Syzygies

There is a professional textbook by Michel Suas that solved a problem for me that no popular book addresses: Advanced Bread and Pastry A Professional Approach (The depth of this book can be intimidating. It reveals that a trained baker can understand their craft as well as any professional in other domains.) The issue was the poor performance of "green" (as in young) flour, freshly-ground flour that has not aged. As Suas states, We of course do not want to age freshly ground flour for 2-3 weeks; besides the inconvenience, the germ that we leave in would go rancid. Even dough left in the fridge a day or two can turn an unappealing grey. Suas also notes that a long first fermentation will naturally increase dough oxidation, offsetting somewhat the ill effects of using "green" flour. Everyone's technique is different, and absolutely everything comes into play, in determining the extent that this is a problem. Hydration? Grind fineness? Fermentation schedule? I have learned to not even bring this up at farmers markets where I see bread sold from freshly ground flour. Usually the baker is oblivious to this problem, defensive when it is even suggested, and has found a way to nevertheless produce loaves with the correct appearance. This reminds me of asking food professionals about "pine mouth" toxicity from wrong species of pine nuts; any pine nut that isn't $50/pound is from the wrong species and a crap shoot. It's easy to understand this ignorance; I have many Mexican recipes that call for avocado leaves, and I was about to plant the most frost-hardy variant I could find, until I read Diana Kennedy's accounts of leaf toxicity in avocado variants not grown in Oaxaca. Now I don't know if I can trust avocado leaves in a restaurant. Some Mexican restaurants in the US even use pine nuts, too. My questions are likely to get me escorted to the door. But I digress. I was pushing the boundaries of reasonable hydration for whole wheat loaves, attempting artisan technical results that usually require somewhat less extracted flour (a Lionel Poilâne loaf is my holy grail), and my loaves were coming out like flying saucers. Then I discovered the Suas passages via Google Books. (I have since bought his book.) 40 ppm is 40 parts per million. Yikes! How does one do that, in a bakery or a home kitchen? We're not science labs here. Suas recommends carefully mixing and cutting twice with white flour, to achieve a mixture one can actually weigh on a gram scale. I mix ascorbic acid 1:20 with white flour, sieve multiple times to mix well, then mix some of that 1:20 with white flour to obtain a 1:440 blend. (There's unfamiliar ratio math here: (1:20) * (1:20) = (1:440), which we can check as 21 * 21 = 441.) For my standard recipe based on a kilogram of flour, I mix in 18 grams of this 1:440 blend. This has been an easy habit, and I no longer experiment with leaving this step out. Others might not find it necessary, but I offer it as an option, in case they're experiencing issues that they can't resolve.

Grilling has never been this easy. I may make it through my pallet of KK coffee lump. The tortilla masa is from Comiteco Rojo landrace Oaxacan corn. Like I said, I'm usually juggling six other cooking tasks. It's a minute to set the Solo Stove fire, then six enjoyable minutes as a reward for the work in between, to gently grill steaks.

My Solo Stove Ranger came today, just after your Bonfire. It's big, though not as big as yours. The top reducer leaves an 11" opening. I immediately lit a single test layer of charcoal, which it improbably managed to sustain, while the outside stayed cool to the touch.This wasn't my best charcoal, but I couldn't resist grilling some salsa ingredients. The salsa was great on leftover fried rice; Mexico won the flavor tug-of-war. I'll be able to easily grill over wood chunks, for a quick steak. This will be fun...

Ingredients for salsa. I moved my comments to the Solo Stove topic.

Ñuke Delta Argentinian Style Wood Fire Gaucho Grill Overview | BBQGuys Wow. I want one!

Feeling the Pressure: Giving in to the Pressure Cooker Steve Sando founded Rancho Gordo beans, considered by many the best supplier of dried beans in the United States. (All bets are off once one includes Spain, where the best beans can require a second mortgage.) To summarize, he has relaxed his prejudice against pressure cooker beans, seeing it now as a possible step whose shortcomings can be corrected in later steps. That's also how I use sous vide: as a step. The issue isn't the quality of the beans themselves; pressure-cooked beans could be rinsed and placed on a salad, and no one would be the wiser. Rather, a pressure cooker fails to develop as rich a bean broth. One can indeed end up with a similar broth most of the time with most beans, but once one experiences a great broth from great beans, that becomes the quest. That is also my experience with stews; the quality of the liquid base is key, and a pressure cooker can't compete with a long slow reduction. I know how to cook a stew in a clay pot so it comes out tasting like I used a pressure cooker. I don't know how to cook a stew in a pressure cooker so it comes out tasting like I used a clay pot. In this sense, the pressure cooker is less expressive. There was a time when I would have claimed that beets were the killer app for pressure cookers. Then I realized that sous vide is the best way to cook beets. This doesn't carry over to sweet potatoes, where a pressure cooker rules.

