasteless crumb. I get around this by leaving the smaller pot in for five more minutes than in the larger pot. Experiment to be sure.

The Ingredients

• Weigh your flour and liquid. Don't measure by volume.
• 15 oz of bread flour
• 1 tablespoon of white wine vinegar.
• ~3 oz light beer
• Enough water to make the liquid up to 13 oz with water.
• 2 teaspoons of Kosher salt.
• 1/8 teaspoon of yeast.

All other recipes call for instant yeast, but good luck finding it in your local supermarket. I use Bob's Red Mill Active Dry yeast. Yeast lore suggests that a smaller amount of instant yeast == a larger amount of active dry yeast and the active dry needs to be proofed. Whatever the truth of that, 1/8 teaspoon of Bob's active dry works great. Keep the yeast in the fridge. Mine's going strong a year later. In this bread, less yeast really is more. You want the stuff to grow slowly, giving time for enzymatic action to have a go before the yeast gobbles up all the food.

The procedure
This probably could be described as the - "measure by weight, assemble like Lahey, ingredients like Americas Test Kitchen but keep the full hydration" - method.

I follow these steps and get consistent results.

• Put the dry goods in your biggest bowl and stir it up. I use a whisk. You want the yeast and salt to be well distributed before you start the sticky phase. This is one of the important steps that leads to consistent results.
• Pour in the liquid and mix it up with your hand until it is well integrated. Try not to get dough on the rim of the bowl, if you do, wipe it off. You need a clean edge for the cling film.

I use a spatula to clean off the dough club hand and scrape the sides of the bowl down to the dough and push the edges of the dough in, making a more spherical shape.

• Cover the bowl tightly in clingfilm and leave in a warm place for 18 hours.

The typical recipe says leave it in a warm place. My kitchen isn't warm at night and I don't have a bakery where it is warm. So the bowl goes on the counter on top of the dishwasher and the dishwasher is started. The heat from the dishwasher is just right to make the yeast happy. You will thank me for this, because it not only guarantees a rise, but you're sure to have a clean bowl for your Wheetabix in the morning, since you've just run the dishwasher.

You then need to shape it and put it in a proofing bowl.

Spill out the dough onto a heavily floured surface. Other recipies say 'lightly floured' I don't know what they are thinking. The dough will stick to anything. Be generous with the flour underlay if you want to to go easy. Spread it out a bit. Use your fingertips and try to avoid degassing it. Fold in the four sides. Try to pull and stretch a bit as you lift an edge to fold it. The original video shows it well at around 2.23 into the action.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13Ah9ES2yTU .

Here's where the America Test Kitchen version comes back in. Lahey messed with cloths and polenta which seems messy and the polenta burns. America's Test Kitchen lined a proofing bowl (a skillet in their case) with a square of parchment. I just use the bowl I did the first rise in (for less washing). So I do this..

• Spray the parchment with some pam.
• Line the bowl with the parchment, pam side up.
• Dump in the dough to rise for a couple of hours. 3-4 hours rise won't do any harm and will give a bit more lift.

The genius here is you can use the parchment paper to lift the dough into the scorching hot pot and use it to lift the bread back out again when its done. This is a lot better than fiddling with oven gloves.

I had experimented with a range of temperatures and landed on 425 as giving the right crispy, chewy crust while avoiding the over dry, slightly burnt edge. But the lift wasn't perfect. ATK solved this. They suggested heating the pot to 500F, putting in the dough and reducing the temperature to 425 to bake. The initial higher heat gives a better lift. The 425F bake gives a good crust. So do that.

• Heat the pot in the oven for 45+ minutes to 500F.
• Remove the very hot pot from the oven.
• Take the dough from the proofing bowl and put in the very hot pot by lifting it on the parchment. Lower both the parchment and dough into the pot. The parchment acts as a lining to stop it sticking.
• Put the lid back on on the pot and return it to the oven.
• Reduce the temperature to 425 F.
• Bake for 30 minutes with the lid on.
• Bake for another 20 with the lid off. 25-30 if the pot is small.

