Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

One of the best sourdough blogs on the Internet is The Perfect Loaf . This week in my Inbox, Maurizio, the blogger, sent a recipe for Pan de Mie , an enriched, all white flour bread. Not only is Pan de Mie made from white flour, but Maurizio suggests All Purpose Flour, not even bread flour. His one concession to uniqueness is sourdough rather than yeast. There are many steps, divided by the hour over the course of two days. The final formula has honey, milk, and butter beat into the dough. My white flour sourdough starter. It is about 30 years old now made from yeast and bacteria captured here in Meadville, PA. After I mixed all the ingredients I had a dough I divided in two. I baked one in a Pullman Pan, that is a bread tin with a top that slides on to seal the bread on all four sides, and the other I baked in an open bread tin. I brushed an egg wash on the loaf in the open tin. The Pan de Mie was creamy in texture and flavor. The sourdough made the bread much more inter...

I had to do some hurried baking last week. I was headed out of town to visit The Sourdough Project  in North Carolina and our house didn't have any bread. So no time to follow a baker's formula or put a lot of thought into preparation. I took my white flour starter and added a cup or two of buckwheat flour. Buckwheat is funny because it is not biologically related to wheat, rye, oats, and barley. It is just a grass with big seeds that can be ground into flour. The bread came out big and bursting with flavor and as is common when I make breads with buckwheat flour the interior crumb had a bluish hue.  Several days later the bread was still fresh and there was a lot of it. The blue color was a beautiful offset for the golden color of garlic and olive oil. Garlic bread at its best. In the same week I was also supposed to make some pita, but ran out of time so I baked them as rolls instead of popping them into steam-filled pitas. A baker's dozen.

An inattentive single mother sets her two-year-old daughter Bella outside to play. When she recognizes that it is too quiet and remembers to go look for Bella the shocking recognition that she is gone explodes like a bomb. The main suspect is a controlling husband in a childless marriage who is either a murderous pedophile or an excoriated victim of circumstantial evidence. But the question of how controlling he is remains in doubt because Jean Taylor, his widow because as the story opens he has just been hit by a bus, is not a totally reliable narrator. Bob, the Chief Detective investigating the kidnapping, is determined to find Bella's abductor. So, too, is Kate, a reporter who is a little more humane than the rest of the British media anxious to grab, or worse, make a story. Slowly, painfully slowly, the obsessions of five main characters are laid bare. Bella's mom cannot let go of the publicity affiliated with her Find Bella campaign. Kate and Bob remain tied to the ca...

Rachel Maddow's thesis is elegantly simple: the Founding Fathers feared that the President of the United States and commander in chief of the armed forces needed to be constrained, lest the power to deploy troops be taken too lightly. To prevent a President from ordering the military into war too easily, the founders invested Congress with the requirement to approve the initiation and funding of any war. Moreover, Maddow argues, the Founding Fathers constructed the army of citizen soldiers thereby making the decision to launch a war one that would necessarily involve a national debate. Everyone would be related to a soldier and everyone would have to decide if his life was worth risking. Drift  describes the post WWII slide into wars and proxy wars led by Presidents circumventing Congress and in recent years even side-stepping the U.S. Army altogether. America has fought in Grenada, Panama, and Bosnia without declarations of war. It has fought in Afghanistan and Iraq for dec...

In 1968 the United States was nearing its first landing on the moon. It was also the year that a British newspaper offered a 5,000 pound reward for the first sailor to circumnavigate the world, solo, without stopping. Another 5,000 pounds was to be awarded for the fastest trip. We were exploring the far reaches of space; simultaneously, humans were testing endurance here on earth. Nine sailors set out from England heading east around Cape Horn, south below the southern reaches of Australia, past South America's Cape of Good Hope and then north up the Atlantic back to England. Each sailor hoped they were carrying sufficient water, food, and supplies to repair any damage that was sure to occur on a boat sailing so far south it had to endure the Roaring Forties. Below the two Capes, the sea surrounding Antarctica is unencumbered by any land masses. Storms have unmitigated fetch over which to whip up gale force winds and towering waves. Beyond the elements, sailors had to endure...

As a young boy Washington Black was enslaved in Barbados. Faith Plantation treated its slaves like the machines that they were: fueling, watering, greasing, beating, and running until their parts failed and their bodies were disposed of to be replaced by new purchases. One of the sons of the plantation owners, Titch, is something of an early British explorer, however, who constructs a "cloud-cutter," a helium-filled balloon that happens to need ballast of just Washington's size. For enslaved Africans, the gift of flight, like the gift of death, was one means to dream of escape. Check out this video from The New Yorker (March 6, 2019) called Dreaming Gave us Wings . Cane-cutters in Jamaica , post slavery.  By the time Titch and Washington Black launch their balloon, this novel has also taken off into new territory. Washington Black, even as a young teen, is the most erudite British gentleman I have ever met in literature; he is also an accomplished artist and scien...

Bread, in America, in the twenty-first century, is a before-thought. At a nice restaurant we expect bread to come to the table, free of charge, prior to the arrival of the food we came to eat. In a restaurant of lower quality, or in our own homes, bread is a vehicle used to deliver the contents of a tuna sandwich, a barbecued burger, or hold together Skippy peanut butter and Welch's grape jelly. Much of the problem lies with the devolution of American bread. It really isn't worth much more than a thoughtless bite. But consider these sourdough garlic naan. Now ponder these naan like they were wine. First, you wouldn't expect it to come for free. Second, you wouldn't eat it mindlessly while you were waiting for the real thing to be delivered to your table. Third, if you were patient, you would taste it slowly. In the case of sourdough garlic naan. You would sense the subtle flavors of sourdough beneath the garlic and in this case chopped parsley (because I did...