Interesting. I bought an 8.5 quart Fissler Vitaquick pressure cooker for my New York apartment, then their 10.6 quart cooker for California near our KK. Mostly a solution looking for a problem, as in many applications (beans, stews, ...) it is noticeably inferior to the best application of traditional methods. And we're not opposed to technology: I also have chamber vacuum machines and sous vide equipment in each kitchen, and they've seen steady use. My motivation for nevertheless buying a second (large) pressure cooker was to make custom stocks for ramen. In our experience, the killer app for a pressure cooker is sweet potatoes. An underrated food available in many fascinating and obscure varieties if one hunts, they come out better pressure-cooked than by any other cooking method. (Let the pressure abate naturally; release the pressure quickly to see if they're done, and they explode into sweet potato puree.) Perhaps the wrong day to praise sweet potatoes, as everyone in the States just experienced their most dreadful incarnation yesterday. Eat them simply. Your two-step bird steps into an interesting debate. Competition barbecue fiends start their meats cold in cold cookers, to maximize the smoke ring formation that wanes once the meat passes a threshold temperature and the proteins change structure. Meat continues to benefit from smoke after this threshold, but there are no longer visual cues. One could cynically argue that competition judges get their palates blown early by wretched examples of competitor smoke, so one wins by offering them visual cues. Or there is actually something fundamentally different about the application of smoke to cold, never-cooked meat. Do your experiments give you any insight into this?

Cleaning the ash? Our KK tenth year anniversary just passed. Have I overlooked some basic maintenance here that I should consider?

Marcato Ravioli Tablet

I'm not sure where my heat deflector is, but I do use the double drip pan when I'm trying to tune how much radiant heat comes from below. Fuel efficiency? This is like debating flower pens when some people are still rolling joints. Although I never use my precious coffee lump indirect.

A commercial bread oven, which we're modeling, provides a wallop of steam in the first minutes of the bake. That device can boil enough water, but over a longer period. I don't believe it recreates our goal, but the effect could be interesting? I try to avoid overly complicated solutions to simple problems, so I'm unlikely to try this. But if I had this device already for woodworking, the temptation would be irresistible.

The density of steam is roughly 600g per cubic meter. So for example, 400g of water or ice turns into 2/3rds of a cubic meter of steam. A typical range-style home oven has a volume of less than 1/6th cubic meter. Our KKs are similar, depending on the size. So there's enough steam to fill an oven or KK four times over. The surplus will indeed come whooshing out! One wants to reach the point of diminishing returns. If you only partially fill the oven with steam, you're only partially affecting the loaf of bread. The water from a few sprays of a plant spritzer is at most half a cubic foot if one is lucky, with a very partial effect on the bread. On the other hand, 200g of water or ice would be nearly as effective as 400g. I've never seen you settle for nearly!

Of course, makes the routing easy. Though I'm enamored with Forstner drill bits, just as quick to make room for the closed end. Or, it's not a bug it's a feature! Expose the box end hole as a way to hang the tool. I never noticed, but handle blanks are their own market, just like pen turning blanks. Rockler sells bookmatched pairs of nice woods for this: Figured Walnut Knife Scales My two favorite "upload your design" fabrication sites are Ponoko.com (for laser cutting many materials including wood) and Drawer.com (for custom boxes in many woods). One could order laser-cut handle layers and glue them up without a shop. Commercial woodworkers don't bother with drawers anymore if they can just order them. Our Atlas 150 Pasta Machine and accessories sit in a cherry box I ordered. Of course, router tables are an excuse to make jigs. I can see making a handle jig designed for the Rockler handle blanks. So what's the nicest source of wrenches? Yours has the right shape to fit the grill; not all do. eBay has plenty of vintage Craftsman wrenches, for example.