Do dump in the dough with the parchment and all. If you don't do that, at least put a bit of lining parchment in the bottom. I was happy to find that the bread didn't stick to my shiny new Le Cruset. I was less happy to find that it stuck hard to my less than shiny Le Cruset after I had used it a few times resulting in a torn and non pretty loaf.

Once you have the loaf out and on a cooling rack, do not cut it before it has cooled. Leave it until tomorrow preferably. If you take a loaf out hot and cut it right away, it will be grey, over moist and tasteless. The carry over is important.

The pitfalls...
Here are the things that I can confirm from personal experience, will make your day worse:

Too much water/Too little flour == Wet nasty bread. Do weigh your ingredients.

A small pot runs the risk of over wet crumb. Do use a bigger pot, or leave a smaller pot in longer.

Too much yeast == a small, hard loaf with less flavour. The excess yeast chomps down on all the available food and then runs out. The action is over before any enzymatic action came in to improve the flavour and by the time you get to the dough 18 hours later, it has risen and deflated again.

Too hot == nasty crust. People seem to like recommending astronomical temperatures. Don't listen. 400 gives you supermarket bread. 425 is much much better. 425 is better than 450 and 500 will give a thick, bone dry, dark, semi burnt crust.

The wrong beer is bad. Don't use your special import Theakstons old Peculiar. Do use some lightweight, light coloured larger/pilsner thing from the local supermarket. Quality beer was never intended to be baked.

No lining in the pot == A torn loaf the third time you try, because it sticks to the inside of the pot.

Dead yeast. It's dead. It won't rise your dough. By some quality yeast from your local Whole Foods store. I like Bob's Red Mill Active Dry. It's magic.

The Summary
There's quite a bit of stuff there, but once you've done it a couple of times, you'll find it's just 5 minutes assembly in the evening. Then five minutes operating the oven the next day, with lots of waiting in between. So it's not a lot of effort to produce better bread than you can buy.

Thanksgiving Bake-a-thon

A huge baking session is over. 4 loaves of bread started yesterday, second rise and baking this evening. With some luck these will turn out to be an improvement over all previous attempts, following some tweaking of the liquid mix (the vinegar/beer/water ratio) and resolving on 425 as the best temperature for crust and crumb. We will find out tomorrow.

This was followed by 6 Peter Reinhart style delayed fermentation pizza dough balls being assembled and frozen, awaiting a 24 hour thaw in the fridge to enable enzymatic action, before warming up for the yeast to kick in, thus making a perfect pizza crust.

All done while juggling with wifey for access to the oven, who was baking apple pies and pumpkin pies.

Sharp Cheese

I cut my thumb on cheese today. It is possible.

Fidelity Investments Can't Count Money

Fidelity Investments is a pretty frustrating stockbroker to use. They keep finding new and inventive ways to prevent you investing your money.

Today's example is something of a classic..




Enough said.

Views of the Sky

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, the sunroof in the oversized, behemoth of a truck is functional and fully slidey-back-and-forthy.

At the used car dealer, the sunroof looked bad. It was covered in duct tape. The shade inside wouldn't slide. The dishonest car dealer informed us that the previous owner found it was leaking and so taped it over.

The real reason it was leaking was because the glass wasn't in one piece any more. It was shattered into a million little pieces. These glass shards were not in evidence inside the car, but the were pretty much packed into every raceway, slider track, crevice and corner of the sunroof mechanism.

This wasn't clear until the duct tape and bailing wire cover was removed and I climbed on a ladder to get a view from above. Obviously I wasn't going to remove the cover until the replacement glass came in, since it was that that was keeping the rain out. So by that time the money had changed hands for the truck and we were back on the other side of town.

I'm not bitter. The price was right.

