Syzygies

On 4/22/2024 at 5:59 AM, David Chang said:

Will this work as a smoking bento box? Is Syzygies delusional? 

Mini Cast Iron Bread Maker, Loaf Pan

Lid: 7.9''L x 3.7''W x 0.8''H Pan: 7.9''L x 3.7''W x 2.1''H

I propose this as an example of a category, not a specific product recommendation. I am intrigued by the lip, one might get away without flour paste, perhaps inverted. It's small, could be used where round 1 or 2 quart pots wouldn't fit.

1 hour ago, David Chang said:

 

what is your keep temp for once a week feedings and what is the warmup temp? 

Here are screen grabs from their instruction manual, and a link to their blog post with more information:

How to Use the Sourdough Home | Brod & Taylor

In KK Bread Making Tips and Tricks, @Pequod posted about his new Brød & Taylor Sourdough Home, a temperature controlled chamber for ideally maintaining a sourdough culture. That is a long and interesting thread, that devolves into speculation about my cannabis use and so forth. The Komodo Kamado forum has great advice from some very serious cooks, and sometimes that advice draws in visitors who decide to stay and buy a Komodo Kamado, and become valued compatriots. So I thought it would be worthwhile to start a new thread focused on the Sourdough Home.

I bought one immediately. The short-term payoff is being able to feed one's starter less frequently without inducing a refrigerator coma, then get it nice and warm for making bread. My first bread this way was a technical flop but the best tasting bread I've made in years. This makes it clear that the long-term payoff is learning to bake with better controls. Sure, people have made wine for centuries before electronics, but they had access to stable temperature caves, and they adapted their methods to reliable conditions. Modern wine is arguably better, in part because one can control conditions precisely. I'm convinced that one can learn to make astounding bread by learning how to use the Sourdough Home to control conditions.

The Sourdough Home is not silent, and even in sleep mode a brighter light source than all of my other LEDs combined. If you live in a studio apartment, you'll likely end up pitching it out the window.

An internet search reveals that a 3/4 liter "743 Weck Mold Jar" with a wooden lid is an ideal starter container (Amazon). Remove the silicone lid seal, so gases can escape. I like mine.

After briefly searching for a bread proofing chamber, I realized that dough for my single loaves should fit in the Sourdough Home itself, if I could find the right container. I got lucky, and found the Airscape Glass Coffee Canister (Medium 7-Inch) with a two quart capacity. It exactly fits the Sourdough Home, with a similar wooden lid and a silicone seal one removes. It looks like a matched pair with the Weck starter jar, as shown in the photos.

I've never had much luck with refrigerator dough rises, but the Sourdough Home allows for intermediate bulk proofing temperatures. My goal now is to adapt the idea of Desem bread (as detailed for example in The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book; we already grind our own flour) to the possibilities of this equipment.

On 4/22/2024 at 5:59 AM, David Chang said:

will this work as a smoking bento box or am i dellusional?

I've made countless experiments over the years, including attempts to adopt ideas that have worked for others. I keep coming back to cast iron. One can find arbitrarily small cast iron pots with effort.

The most common mode of failure I've experienced is a breach, where either the lid displaces or a space opens between the lid and pot. Now convection burns the wood in the way we're trying to avoid. Thin steel deforms easily. An unsecured cast iron lid usually stays on, but smoke pots can tip as the fire shifts. I don't care how small the chances are here, I would find it unacceptable to lose a cook, particularly if it's for an event where others are depending on my BBQ. The flour paste seal for a cast iron lid is easy once one establishes a routine, and reminds me of the romance of using questionable pots in Moroccan cooking.

I've never actually seen my three 1/8" holes clog, even though my wood could be in contact with the holes. A single hole would probably work, but one never wants to build a bomb, and three holes is not a liability. Do the holes need to face down? This was based on watching how one makes charcoal, where the exhaust becomes a self-sustaining flame at temperatures well above low & slow. Dunno how important "down" is, but down is better than up, and I have to point the holes some way. (I came up with the smoke pot idea after some ill-advised experiments at making charcoal...)

If I had investors for a state-of-the-art BBQ restaurant in Manhattan, I'd design a method of heating wood in external chambers, and feeding the gas produced to a modified standard gas oven. I'm surprised that no one has tried this.

Usually when people are unhappy with smoke pots, they're having trouble getting them going. I like starting my fires with a weed burner propane torch. For low & slow one wants a fire in one spot, so the fire doesn't run away. If one lights that spot under a smoke pot, one can arrange to get the smoke pot going too. This is fire tending, not fundamentally different from any other form of fire tending. One learns with practice. I don't give up.

Alternatives? A mandatory PSA is required here, not all metals belong in a smoker. Galvanized metals in particular off-gas toxins one doesn't want near food. Never break with tradition without understanding what one is doing.