Sous vide ribeye about to finish on coffee lump.

I'm waiting for a Jessum router table that cost a fair fraction of what I paid for my KK. If the other end is closed, I can imagine a captive nut to help hold everything in place. Or, place an order at Ponoko to form fit the wrench, and fit that into a nice wood handle, with appropriate glue. In any case, making a few of these is clearly in my future.

Bouchon Bakery recommended stones. Huh. I figured get water inside stones, heat to 450 F, you're making a bomb. No way. I started with cast iron and steel, and stumbled onto aluminum.

That calculation is for two plates. One shouldn't trust other people, ever, to do numbers. Let me explain my calculations so you can check me: A calorie is the energy it takes to raise a gram of water one degree centigrade. It takes 80 calories to thaw a gram of ice, 100 calories to bring that gram to the boiling point, and 540 calories to then turn that gram of water to steam. When the steam condenses, it releases that same energy. That's why steam burns are so severe. That's why the bread loaf notices we're doing this. By weight, aluminum holds 21.5% as much heat energy as water. This is better than steel, at around 13%. Water has a specific heat capacity of 4,181. Aluminum has a specific heat capacity of 897. The fraction 897 / 4181 = 0.2145. I bake at 450 F = 232 C. That's 132 C above the boiling point 100 C of water. My cake pan with two aluminum disks weighs 44.9 pounds. 44.9 * 454 = 20,385 grams. Scaling by 0.2145, that's the same heat capacity as 4,373 grams of water. 4,373 grams of water times 132 C above boiling = 577,236 calories of energy for us to play with. To turn ice to steam in the KK, we need 80 + 100 + 540 calories per gram of ice, or 720 calories. Our 577,236 calories divided by 720 is 800 grams of ice. 400 grams of ice is plenty, so one aluminum disk is plenty. A facility with math lets one shorten all this substantially in one's head, or write a spreadsheet, but anyone can work through each sentence one at a time, and understand what's going on here. If one wants to check my research, in addition to my calculations, here is a site describing turning ice to steam, with numbers matching mine: Heat Energy Required to Turn Ice into Steam The ratio of specific heats between aluminum and water is what matters here, not the units or their definitions, which can get confusing. Here's a table that yields similar ratios to mine: Table of Specific Heats And there's an age-old tension between theoretical physicists and experimental physicists (I am neither). Theory is only good for puzzles unless it works. In my experience, these calculations work.

Same recipe (tweaked over the years using a spreadsheet). Different results, both great. I won't even try to describe the differences, as I'm never convinced when someone uses florid language to describe wine, I don't see how I could do better with bread. Really, I like Bâtards because I can slice them to fit in the toaster. Finding a cast iron dutch oven in this shape is a frequent bread forum question; here is their preferred choice, available from various suppliers: Bayou Classic Cast Iron Oval Fryer I like to make two loaves (same work as one loaf), and the steam is easier than juggling two heavy pieces of cast iron. I've been burned both ways; steam burns are far easier to avoid by simply following a proper protocol: Use a slab of ice, or (indoors) wear a silicone mitt. I wouldn't say I'm riled up. I do like clarity. Some people are more difficult online; I'm probably more difficult in person. As my wife says, we're high maintenance, but we do our own maintaining.

Wow, how timely to find this thread active. I also have news to report. I got tired of cleaning yard schmutz out of my stainless steel chains, so I ordered a second aluminum disk off eBay. My steam generator now consists of one cake pan and two disks, all aluminum: Fat Daddio's PRD-163 Round Cake Pan, 16 x 3 Inch, Silver 1 Aluminum Disc, 1 1/4" thick x 14 3/4" dia., Mic-6 Cast Tooling Plate, Disk To my surprise redoing my calculations, aluminum has a significantly higher specific heat capacity than steel: Water, 4181. Aluminum, 897. Ratio: 21.5% Moreover, these disks are heavy. The cake pan and two disks combine to 44.9 pounds. So, in a ceramic cooker or oven heated to 450 F, this steam source can boil off 803 grams of ice, or 964 grams of warm (40 C) water. I rarely use more than half that, enough steam to replace the air in a KK or oven several times over. Perhaps I should have just tossed the steel chain, but now I have two aluminum disks. Nice. As for the no-knead discussion, is there any connection between no-knead recipes and cast iron enclosures? Or are we all playing Simon Says? Are the authors assuming no one is crazy enough to generate steam as Thomas Keller advises? A cast iron enclosure, and a steam generator, both work. They work differently. If no-knead bread is wedded to a cast iron enclosure for some technical reason, I'm all ears. I'm not seeing it. I've tried both ways with my bread (derived from Tartine Bakery which is a nuanced version of no-knead), and steam is better. What pushed me to experiment was a desire to pick my shape and make multiple loaves at once, not to be forced into the shape of the cast iron enclosure.

