Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Sue has known for a very long time that I like soft buns, but here's the proof.  I haven't spent a lot of time making buns, so before I prepared these, I checked a recipe.  This dough had a couple of table spoons of oil and an egg, neither of which I ordinarily add to my sourdoughs.  I also added spelt flour, which wasn't in the original recipe I consulted.  Spelt is an ancient relative of modern bread wheat.  It doesn't have as much gluten as bread wheat, but what it is missing in gluten, it makes up for with an earthy flavor that predates modern, industrialized farming. Just for comparison, here is the same dough, made on the same day, but baked as a single loaf at 475 degrees instead of 400 degrees and in a Dutch Oven instead of on parchment paper.  Look how much difference baking technique makes to the loaf (on the right) that comes from the same ingredients.

In the summer of 1911, a motherless fourteen-year-old farm girl, responsible for house sweeping, toilet cleaning, cooking, darning, dish washing, clothes washing, and room cleaning for four older brothers and an abusive father makes her escape.  She travels alone to Philadelphia where she becomes "The Help" for a wealthy Jewish family.  Joan Skraggs is impetuous, smart, and deeply curious about the world.  Joan's diary entries serve as our insight as she struggles to understand her first exposures to erudition, Judaism, kashrut , parental expectations and encouragement, mainstream Catholicism, anti-Semitism, love, and simply growing up.  The book won a Newberry Medal and Jewish book awards and plays heavily on literature that would be familiar to early teenage girls that love to read.  Think Louisa May Alcott.  I, of course, was way out of my element.  Nevertheless, The Hired Girl  focuses a lens on young adult fiction as well as the lives of German Jews working as h

One of the features of making sourdough bread that always pleases me is how many varieties of bread can be concocted beginning with just flour, water, salt, and a wild sourdough starter.  Here are three breads that came from a recent weekend of baking. To me this compact loaf was more than just a crispy-crusted whole wheat baguette.  It was the first set of slashes I ever succeeded in getting to perform like they had been cut by a professional.  Look closely at the cuts and you will see what bakers call "ears."  The dough curled up as the bread sprang in the heat of the oven and browned along their edges. This loaf was baked in a lidded, cast-iron, Dutch Oven.  The lid holds in steam emanating from the baking loaf.  Steam keeps the surface moist so it can expand evenly.  Once the bread has nearly cooked through, the lid is removed, the steam escapes, and the surface turns this lovely reddish-brown.  We were also making a Middle Eastern meal over the weekend an

Following the end of WWII, the Atlanta Police Force reluctantly added eight African American police officers.  Their beats were restricted to Darktown, the part of Atlanta without streetlights, and it almost goes without saying, without white people.  Two recently hired war veterans, Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith, stumble across an inebriated white man with a young black woman in his car.  After they see her get punched and then escape from her driver they later find her body buried among trash in a vacant lot.  Superficially, the novel is a 1940s murder mystery in the south, but the real story is the unflinching detail with which we observe Boggs and Smith endure Jim Crow.  They are forbidden from arresting white criminals, only white officers can, so they must subdue adversaries, run to a telephone, and call for a squad car whose white officers may or may not arrive.  They may not question, nor even look into the eyes, of white officers, or for that matter, white men.  They may n