Long ago, others followed my smoke pot experiments by building "pipe bombs", stainless steel threaded pipes with caps, with multiple holes along the bottom edge. These were expensive, but avoided the flour paste lid sealing ritual. For a bento box one would want a smaller pipe, bringing down the expense. Could one use other metals? See above. Texas oil rigger BBQ recycled job-site drums. I'd just go with stainless steel, to be sure.

With several holes and ordinary wood as filler, I can't imagine sufficient pressure building to create a bomb. On the other hand, in math we observe that lack of imagination isn't a proof of anything.

A reasonable design principle is that you can never design something not to break, but you can and should design how it breaks. Would pipe caps really need to screw on, or could one rig something that slid together, perhaps with enough overlap that there was no need for flour paste?

Try multiple ideas, with care!

I've used grape vine cuttings, and fig (a bit odd) but not olive wood. Here's what ChatGTP-4 said:

Quote

In Mediterranean cooking, olive wood is primarily used for grilling rather than smoking. The wood from olive trees, when used as fuel for grilling, imparts a mild, sweet, and somewhat fruity flavor to the food, which complements the region's culinary style well. This flavor is particularly popular for grilling meats, fish, and vegetables.

While olive wood can also be used for smoking food, it is less common compared to other woods like hickory or mesquite, which are more typically used in American-style barbecue smoking. The slow-burning nature of olive wood and its subtle flavor profile makes it ideal for the quick and high-heat cooking methods preferred in Mediterranean grilling.

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

[ I started a new thread, Brød & Taylor Sourdough Home ]

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 started a new thread, Brød & Taylor Sourdough Home ]

On 4/14/2024 at 9:59 AM, tekobo said:

We have a good sourdough bakery nearby and I think I will go and ask for some of their starter when I decide to get back on the sourdough horse.

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.

[ I started a new thread, Brød & Taylor Sourdough Home ]

On 4/14/2024 at 10:01 AM, Pequod said:

And it is in stock at King Arthur: https://shop.kingarthurbaking.com/items/sourdough-home

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.

[ I started a new thread, Brød & Taylor Sourdough Home ]

On 4/10/2024 at 11:27 AM, Pequod said:

@tekobo -- new toy you need to up your breadmaking game. Note the photobombing grains in the back, ready for milling.

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?"

[ I started a new thread, Brød & Taylor Sourdough Home ]

20 hours ago, PVPAUL said:

I also have a recipe for taking fresh sweet corn, cooking and making this into a masa of sorts for a sweet tamale…..still working on this one but just shows you wide ranges of corn for making masa.

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 ??

On 3/21/2024 at 1:25 AM, tekobo said:

Thank you @Syzygies! When I tagged you in my message above I hoped that it would trigger a response from you.  There is no way I am going to attempt to reproduce your spreadsheet.  Is there anyway you could post it somewhere it could be downloaded, if you are willing to share?  

On a much less complex level, do you have an up to date version of your spelt bread recipe that you can share for use and further tweaking as necessary?

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.

1 minute ago, MsTwiggy said:

Do you use to cococchar because you prefer the flavor or becuase it consistently burns longer?

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. 

6 hours ago, MsTwiggy said:

Has anyone gotten more than 10 hours of burn time out of a full basket of lump charcoal on an Ultimate 23 running at 230 ish ???

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)

5 hours ago, tekobo said:

Have you tried with and without and can you genuinely tell the difference?

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.

2 hours ago, C6Bill said:

Seeing that spreadsheet makes me sad. I had a drive failure and lost the one i made for bread and pizza dough.

Yes, my spreadsheet was inspired by my bread spreadsheet, for sourdough batards from freshly ground flour. Various people here have adopted my method for producing steam in the KK. What I don't really understand is how my process is like releasing a marble in a spherical bowl; no matter how I start out, I end up a few iterations later with exactly the same recipe. I'd like a few variants in the rotation...

Now that I'm retired I want to take the bread intensives at the San Francisco Baking Institute. Michel Suas wrote Advanced Bread and Pastry, a professional tome that makes it clear a well-trained French chef has a PhD understanding of cooking. That remains the only book I know that addresses the challenge of "green flour", freshly ground flour that hasn't aged. I now add 60 parts per million ascorbic acid.

On 1/25/2024 at 5:17 AM, tekobo said:

I just bought two dies but look what there was to choose from.  Wasn't I good to be so restrained?

Wow. I freaked at that picture, thinking that was now your stash!

There's a pretty good learning curve, nothing that will throw you, but many would give up.

Let me send you an upgraded handle! The traditional handle is the weak link in the design. Being too stubborn with a too stiff dough, I managed to widen its hole. I then went through several spectacular failures of embarrassing experiments making a replacement handle, before recognizing that the forces involved were beyond my usual experience. One can spend five minutes in Adobe Illustrator, then upload a design to a professional laser cutting service such as SendCutSend. I did, and I'm thrilled with the result.