That is excellent news. Here's wishing for a speedy recovery. That's a serious workout schedule. It was pretty clear one can under-do it (telling my doctor I'd work out never helped much, but an actual half hour swim each day changed all my numbers). But one can over-do it? Wow.

I use a pair of propane weed burners to light charcoal, then a Milwaukee cordless leaf blower to blow sparks around everywhere. I bought the second weed burner when the first one stops igniting. I then realized you really only need one to light itself, it can light the others. So I kept both. If you make a habit of using two burners, and one propane canister runs out, you still have the other. Note the hose clamps, so I can balance the weed burners on the edge of the KK. Adjust to taste. I've heard of MAPP gas. My trouble is I'm adequately handy at too many things, including sweating pipes for plumbing. I do it so infrequently that I forget I can't work quickly enough to use MAPP gas rather than propane. It's like landing a jet compared to a propeller plane. It all happens twice as fast, and it might go well... So I only stock propane. In any case, once one gets a flame going, increasing the air supply does far more to establish the fire than continuing to apply an external flame. Dennis used to use a hair dryer. The Milwaukee leaf blower is pretty anemic for blowing leaves, which makes it perfect for getting fires going. If I actually want to clean up our yard without gasoline fumes, I use an EGO leaf blower that takes my EGO lawn mower battery. The dog charges me when I use it, she thinks I'm being misguided.

Well, I did have to replace my gasket recently, though I don't think the steam did it. Just time. I highly recommend a gasket change if warranted; it's like sharpening a knife. My KK runs so much better now. I am hard on cookers. I basically destroyed a Richard K. My KK can take everything I give it.

Yes. Let me give a meta-answer: Commercial bread ovens inject a great deal of steam at the beginning of the cook. This is a lot of trouble to design; they must have a good reason. Individual cooks can come up with some pretty whacky explanations for why things work. Trust their observations that things work, but don't accept their explanations. I learned this for example working on what is perhaps my best-known theorem: It takes seven shuffles to randomize a deck of cards. One piece of evidence that people under-shuffled was the outrage from duplicate bridge players when tournaments switched to dealing hands by computer. The players astutely observed shifts in game play, but wrongly believed that the computer was doing a worse job of shuffling than humans. I believe that the effect of steam at the beginning of a bread bake is this: Just as it takes a great deal of energy to convert water to steam, a great deal of energy is released when steam condenses back to water. One needs to be attentive working with steam; a steam burn could easily put you in the hospital. So at the beginning of a bread bake, what's cold in the oven? The loaf of bread. Steam condensing on the bread delivers a giant burst of heat energy to the crust. I observe better oven spring, and a better crust. There is however an ensemble of effects. The process is simply different. Proponents of baking no-knead bread in a cast iron pot often claim that the cast iron pot traps steam, also replicating the steam injection in a commercial bread oven. Huh? Their method also produces good bread, but it's totally different. There is no initial surge as steam condenses to water. The crust is interesting, much better than not using the pot, but not the same. I'm reminded of debating programming languages. Never debate programming languages with someone who isn't proficient in each language under discussion. Too many proponents of no-knead bread are no damn good at baking conventional loaves, and I simply don't trust anything they have to say. Confirmation bias, they like no-knead bread and they don't like kneading. I get it. The truth here is much more subtle. Chad Robertson for example advocates a very precise method of turning dough in a bowl, a very light kneading, that works well with baking in a cast iron pot. I bought some Danish landrace wheat flour at a farmers market this morning, and the directions about a long hydrolyze and the faintest knead were carefully given. If one isn't versed in both no-knead and classic kneading techniques, one doesn't have the skill set to adapt to actual conditions. Die-hard no-kneaders are simply dogmatic, they're not taking in new information.