So Thursday, the $400 bit of glass arrived in the mail from a wrecking yard in Nebraska. Filthy and dusty, but in one piece. Of course, shortly thereafter, anyone who set eyes on it proclaimed that I should have gone to so-and-so's yard and talked to so-and-so. They could have got me a better deal. This is all very well, but until such a time as they get off their behind and put their automotive parts on Ebay, Craiglist or something I can find with google, they don't get the sale. This Nebraka wrecking yard not only put the thing up on the web to be found, but included which models and years it fits into. Thus proof that information is not only power, but it gets the sale as well, especially when it is posted on Ebay.

I expect all the physicists, computer scientists and information theorists out there to wince a little, since you know full well that information = a measure of disorder = entropy = heat energy not available to do work. It certainly isn't power in the work*time sense, but bear with me, I'm writing for a lay audience.

Back to the point. Yesterday was spent on a ladder with tweezers, pulling out every bit of glass I could find. I would clear them out, get in the car and move the sunroof back and forth. Each time it would move a little further and push another pile of glass bits into view before locking up. Repeat ad nauseum and after an eternity (time runs more slowly when on the top of a ladder with the neighbor peering on) it started to lumpily slide all the way back and forth. After some more fiddling, it slid almost smoothly, but no more glass to pull out was appearing.

A bucketful of goof off was employed to remove the duct tape glue from around the seal line and the new glass was screwed in. Another half hour of fiddling with the position and it would sit in its hole correctly.

This morning, right on time, the sky's opened and rain, the big, blatty, wet sort or rain came down. So back into the truck for a look-see and yay, it doesn't leak.

So I now have a fully functional sunroof through which I can see the rain and cloudy sky.

Celebrations were held at the McMenamins Oak Hills Brewpub. Wifey had the black bean, tortilla dip thing. I had the hamburger, to go with my new truck driving image. Nestled under the menus and specials was a small slip of blue paper advertising Penney's Gin. McMenamins are doing their own gin now. A G&T was ordered and it turned out to be quite good. Very fruity. Not quite Hendricks, but you can't expect miracles. Kudos to McMenamins for not fluffing it up, like most gin vendors do.

Whole Foods Pt 2

But they don't have Bramleys. Incompetents.

Whole Foods

Food alert: Whole foods has "pork bangers". Four were purchased. They looked a little too thick but I will report ASAP when cooked for breakfast.

From One Extreme to the Other

Not a food related post this time, except for one minor detail. Read on..

For the past five years, I've been driving a very nice 2001 Miata SE.


It has been trouble free and has all the nice bits and bobs, like leather seats and Nardi wood steering wheel. This doesn't haul much except me and one passenger. So we have a 1994 Ford Ranger pickup with no mod cons at all. But it has a long bed and hauls stuff to the dump and from Home Depot with no problem. However, like the Miata, it has no back seat.

This has proved to be a problem when trying to move one offspring's stuff from her student accommodation to a new post graduation apartment. We had to drive up two cars to get around.

So a truck with back seats was called for. The ranger has been spending most of its time with another offspring at a different college so isn't available when we need it. However you can't just go out and buy another vehicle without getting rid of one first. For one thing, it gets expensive. For another, it is the start of a slippery slope at the end of which is rusty Buicks up on bricks on the front lawn.

So the Miata went up on Craig's list and by Friday it was gone in exchange for $10,000.

I had been thinking of a nice, newish, second hand truck with back seats. Say a Toyota Tundra or an F150. I could get one of them for $10,000 and I would be no worse off.

This is where wifey got involved and somewhat carelessly suggested that we wouldn't want to have to replace the truck if we wanted to pull a fifth wheel or a horse trailer or something in the future. We have neither of these, but could hypothetically have one or the other in the future, given a long string of unlikely events all falling into place. So the requirements went from a normal pickup to a 1 ton, diesel behemoth. By the end of Saturday we were home in a 2004, Lariat, 6.0L diesel, F350 with crew cab, long bed and a 4" suspension lift.

So I had gone from driving one of the smallest cars on the road to the largest pickup on the road, skipping over all the normal sized vehicles in between.

