Syzygies

Their chat recommended masking tape. I asked how to vent a box; they said leave the back open.

The Sourdough Home is a clean design that works. My one objection so far is light pollution. Up till now, the brightest object in our night environment has been our SimpliSafe home security Base Station. We keep it far from our sleeping quarters, and it's too bright even with the light ring wrapped in electrical tape. The Sourdough Home ("Starter home?" "Starter marriage?") has a sleep mode, but even that generates more light than the other 50 LED sources in our night home. I can imagine someone in a studio apartment frickin' despising this thing.

I'm a heretic here. There's a history saying, conquer China and you will become Chinese. Here, local conditions win. When I lose a starter, I just add a teaspoon of yeast to the first feeding, and pretend I have starter. If you've baked with yeast in your kitchen in the past decade, yeast will get in. Otherwise, the starter is largely determined by what's on the flour you use to feed it. It doesn't matter if you get starter from St. John Restaurant, or a winery gives me starter dating to the California Gold Rush; the starter will be the same in a few weeks, adapting to local conditions. In the meantime, you're baking with old dough, also a respected tradition.

Yes, as I just discovered. Their 20% off first purchase doesn't apply. I did order one. I'm a bit surprised that they don't help you manage a feeding schedule, now that it's no longer each day. My Joule sous vide unit, for example, uses a phone app because that was actually the least expensive option for them.

Brod and Taylor Sourdough Home Um, wow. This looks radically useful. We see pretty extreme temperature changes in our kitchen, season to season. I can believe that this matters but how much? One of my first lessons in cooking was asking a maven friend in college (now a country doctor) about cheesecake. He told me the four people on our 1,200 student campus who were most proud of their recipes. I interviewed each of them, threw out the superstitions (walk in socks by an ajar oven for an hour afterwards), and intersected their recipes to obtain what anyone now would recognize as one version of a classic cheesecake. This taught me about efficacy. In the kind of optimization that makes companies rich, they get numbers next to each lever revealing how important that lever is. In cooking, most levers are fantasies that hardly matter, even as the best cooks pile up a series of 1% advantages into striking results. So cooking well involves making some deep judgements about what matters, all while relaxing with a beverage of choice. The idea of slowing down my feeding schedule between bakes is very appealing. I hadn't considered seed ratio; I get fine results with less seed, but as always that impression says more about my mental health than whether I'm right. People always say this when they're happy with what they're doing, usually because they're unaware they could do better. The 100% hydration ratio they use in their examples leans hard to one extreme, favoring a certain acid profile. I use this too because it's easy and I'm lazy, but I recognize there's a choice here. Perhaps they address this deeper in their instructions, but I'd believe this choice to be more significant than the variables they do control. Which brings me back to "How much does this all matter?"

Yes! We're getting closer to fresh corn season (having past fresh fava bean season) and we love the idea, but we've overdone dressed kernels off the cob. (Olive oil, salt, pepper. A great add-in for pasta or tacos, but one can only eat so much straight.) I thought of fresh corn as a masa add-in for tortillas, but that's a poor idea. Tweaking tamale dough with fresh corn sounds great, I'll experiment too. Along the same lines I love the idea and taste of plantains, particularly ripe plantains, but I can't bring myself to keep preparing and eating fried slices, as is the common side to rice and beans in Caribbean cooking. In her Oaxacan cookbook, Diane Kennedy notes that plantain was a masa filler when corn ran short. That sounds great as a tamale tweak, too.

(Someone should send @PVPAUL a McLaren 750S Spider, to see what he cooks for them!)

(I freely recognize how absurd my tamales look. Hopefully I freed others to not worry about appearances. It was the height of arrogance to just "I know how to cook!" wing it, rather than watching a few tamale making videos. Tamales really are much less work than this!)

We made way too much masa for a party last Sunday, starting with 600g corn which is pretty much the limit for wet grinding in my Premier Chocolate Refiner (fancy Indian wet grinder). I ended up with a pound of leftover masa, even after making too many tortillas. When I gave my New York masa grinder to @PVPAUL he sent us a dry ice freezer care package, including mole, and tamales, which inspired us. Last night I used some leftover KK pulled pork in a riff on a Serious Eats tamale recipe (I grilled the peppers outside on my Solo Stove fire pit). These were the best tamales I've eaten in my life. Tamales are a world changer: One can improvise fillings even more broadly than for tacos, the masa can be frozen more effectively if it will be turned into tamale dough, ... I've always thought mole sauce was one Holy Grail I wanted to master, and yet I didn't understand how to use mole sauce. Tamales might be second night leftovers for a Mexican, but I'm happy to prepare mole sauce to use in batches for tamales. LIGHT BULB TIME: Grinding nixtamal into masa in a wet grinder can take some tending, because an Indian wet grinder is tuned for wetter mixtures such as dosa batter. But one makes tamale dough from masa by adding lard or oil, water or stock... ?? If I make my tamale dough straight from nixtamal in a wet grinder, including all wet ingredients, can I just run the grinder unattended, as if I were making dosa batter ??

