devlin

Again, it seems an essential disagreement is the perception of how much starter you think you need. In reading through this thread, it appears to me that I make far more bread in a week and maintain far less "starter" or "culture." I suspect my starter is thicker too, but I can't be sure of that. Anyway, if the method works for you, then no problem. But then again you did initiate the thread (before it was merged into this larger one) asking how you could make your work less burdensome with so much starter. So then one would assume something *isn't* working for you. I understand that from your perspective it's more to do with the manual mixing of the starter, but all sorts of experienced folks here now (including me) are suggesting perhaps there's a whole nother way to approach the problem that would not only save you from what you've characterized as a burdensome issue in your baking, but might also change your approach in other ways. This probably won't change the quality of your bread, by the way, or at least not in the long run, although if you do change your technique you will invariably have to tinker with your formula a bit to get what you're going after. I use a whole nother method that garners equally rave reviews, and although I started out using Silverton's methods and formulas, I was frankly not pleased with the results I was getting and so after a lot of experimenting, taking a little from here and a little from there, and through a lot of practice and baking and experimenting, I finally came up with my own method which is what moved me beyond following someone else's techniques and formulas and on to developing my own. I'm not saying Silverton is wrong or bad, but she is only one method among many equally valid (and for me, better) methods. The Village Bakery

It's reasonable for me, as I make 10 to 20 loaves some weekends. ← I've been following this a bit but am still a little fuzzy about how much starter you keep on hand as a matter of course. Even if you bake 10-20 loaves some weekends, you wouldn't need to keep so much starter all the time. When I'm baking, I bake substantially more than 10-20 loaves during the week, but I keep only a cup of starter (culture) going all the time (feeding once a day). I then build from that starter/culture over the course of three or so days to get the volume/weight I need for any given bake. But I'm not clear what you mean when you say you keep two to three quarts starter going of each starter. If you're making only 10-20 loaves a week, maintaining 2-3 quarts of starter all the time is a waste of time, flour and water.

How about a brioche?

I'm wondering whether the tablespoon of vinegar might be meant to be used as a wash? It's sometimes used to give the bread a dark, shiny appearance, although I've never done it myself.

My favorite way to eat molasses is with a spoon. Preferably a very large spoon. But recently, because my husband brought home a cheap bottle of "curry powder" for rice, a weirdly unsatisfying blend I couldn't seem to make work, I added some molasses which made all the difference.

Um, can you say more? What sort of "less savory cooking techniques" might be resorted to?

We table shopped for two years and nothing wowed us. And then we found THAT. Which to me is a work of art. It's sort of Frank Lloyd Wright-like, that table. Cluttering it up would be criminal.

I am sooooooooo jealous! (Could you please come over and declutter my house?) ← When I was in graduate school, I couldn't do major papers til the house was clean. It's a thing with me. If my house is a'clutter, so's my head... Over the years too, my husband and I moved a lot for his job and got used to keeping our lives pretty stream-lined, and now keeping clutter at a total minimum is just a way of life. With the exception of my laundry room, which really isn't that bad, my whole house looks pretty much like that. Course it helps it's just the two of us, which is just as well as kid clutter would probably have driven me batshit insane.

It's times like this I realize I'm more of a neat freak than I generally think. We have a rule in our house -- no junk on the dining room table (we don't have a kitchen table) or the kitchen island or the foyer table.... But you should see the laundry room, which I avoid as much as I can because it's turned into the default dumping ground for mail and the like. So here's a pic of my own table. I took this Christmas week, but it still looks just the same because that's just the way we keep it.

Huh. And here I thought my husband was the only grown man on the planet to love a big bowl of cereal for dessert. Although til now I've been embarrassed to admit we've been enjoying jello (artifically-sweetened) for dessert these days, after years of ice cream and the occasional box of vanilla wafers. What's next, Kool Aid?

Well, I didn't want to say it, but k8memphis did and she's absolutely right on. If I were you, I'd be adding wedding cakes or some bigger ticket item such as that to the business. Otherwise, I honestly don't believe bread alone is enough to provide a single income. I'd also be taking a hard look at why the business is up for sale in the first place.

I hate to be contrarian, but this is simply wrong. Enriched breads typically are breads with butter, additional fats and/or eggs, sugar, etc. Low GI breads would slant in the direction of whole grains, ryes, brans, etc. But also, true sourdough, or naturally-leavened breads, are by nature low GI. I'd for sure start there.