These trucks are not cheap. The new price would be about $50,000. The Kelly Blue Book price for this model is $21,000. We paid $15000. So something was up with it and whatever it was, it better had not cost more than $6000 to fix, or we would be out of the money. The randomly selected target was for the fixes to cost less than $3000. This is what is commonly known as a gamble. We will see if it pays off.

After driving it around for a bit and poking around, the problems started to emerge. The batteries won't charge, the tow bar connector was missing, one window didn't work, it smelled of cigarette smoke, the tires were bald and the sunroof wasn't there, the glass was broken. The trip computer was a brick.

So the challenge is on. The charging problem turned out to be corrosion on the terminals and so neither new batteries nor alternator were required. Just a good terminal cleaning and some anti corrosion goop. Score 1 for the gamble.

However tires (or tyres) are going to be next. That should be $800 ish.
$150 was spent getting a replacement trip computer off ebay, which came, was fitted and now works fine.
$400 was spent getting new glass for the sunroof. Again off ebay. But it has yet to arrive.

But for now, the beast is driving. This gets on to the important bit. There is very little evidence to suggest that if I tried to drive the thing through a McDonalds or Starbucks drivethrough, I would be able to come out the other side without serious damage to either the vehicle or the vendor.

So from now on I park and walk.

Lured Into Alcoholism By Hendricks

Preparing for July 4th, we raided the local liquor store and came out with a bottle of Bison Grass vodka (that wifey likes) and more importantly, a bottle of Hendricks gin.

Come July the 4th, we didn't get around to cracking out the gin or vodka and it languished in the fridge.

The problem with Hendricks gin is that it is the most quaffable, enjoyable, flavorful gin on the planet. So 2 nights ago, on finding the unopened bottle in the fridge, I poured myself a pint glass of gin and tonic (lots of ice, so it wasn't really a pint), quickly followed by another.

It was so good that I had another last night. Again tonight I cracked out the gin and had another couple.

I have been a moderate, infrequent drinker all my life. I've got some sort of internal alco-meter that starts pinging at the mildly drunk stage and makes the next drink quite unappealing. So alcoholism is not a problem.

Now I've found a drink so nice that I could drink myself silly with it. Its a good thing I have a brain and can choose to stop. I'm told that my grandfather was an alcy and my teatotal mother was afraid I might go the same way if I took up acohol, but instead I turned into a lifelong moderate, occasional drinker.

So the advice of this post is.. Go get some Hendricks gin. Its so good that it can turn a non lush into a lush. Enjoy.

Now back to the fridge..

The end of travel as we know it.

For the past few years my job required me to travel several times a year and not little trips either, but all around the world for about a week per trip. The last few were..

- Levi, Finland
- Kona Hawaii
- Boston, USA
- Orlando, Florida, USA
- Madrid, Spain
- Athens, Greece
- Orlando again
- Denver, Colorado, USA
- Dublin, Ireland
- Kobe, Japan
- Dallas, Texas, USA
- Vancouver BC, Canada
- London UK, Brussels Belgium, Cologne Germany in one go.

This doesn't include the lesser trips to the bay area.

But this year I've moved onto a new job, starting Monday and it has been a travel cold-turkey.
I haven't been on a plane since April and that was just a non business weekend in Vegas. I am not, for the first time in many years, booked on any flight anywhere.

So this time last year, I would spend my time thinking of ways to avoid getting on planes. Now the reverse happens. Since there is no one telling me where to go, I'm free to choose anywhere and consider going there for vacation. Especially now that I'm not staring unemployment in the face any more.

So the shortlist of places to go is..

Maui, Hawaii. Probably in the winter. I've been to Oahu, the big island and Kawa'i but always on business. So a week in Maui without a job to do sounds like a good plan.

Japan. This time with the family in tow and no conference to attend, to see Kobe, Tokyo and a few other cities.

Botswana. It looked very nice on the #1 Ladies Detective Agency. No other reason.

New Zealand. I've never been South of the equator.

India. Don't know which bit. But the curry should be great.