I never made a spelt recipe? Here is my most recently revised Numbers spreadsheet. Sourdough Bread.numbers

I recently redid my spreadsheets to match current practice. First is "worksheet", second goes on wall while I work. It doesn't really matter if you're consistent and don't care about comparing notes with others, but I account for board flour, shrinkage, to nail actual hydration as if this were a chemistry lab experiment. I've seen other accomplished bakers who ignore the starter hydration, for example. Their effective hydration is a local fantasy. We grind some of our flour. We've been buying white from Acme Bread, famed in Bay area. They have Guisto's make this for them, but likely a different blend than one can buy elsewhere. I learned to accelerate the hydrolyse for each step by 60 seconds in a vacuum sealer chamber. This makes an obvious difference for pasta dough, and I believe a difference here too. I rediscovered "bassinage" where one kneads the dough at a comfortable hydration, then adds water at the end using Chad Robertson bowl folds. I like to knead a long rope, fold it over and twist, knead again to a long rope... My theory here is that one does better with a kneading technique that doesn't cause the bran to cut through the developing gluten. We use the KK in summer to avoid heating the house, and a convection oven in winter. I used to worry about filling the oven with ample steam. We now swear by the Challenger Bread Pan.

Flavor. I built storage in a shed that's definitely ambient. California is wet some, mostly dry, and I barbecue more in dry weather. Of course "there must" be a humidity effect, storing charcoal, but you should directly experiment to find out how pronounced this is. My belief is that the effect can be too faint to worry about. You want a load of charcoal for low & slow to burn like a fuse, and the hot fire dries out any residual moisture in the nearby charcoal as it progresses.

Yakitori Kono, New York City Here's some binchotan in the wild, at my favorite restaurant in this hemisphere. I've been three times. He gets better. He spent six months researching chickens before finding a Pennsylvania farmer that supplies the restaurant. Best chicken I've ever tasted, including Japan and the SF Bay Area, e.g. The Local Butcher Shop. The kappo-style yakitori omakase is $175 per person, but one can get into serious trouble there ordering sake and bonus skewers, in an enthused state where one loses all reason. Go for beer and just the prix fixe, and have just as good a time.

Many of us won't know, because for low & slow cooks we used extruded coconut lump charcoal. It's poor-mans Japanese binchotan charcoal, if you know what that is. Komodo Kamado makes the best extruded lump, but I also enjoy Than Charcoal as an alternative, a bit less neutral in a way that reminds me of roadside Thai barbecue. Komodo Kamado's coffee charcoal, when available, is the single best lump charcoal I've ever used. If you're cooking for restaurant investors, pull that out. There are many ways to look at ordering KK charcoal. People go for pallet shares (group orders) which is a great way to meet people in the clan, but there's no actual definition of a "full pallet". Try different orders, e.g. 12 boxes, to see how shipping works out, and just go for it. Or order a few boxes of Than and save it for low & slow, if infrequent. It kind of depends on your price sensitivity. I've always found that a poor memory is the best way to get past spending money. A heretical point of view would be to buy high quality briquets, with no filler that changes the lump taste. I love all Fogo lump charcoal choices, and I've recently started buying their briquets. They're denser than lump, and the uniform geometry also helps with getting to 550 F for pizza. KK COCONUT SHELL AND COFFEE WOOD CHARCOAL Than Charcoal, Chef's Choice Premium Grilling Charcoal, Log Style, 22lb Binchotan White Charcoal FOGO BRIQUETS (2 BAGS OF 15.4LBS)

I only started because I had a problem with freshly ground flour. Not to be unduly graphic, but also in England there must be country walks where there's a giant flat brown disk of bovine origin? When one doesn't adjust for green flour, that can be how a loaf comes out. Some people don't have this problem. Adding AA changes the limit on hydration. I'd turn this around: Only a moron would take typical doses of vitamin C after seeing the difference 60ppm makes in bread.