Just wanted to chime in on the issue of cutting back on cheeses for health reasons and make a suggestion. I love cheeses, and I also try to eat cheese judiciously, although perhaps no more judiciously than anything else. I don't have a weight problem, but if I ate as much cheese as I would LIKE to, yikes, yeah, I'd be big as a house too. Anyway, the point I sort of wanted to raise was that it might be worthwhile for folks who've been cautioned by their docs to ease up on dairy and other fats to consider adding freshly ground flax to their diets. My husband was advised to cut cheese and dairy out of his diet, and the doc also suggested perhaps some cholesterol meds, but my husband objected, did some research, discovered after a lot of reading that some studies have indicated flax can actually lower cholesterol, together with a healthy diet, and so he starting adding a couple tablespoons of freshly-ground flax to his smoothies or cereal/oatmeal, and after about a month, voila, his cholesterol lowered very substantially. He still eats cheese (way more than I do), all kinds, but his cholesterol is now within the normal changes. It's also not the case that dairy products/fats/cheeses, etc are always the cause of high cholesterol.

Nice picture. I just did an auto adjust with Windows photo gallery. Here is the result. ← Nice job! I'm going for something in between, and have actually had luck with my nikon editor, at least within the actual editing program. I'm really frustrated right now because I'm getting really beautiful images in the nikon program, but when I upload them elsewhere they look very different, the colors sort of darker, muddy-ish. Argh! Anybody have any suggestions as to why that might be?

The light box is brilliant. I need to use brighter bulbs, and I need to edit this photo to lighten it up a bit, but I'm really pleased with how this works. I put the box together yesterday, finished my first wedding cake today.... Here it is in the box.... It could be better. I had to touch up a little piping after I'd already corrected one photo for light, and I'm too tired to correct it right now. Off to bed.

A lot of good suggestions here. I'd add that a good book to start with might be one of Dan Lepard's, and I wish I'd had it when I started baking bread. I started with Reinhart and Leader and Silverton and then Hamelman, and I suspect I would have had better luck right off the bat had I'd been able to work with one of Dan's books. For me, although it's difficult to get a whole lot of information from one pic of an uncut loaf, your photo indicates maybe not an over-risen loaf, but a loaf that's probably never developed fully because of your experimentation with removing water from the dough. And though I couldn't say for absolute certainty, the folds to me indicate a far too heavy, dry dough. The folks you see through the window of the bakery handling doughs easily probably aren't handling them easily simply because the doughs aren't wet or that they are very dry doughs, but because the bakers have experience handling all sorts of doughs easily, even very wet doughs. There are ways of doing that which don't require a baker to simply add flour to the dough itself. And you may also be seeing the doughs in a more or less finished stage, which might make them easier to handle. I'd also second the suggestion that you probably don't need to proof your yeast. If you're using it fairly soon after you've purchased it, then it should be fine, and I wouldn't bother proofing it myself. It's one thing if you pull a packet of yeast off your shelf that's been sitting there for a very long time, but if you know you've purchased it recently, it's probably fine. Keep it in a jar in the refrigerator and it'll last even longer. The Village Bakery

Find a local sawmill. They often will let folks carry away as much scrap and chips and shavings as they like.

I wouldn't ignore the hard realities of the job either (pay, benefits, hours, etc). If you're there to talk about the business, that's certainly a crucial part of it, and it's probably exactly the sort of thing the teacher who invited you wants you to talk about. When I was teaching, I did the same thing, inviting a range of professionals in to talk about their jobs, and I wanted them to talk about those issues in addition to what they loved about their jobs. You might briefly discuss how your own job compares to other vocations/careers as well in that regard because it's just a fact that many of the most creative sorts of vocations are paid poorly and require long hours, many years of learning and sacrifice and are demanding in more ways than most 9-5 type jobs. Popular media tends to romanticize a lot of the most artistic vocations or distort them in such a way that they look way more glamorous than they really are (starving artists in a Paris garret, or cute boy opens pie shop and makes a success of it making the occasional pie in his adorable pie shop whilst traipsing around solving murders, etc,). And the food tv/travel channel/Bourdain type stuff doesn't help.... There's a reason chefs like Bourdain and others prefer to talk about food rather than spend their time anymore actually making it for a living. You might also clarify how the restaurant industry in this country differs from the restaurant industry in, say, Europe, for example, the differences in compensation and benefits and the like.... Watch "Big Night" and "Babette's Feast" for inspiration. Recommend them to the class. edited to note: Recommending "Hell's Kitchen" and a little bit of Gordon Ramsay wouldn't hurt either.

It occurred to me while reading this thread that nearly any time I order coffee these days, the wait person's response is invariably, "Decaf?" And it surprises me every time as well. But clearly it's for clarification, not that it's meant as commentary on my personality.