Cuba. It's about time they started flights from the US and quit with the restrictions.

Wifey probably has opinions. We shall see..

Have you ever met an unemployed cryptographer? Part 2

The 5 job opportunities slowly whittled down to 3, then 2. One of them turned into and honest to goodness solid sort of job offer, with requisitions and approvals and everything. So yesterday I took it and I'm no longer a soon-to-be unemployed cryptographer.

So it was time for sushi to celebrate. If you haven't been there, try Syun in Hillsboro, Oregon. The lunch planner entry sums it up..

13) Syun at 2nd & Liconln in Hillsboro, the Old Library building. Best shushi around.

There are plenty of other places to eat. The lunch planner will tell you which one to eat at. By coincidence, it was suggesting Syun today. However I didn't find that out until after we had eaten there for lunch. Spooky. The odds of that are 23 in 1.

Remaining Employed, or 'Have you ever met an unemployed cryptographer?'

I happen to work for a very big techy company. These days, very big techy companies are in the habit of laying people off.

So on Wednesday, I found that I'm not exempt from this and they were laying me off. However the company doesn't just kick you out of the door. They put you in a special kind of purgatory called 'redeployment'. This is a two month period where your job it to find another job somewhere in the company. If you fail, then they kick you out of the door.

The screwed up part about redeployment is that companies who are laying people off don't tend to also be hiring people at the same time. So finding a job in the company during that period is not a likely thing.

Regardless, I sent out a one line message on the internal news server asking if anyone needed a security architect. One day later I'm juggling 5 job offers. It turns out that the techy world is very short of cryptographers and security architects. Every product group has some security or cryptography function in their products, because they have to, but by and large they don't have a clue how it works or what it does and they tend to know they don't have a clue and would love to hire a security guy if only they could find one.

Had I been tempted with a single job offering, I would have had to fight for it and I would be feeling relieved to be still employed if I got the job. Now I have a bunch of options, I'll be spending my days wondering if I picked the right job.

Eenie meanie miney mo...

Cutting Things for Pleasure and Profit

Today I came home with a set of these. They are both very pretty and very sharp. It is a good thing the local kitchen shop was having a sale because they don't come cheap.

You will find out if I survive the week with my fingers intact by checking whether or not I can type another blog entry.

Disney Ride Summary

Following last week's trip to Disneyworld, in order of personal preference, best to worst, here are some of the rides at Disney World:

Soarin', Epcot
An IMAX screen, but you're hung in the middle of the bubble so it fills your vision. Great, Not scary. don't miss it. Get a fastpass early in the day.

Expedition Everest, Animal Kingdom.
A big, fun roller coaster complete with angry yeti tearing up the tracks. Don't miss it. Get a fastpass.

Space Mountain, Magic Kingdom.
A roller coaster in the dark, with little points of light bathing the place. It would probably be a second rate roller coaster, but since you can't see where you are going, it adds enormously to the experience. Don't miss. Get a fastpass.

Thunder Mountain Railroad, Magic Kingdom
A railroad themed roller coaster. Lots of fun with big swoops. Don't miss. You'll need a fastpass.

Tower of Terror, Hollywood Studios.
An elevator that goes up an down, only very fast. It is quite scary the first time you try it, but the novelty wears off the second time, since you know what's coming. Don't miss it, but don't rush back for a second run expecting it to be as good the first time. Fast passes are usually needed, but not always.

Splash Mountain, Magic Kingdom
A log flume. You get a little wet, which is fine if the weather is warm. Lots of fun. Most times a fastpass was needed.

Rock n Roller Coaster, Hollywood Studios
An indoor rollercoaster. Very fast with an upside down loop early on and a corkscrew a bit later. But is it super short. Worth trying, but it's not worth waiting in line a long time, only go if you can get a fastpass.

Spaceship Earth, Epcot
A slow moving ride through the big ball in Epcot, with displays of invention though the ages. Quite boring until you get to a bit near the end where you pass through a 3D regular grid of pointy lights, which looks very cool. It's worth sitting through the first bit to get to the bit at the end.

