Adaptive Curmudgeon

An optimist thinks we live in the best of all possible worlds.  A pessimist fears that it’s true. 

Adaptive Curmudgeons like to focus on the little things that make life better.  The following things are modern miracles which we should be thankful for every damn day!

• Cheap plentiful food.
• Air conditioning.
• Ice cold beer in August.
• Four wheel drive.
• Padlocks.
• The Internet.
• Pizza delivery.
• 24/7 electricity.
• Modern medicine.
• Peaceful elections (even if we have to choose between a dipstick and a jackoff).

Don’t believe me?  Try this; drive a on old station wagon without air conditioning across Texas to find two jars of peanut butter which cost $87.50 each.  Drink beer which got hot in the back of the car.  Then turn north and drive the same station wagon over Lolo pass in a snowstorm (have fun chaining it up or just plunge off a cliff, it’s your choice).  Once you get to your cabin (which has no internet because you didn’t padlock it and someone ripped the copper wires out to sell on e-bay for crack money) just sit in the dark because the power is off.  Meanwhile you’re dying of tuberculosis while a battery powered radio is reporting that Baltimore is suffering from “political upheaval” because a contested election between a dipstick with an army and a jackoff with a secret police organization got interesting.

None of this is going to get your pizza to you while the cheese is still hot.

See, our world is positively gleaming by comparison.

You have been denied mission critical, need to know, information.  The recipe post had a flaw!

I screwed up royally Some idiot (who is totally not me) typed the wrong temperature for the oven.  The mistake has been rectified and those responsible have been executed.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled program.

Some tips about cooking:

• A grain mill to grind wheat into flour seems weird but if you can hack the price it’ll make your food taste better.
• It takes X minutes to prepare a four loaf / four pound dough batch. It takes much less than 2X to prepare two batches. I make eight loaves at a time and it’s only a little more work. Get what I’m hinting at?
• If you are really careful about cleaning you’ll get it done in a fraction of the time a less organized person would take.
• Leave the kitchen in better shape than you found it. Just do it.
• You don’t need many ingredients or utensils but keep them segregated from the general kitchen population or you’ll waste time looking for things.
• If one batch of bread dough sits around an extra half hour because the oven is full with a different batch, it doesn’t seem to matter.
• According to the book, the bread dough can sit in the fridge for several days. I haven’t tested it. I make dough one day, bake it the next, and forget it the rest of the week.

Tips about the bread:

• Your bread will have the size and shape of an actual loaf of bread. This is how bread has looked for thousands of years. Naturally it’s alien to folks who think “Wonderbread” is “tasty”. Get used to weird looks when your peanut butter sandwich is narrow.
• Store excess bread in the freezer. Stuff a loaf in a plastic bag and jam it in the freezer as soon as it’s cool (not earlier). It seems to taste perfect when thawed out.
• Don’t try to cut a frozen loaf…let it thaw. Don’t ask how I know this.
• This bread will go stale faster than the crap you buy at a store. After about the third day it’s time to throw it to the chickens. (Frozen bread excepted.)

Last few notes:

• Bread made this way is rediculosly cheap. Every loaf you or your family consumes is money in the bank.
• I’m not a doctor but I’m convinced this is just about the healthiest food this side of things I shoot with a rifle.
• If low carb diet nuts give you crap about this bread give ‘em a good smack. Yes, it’s carbs but it is pretty much all simple stuff and in a world full of Doritos and PopRocks nobody should get crap about homemade wheat bread.
• If any hippies visit your house tell them the bread was bought at great expense from Laotian Monks. They’ll never believe you made it yourself.

The title of the book that is my bread bible is called “Bread In Five Minutes A Day”. This is because you can (in theory) use the goop you’ve stored in your fridge to form a bread loaf in under five minutes. While technically true it’s a lot like calling a reduction in the projected rate of spending a “tax cut”. That shit won’t fly on my blog!

I differ from the basic plan by baking all of the dough in one shot. Why? Because I’ve got a damn day job and can’t sit on my ass baby sitting an oven every day. Harrumph!

Today’s baking day. Go to the kitchen table that was spotless yesterday and use a pitchfork to heave everyone’s crap off of it again. How does clutter grow so fast; it’s like kudzu on crack! Wipe down the table and get out your bucket of dough out of the fridge.

Chilling it overnight (or longer) has made it stiffer and easier to handle. Also the dough (which has never been kneaded has a strange structure that looks like wood cellulose that’s been microwaved on Jupiter. Analogies fail me…just go with it.

You’re going to need some more equipment:

• A flat thing (to put the dough on while not baking).
• A flat scoopy thing (to maneuver the dough into the oven).
• A basting brush.
• Cornmeal (to keep the dough from sticking to the flat thing.)
• A bread knife (for installing expansion joints).
• Poppy seeds (for bragging rights and to screw up drug tests).
• Some flour.
• Scissors.