As for dough, I keep a MacOS Numbers spreadsheet of all attempts, which computes target hydrations for me. Too wet a dough just sticks together, but too dry can jam the bigolaro and make it howl. One wants to nevertheless go as dry as practical. This is easiest mixing the dough in a food processor (I mix other doughs by hand or in a stand mixer). Working without exact measurements, people tend to aim for a dough that just barely clumps together.

A principle I've learned the hard way: The dough has to taste good. One can extrude any dough, this isn't a constraint. It nevertheless reminds me of traditional Japanese woodworking. They use a rice paste as glue. It's not really a glue in the sense of Titebond III Ultimate Wood Glue, or even traditional rabbit skin glue, but rather a mechanical stabilizer to fill faint gaps in the elaborate joinery that actually secures the structure. So the new guy is tasked to cook the rice. He asks what to aim for? "So it tastes good."

I use food grade silicone grease on the shaft and die holder, wiping excess with a paper towel. I use a strap wrench to remove the die holder when it gets stuck. I rub a bit of olive oil around the plunger. If I've concerned that the bigolaro will howl halfway through, I feed the dough in several steps so the last portion doesn't get too compressed (aspiring to turn to diamond).

I separate the strands, shaking on cornstarch if needed; flour will clump rather than dissolve away, cooking. For Asian noodles such as rice, one can extrude straight into boiling water as I saw done in a kanom jeen namya breakfast establishment in Thailand (had to throw that in to keep Dennis paying attention...) It's easiest to learn on fat extrusions like fusilli, as they easily separate, and can be cut shorter once they dry a bit.

A related puzzle is how to clean the dies. Restaurants just soak them, changing the water daily, and toss the first dough to come out. A dental water pick does a reasonable job, once they've soaked. I happen to use an electric pressure washer, outside. We bought one to maintain our ipe deck, but I also use it to clean our Mexican molcajetes, whose open grain can trap food.

I intend to make a tongue-in-cheek YouTube video on all this, going into the woodworking for my pressure washer die holder, suggesting with a straight face one should install an ipe deck to justify the pressure washer purchase, even though it's really to support the bigolaro.

I've always wanted a flywheel slicer.

On 1/6/2024 at 7:47 AM, dstr8 said:

I use my Cusinart food processor to get the cooked corn kernels to a very fine consistency.

That has to be it.

For centuries, masa was stone ground "a mano" using a metate. Modern expediencies involve using powerful grinders, far more powerful than a food processor; Masienda sells a $1995 Molinito that does a credible job. However, I went to an acclaimed restaurant that let me tour their kitchen to see their Molinito, and my friends at table thought my tortillas were clearly better. One can see all sorts of possible confirmation biases here, such as a restaurant needing to "lean in" to an obviously artisanal style, for diners who can't discern "traditional but better" quality unassisted.

Cutting isn't grinding. The best way I know to grind is using a Premier Chocolate Refiner, an upgraded version of advice by Bricia Lopez to use an Indian wet grinder. The process is tedious, less tedious with experience, but it produces fundamentally different results.

The friend who introduced me to fresh masa now has the Vita-Prep commercial blender from my former New York apartment. Working too wet then mixing in masa harina, he still wasn't satisfied with the results. For this purpose a Vita-Prep is far more powerful than a Cuisinart (I have both).

How one cuts matters. For a parallel problem, Serious Eats' The Best Way to Mince Garlic details the significance of different techniques.

I'd say "not puffing" is a symptom, not the root issue. For a parallel problem, consider crema on an Italian espresso. People expect to see crema as a certificate of quality and correct technique, but it's actually easily manipulated detritus in the beans, independent of flavor. Here, based on experience, I'm not concerned that you can't puff but I'm profoundly suspicious of Cuisinart masa.

The first Rick Bayless method is how I've always rescued stale artisan bread, but I then want to toast the bread. He's good, but my younger attempts at learning to cook Mexican based on his books floundered. Diana Kennedy got me past restaurant Mex to regional surprises, and Bricia Lopez unlocked an ingredient one could do better than restaurants (tortillas from homemade masa), freeing various of us here to then improvise to our heart's content.

I like his second method. I'd be tempted to instead set up a @PVPAUL pipeline, passing fresh tortillas through an actual steamer then do-like-Paul onto open flame briefly to restore some character, then into the warming basket.

Despite my best efforts to free my New York apartment to the four winds (My second masa wet grinder in NY became Paul's second masa wet grinder, and you wouldn't believe the Mexican goodies freezer care package he sent us as thanks) there were many casualties, including a Brazilian soapstone pot. It was too small, and I've cracked others, but even cracked they would make phenomenal tortilla warmers for occasions like this, as they hold heat for hours. Sturdy clay would work well for shorter waits.