Mad Tea Party, Magic Kindom.
This is a bunch of large tea cups in which 2 or 3 people can sit. They rotate around, but you get to spin the cup by pulling on a disc in the center of the cup. So with a bit of muscle you can spin it really fast. A much better ride than it looks like from the outside.

Kali River Rapids, Animal Kingdom.
Here 6 of you sit in a circular floating thing and ride down a river. The thing is there are some places where 1 or 2 seats, along with their occupants, get drenched. You don't know if it will be you or not, because the boat rotates freely. Take it if the weather is warm and you will dry off quickly.

Haunted Mansion, Magic Kingdom
A slow ride through haunted theme rooms. Boring.

Test Track, Epcot
Nominally you're in a car on a test track. There's a bit at the end where it goes fast around a banked track. Frankly boring and the GM adverts grated. The 7 yr old liked it though.

Primeval Whirl, Dino-land, Animal Kingdom
This is a rollercoaster with a car that rotates as you go around. It's short, nasty and uncomfortable. It runs slowly and jerks you around. All pain, no thrills. Avoid.

It's a Small World, Magic Kingdom
Help! Let me out. It's a boat ride through millions of annoying, badly animated dolls singing and stupid tune, dressed in culturally naive outfits. No fastpass needed here.

The Carousel of Progress. Magic Kingdom
The Carousel of Boredom. Avoid. You will not need a fastpass.

Legends of Hollywood, Hollywood Studios
A super slow ride through a bunch of scenes from old Hollywood movies, with a boring commentator and a super tedious bunch of film clips at the end. This is the worst ride in the park. Shoot yourself before getting on.

Prince Caspian, Hollywood studios
I was wrong, this is the worst ride. It isn't even a ride, but they don't tell you that before you go in. They just show you a video while you stand. Ugh.

Disney Dining is Bipolar

On Thursday we got back from a heavily Disnified vacation in Florida.

If you find yourself in Disney World, looking for something to eat, there is a problem. The walk up 'counter service' eateries are truly nasty. They serve a dismal array of fast food items all the way from cheeseburgers to hot dogs. In Animal Kingdom there is a hole in the wall outlet selling nothing but turkey legs. They looked nasty.

Possibly the best of the hole-in-the-wall outlets it the fish and chip shot in the British section of Epcot. But then you have to go to Epcot to eat there. Epcot is annoyingly bereft of good rides like the Tower of Terror or the Rock n' Roller Coaster. It does have Soarin', but that is for a different post. I'm not sure if the patisserie in the French section counts, since it doesn't sell real meals as such. The pastries are good though.

There are proper sit down restaurants in Disney World. However you have no chance of getting in without a reservation, which you typically have to book a few days in advance unless it's a quiet week.

Of the real sit-down restaurants, myself and the rest of the family ate in the 50's Prime Time Cafe in Hollywood Studios and the Marrakesh in Epcot. We failed to book Celliers steakhouse (fully booked even though calling the day before) and the Japanese place (too many people didn't want to eat Japanese food).

The food in both was great, the price was wallet shreddingly expensive. The bill at the Marrakesh was $177 for five of us. The seafood bastilla and the sheesh kebabs were great though. The chicken pot pie in puff pastry at the prime time cafe was perfect.

The real problem is that there is nothing in between. Good food you can't afford at one end and terrible food you don't want to afford at the other end.

Since we couldn't get in the Celliers Steakhouse on Wednesday, we elected to head on out of the Disney zone and try a restaurant out in the real world. What we found was Tu Tu Tango, which serves the closest thing to the Tapas I had in Malaga in Spain that I've had. The Tu Tu Tango quality was better though. The price turned out to be less for 5 of than 2 of us in the Marrakesh. I recommend the black bean soup and mushroomy flatbread.

On balance I recommend swallowing the cost and booking a long time ahead for real food. Otherwise, rent a car and go to International drive to eat at the Tu Tu.