Get a flat surfaced object, like a cookie sheet, pizza peel, or an Barry Manilow LP record and sprinkle cornmeal on it. Cornmeal is cheap, don’t scrimp. The cornmeal isn’t really part of the food, it’s there to keep the dough from sticking. (For those of you who don’t know what an LP or 33 RPM record happens to be, Google “life before iPods took over the universe”; you’ll be fascinated.)

Now put some flour on your hands, this is to keep the dough from sticking to your hands. Plunge one hand into the bowl and come up with a grapefruit sized glob of the dough. It’ll stretch and won’t break free from the mother glob. You’re aiming for ¼ of the total volume in the bucket. Cut it off with the shears.

What happens next is hard to describe. Use your hands (coated with flour) to grab the bottom of the glob and wrap it over the top. You’re trying to make a “smoothish” surfaced bread glob that’s without resorting to a “patting motion” like you’d use when making a snowball. Make it roughly football shaped and don’t try for perfection. I’m not sure of the exact biology here but the gluten is elastic and wants to stretch “around” the loaf you’re forming but it doesn’t like being separated and squished back in. (That’s my understanding…for all I know it’s caused by magic refrigerator Smurfs.) Don’t over think it. You’ll know when you’ve done it right. Allocate 30 seconds or less of screwing around and if you haven’t made the shape you want just give up and go with what you’ve got. You’ve almost certainly made something good enough.

Do the same thing three more times. You should have four loaves. You should have done it in a couple of minutes. They look roughly like flattish dinosaur eggs to me. If they look like that to you…everything’s shiny.

Wash your bread bucket and put it in the strainer. Crack a beer. Repeat.

The loaves will rise slightly. As far as I can tell it’s not a big deal how much they rise. Focus on the beer. You have very little to do for 90 minutes. Enjoy it.

Warning: you do not have enough time to change the oil in the car, reshingle the roof, or split wood. Park your ass and relax. See? Baking is fun!

After 60 minutes start preheating the oven. 450 degrees. Shove the baking stone in there. Check that you’ve got a broiler pan to add water for steam but don’t add water yet.

At 90 minutes it’s show time!

Just before show time you’ve got to do a few minor things. First use a basting brush to coat the outside of each loaf with water. Don’t screw with the underside…just the top.

Then sprinkle poppy seeds on it. The purpose of this is to make it look awesome and taste as good as it looks. You don’t need poppy seeds but if you don’t add them it’s like ripping the supercharger off a racecar’s engine. I’ve tried sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, etc… they’re all sub-optimal. In the end poppy seeds are best and if I leave them out I regret it.

The last task is to cut a few slashes in the top of the bread. I call these expansion joints. They actually serve that purpose…they also make the bread look cool. Do this after the poppy seeds are on for maximum coolness of appearance.

At 90 minutes (give or take…there’s no rush now) it’s oven time. Shove the loaves onto the baking stone one at a time. They’ll expand slightly and might merge into each other. It won’t ruin the bread any more than the same effect when your pancakes run together. At the last minute dump a cup of warm water in the baking pan (to make steam) and quickly close the door.

Do nothing for a half hour. Don’t sweat it…the bread knows what to do. it should smell delicious by now.

At a half hour take the loaves out and put them on a cooling rack (the cooling rack is probably optional). Household members will come out of the woodwork as they smell the bread. It’s easier to cut after a few minutes of cooling.

If your bread tastes like mine you’ll have the first loaf half gone within fifteen minutes. All it’ll need is butter. (Margarine sucks…invest in butter.) Homemade jelly will turn the dial to eleven.

You’re finally ready to make some bread! Make some coffee first. Why? Because it’s coffee. You can’t have beer until the coffee phase is over. I’ll explain later.

Kick everyone out of the kitchen and bask in the glory of what you have accomplished; a clean kitchen, a clean workspace, all your measuring cups and stuff ready, all your ingredients at hand… you may never see this level of organization again. Sip your coffee. Smile.

Now a word about dry ingredients like flour. They’re essentially a powder. They’re easy to handle when they’re dry but become a hassle to clean up when wet and a stone cold misery they get wet and are allowed to dry. Use physics to help things stay clean. Keep your powder dry!

This is why you can drink hot coffee but not cold beer. No condensate during dry materials mode!

Measure 5 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour into the bucket. (You know the recipe because you bought the book right?)  Measure each cup carefully. Scoop up a heap with your measuring cup, use a butter knife to carefully push all the excess off the cup, and dump it into the bucket. Do it carefully. You may be a creative genius. Possibly you like to cook. Possibly you like to apply your creativity to the measurement of flour. Possibly you’re an idiot. Shut up and stick with the recipe.

Inevitably you’ll be interrupted while counting cups. If you’re looking at the bucket wondering if you’ve added four or five cups don’t leave it to chance. Shoo whomever interrupted you out of the kitchen (especially if it’s the damn cat). Then dump the flour and do it again. The goal here is to not bake a brick.