Yeah, I dunno. It seems a little precipitous for a bunch of total strangers to be advising you to dump a man you say you care for, despite the one big thing you find alienating about him. If I were giving advice, I might suggest instead, if you really care that much about him, that you try approaching the whole subject in a different way first. Instead of giving him a list of restaurants to choose from, why not instead just make a reservation at a particular place and then make a date to meet him there? Do it every couple of weeks maybe to start. Or pick up some great food you like and bring it home for dinner. Don't ask him what he wants, just bring it home and put it on the table. As a sort of bargaining chip, if he objects to meeting you at a restaurant, ask him what sort of thing he'd like you to enjoy with him that you normally wouldn't do on your own and suggest you'll try that out for awhile if he tries your thing out for awhile. My husband loves food, all kinds of food. But at home, for years, he refused to eat leftovers, thinking them inferior to freshly made meals, and he also had (still does to some degree) a habit of saying no to whatever I felt like making for dinner, even though he likes the food itself. It's just that he wasn't in the mood for whatever I was offering. We did that for about ten years. I finally just said, "We're having X for dinner" without consulting him because I knew he'd actually eat whatever I'd make. For some reason, he just seems to like saying "no." Thankfully, he's come around on the subject of leftovers as well. But honestly, if your guy isn't a philanderer, a drug or sex addict, an alcoholic, abusive, etc., and this is his one flaw? I'd be inclined to try for a little longer to help him come to his senses.

Really gorgeous, all of it.

He's talking about both his contemporaries, from whom he learned a great deal, and himself. If we over-protect designs and ideas, we actually will slow down the pace of discovery and innovation. Don't forget about learning: Taking a photo of something doesn't get much information into your brain. Drawing it helps you to discover a lot about what you are looking at. Trying to make an exact copy teaches you a huge amount about the original and the process that went into its creation. In fact, making exact copies was the core of education for most crafts/trades (for example, furniture making) for thousands of years. Just don't take credit for the design of your copy. ← This whole post was right to the point, but this particular paragraph summed it up for me. As I read the original query here too, I thought of the books published by folks like Sylvia Weinstock, Martha Stewart & Wendy Kromer, Toba Garrett, Peggy Porschen, Nicholas Lodge, etc., who publish their cake designs precisely for the purpose of having folks buy the books so they can at least attempt to copy the designs. If you google wedding cakes, it's impossible to discover where many of the designs actually originate. And so far I haven't seen any evidence that Weinstock, Stewart, Kromer, etc., have been suing folks over copyright infringement. I'm only just beginning to explore cakes and cake design. The only way I can do that is to study and copy other people who make what I consider to be really beautiful cakes, at least structurally. The other equally important element is the cake itself, the basic cake with fillings and flavors and so forth. If you want to sell cakes, you can't have one without the other. If you make really gorgeous cakes that taste awful and that people don't enjoy eating, then eventually people won't buy your cakes. Unless they're designed and structured strictly as an exhibit.

He was only 72 and seemed the sort of man who'd live forever. Although in many ways, of course, he will. When I started to think of the numbers of people who have been influenced by his work, it was sort of staggering.

We're rebuilding our oven. Today we started tearing down in earnest, and as I was looking online for a couple of necessary parts, I came across the February 5 obituary for Alan Scott. I can't say I was completely surprised. I knew his health had been poor for some time, but I was still sort of blind sided by it. I hadn't seen any mention of it here, and if I'm repeating the news, apologies. Alan Scott, 72, Artisan of the Brick Oven, Dies By DENNIS HEVESI Published: February 5, 2009 Alan Scott, whose blacksmith’s skill in using radiant heat led to a revival of the ancient craft of building brick ovens, allowing bakers to turn out bread with luxuriously moist interiors and crisp crusts, died Jan. 26 in Tasmania, Australia. He was 72. The cause was congestive heart failure, said his daughter Lila Scott. Her father had returned to his native Australia several years ago after becoming ill, she said. Ms. Scott and her brother, Nicholas, now operate OvenCrafters, the company their father opened nearly 30 years ago in a large Victorian home in Petaluma, Calif. Several thousand amateur bread bakers and thin-crust pizza makers now have backyard brick ovens, many with cathedral-like arches, that were built either by Mr. Scott, with Mr. Scott or according to specifications he laid out with his protégé Daniel Wing in their 1999 book, “The Bread Builders” (Chelsea Green Publishing). More than a how-to manual, the book is also a meticulous treatise on the history of bread making and the physics of baking, with instructions, for example, on how long to let the dough rise. Mr. Scott, who held instructional workshops around the country, played a role in bringing brick ovens to hundreds of bakeries and restaurants as well. .... for remainder of the obituary, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/dining/06scott.html?_r=5

I like the notion of lotus flowers (are they safe? I'm not sure).... And to clarify the religious symbolism issue.... I'm a little familiar with Buddhism, and from my perspective, a laughing Buddha is to Buddhism what the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus are to Christianity. They're not spiritual iconography so much as kitsch.