Now comes the white (or “evil”) flour. Measure 2 cups into the same bucket.  (If you didn’t buy the book I’m gonna’ feel guilty.)

Add 1 tablespoon salt.  (As instructed by the book.)

Add 1/4 cup gluten flour.  (Have I mentioned that I’m terrified of lawyers?  This is “fair  use” as far as I can tell but you should buy the book anyway.)

Add 1 1/2 tablespoons yeast.  (Lawyers are evil.  The book is good.)

Be extra special uptight about the measurements. Have you been measuring as if you were handling a mix of uranium and smokeless powder? Good. Have you been measuring like an incompetent slob? If so you suck and you deserve the disaster you’re about to bake.
Incidentally, you can measure as if you were defusing a bomb and still get the job done in less than ten minutes.

(Throughout the entire bread manufacturing process the most time consuming part is cleaning the kitchen. Regardless of the mess you start with you should end with a clean workspace.)

Sip more coffee. Did you add whiskey? It’s entirely acceptable to bake bread while drunk. I encourage it. Don’t spill the coffee…you’re still in ultra dry powder mode.

Now grab the whisk or a big ass spoon and mix the living shit out of the dry ingredients in your bucket. Don’t slouch. Right now everything is a powder so you can easily create a homogeneous mix. Once you add water the die is cast.

Mix like you damn well mean it. You can play Metallica while doing this. (Heavy metal seems to keep skilled cooks from showing up and messing with your manufacturing process. It also keeps the cat away.)

You do not need power tools to do the mixing. Put that idea right out of your head.

A homogenous mix of "good" and "evil" flour and a few other ingredients.

Now it’s time to switch from “dry powder mode” to “wet goo mode”. Before you pull the trigger on “goo mode”, clean up everything that’s powder dry. Wipe down the table where you spilled the flour. (Of course you spilled some flour. Don’t deny it. I know.) Then rinse (wash!) all your measuring cups and stuff. Since it’s just dry powder you should be able to wash it sparkling clean in seconds. Go ahead and feel smug about it. (Studies show that people who don’t immediately wash the cups and stuff are 86% more likely to live in their mother’s house.)

You may now switch from coffee to beer. No need to thank me; I’m here to help.

I needlessly fret about the temperature of bread water. I try for the temperature to which you’d heat a baby’s bottle. Learning the proper temperature of a baby’s bottle is an incredibly expensive proposition so you can wing it if you don’t know. I’m not sure if this recipe is temperature sensitive but some are.

Measure four cups water carefully. Hold it to the horizon, adjust for parallax, and endeavor for accuracy. At this point I think it might not be too important but do it anyway.

Pour it all in the bucket. Don’t try anything fancy like adding it a little at a time. If the bucket you choose was too small you deserve what happens next.

The flour/water mix will assume a consistency I call “zombie brain”. Grab a big ass spoon and start mixing. It’s your job to mix every molecule of the dry stuff into the wet stuff and make an utterly homogeneous mix. Any dry stuff that doesn’t get mixed in will become a clod of flour in the loaf. It’s not rocket science. You should be able to do this in five minutes or less. Don’t knead, just stir.

Most of the glob will stick to itself and form a strange texture I call “Yak flem”. Once you’ve attained “Yak flem”there are no stray pockets of unmixed flour. You’ll know when you’re done.

Yak flem; ready to be ignored for a couple of hours.

Quit for the day. Drink more beer. Wash the one spoon that’s still dirty, wipe down the table again, and put away the water measuring cup. You should have about four pounds of “Yak flem” in a food grade bucket sitting on a spotless table.

Trust me on this, if you were efficient you did this all in 15 minutes or so and still had plenty of time to drink beer. Most people spend more time looking for their measuring cups and cleaning the kitchen than they’ll ever spend actually “cooking”.

Loosely cover the bucket (not tight…there’s fermentation going on). Loudly announce to everyone in the household that “phase one of the bread project is proceeding according to plan and that you’re winning the war against bread hegemony”. (This means nothing but it’s fun to say.) Then go split some wood.

Two hours later the bread mix will have risen into a material that appears to be the love child of a marshmallow and a Nerf football. The timing isn’t important. At least two hours is probably close enough. All you needed to do was let it rise a while at room temperature before sticking it in the fridge. Ideally the beer you’ve drank will have freed just the right amount of space in the fridge.

Two hours later; it has ballooned like the national debt.

Don’t mess with it, knead it, or discuss politics with it. Just shove it in the fridge and ignore it until tomorrow. After several hours in the fridge the concoction will have reduces in volume.

The volume reduces considerably but never as low as it's initial state. A lot like a spike in gasoline prices.

In the meantime the formerly empty kitchen table is already collecting stuff…how does that happen?

Tomorrow is D-day. Good luck.

A.C.

P.S.  I sincerely think this article is OK under fair use but I’m going to cower under my table until everyone buys the book.