Teleidoscope

Sat, Feb 10, 2007

I Have a Road (Sort Of)

Posted at 3:53 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Feb 10 2007 22:51 GMT

I made a run to Costco this afternoon. When I got back I examined the snow it what should be the road leading to my driveway, and the drifts at the end of my neighbor's driveway. There was a gap between the drifts and his new split rail fence that I thought the truck could fit through, and the snow on the road seemed slushy, and shallow enough the I wouldn't high-center.

After I unloaded some of my groceries and schlepped them the length of my driveway to the house, I drove out and back without detouring through my neighbor's driveway for the first time in several weeks.

And I parked my truck, nose out, in what is technically my own driveway, not the road. It's at the very end of the driveway: there is still a drift farther in that is 20 inches deep where the snowblowered foot-path goes through it.

Of course, all of the melting snow is also causing problems. We have had morning fog three days in a row because there is so much moisture in the air and it freezes down over night. On Thursday, the fog was so dense that a woman gave birth in a vehicle on the side of the highway because they missed the exit for the hospital.

The melting snow has also turned my 'gravel' driveway (which is mostly clay) to slippery, gluey mud. Schlepping the groceries up the driveway to the house was annoying. The footing was bad and the mud kept trying to pull my boots off my feet. This summer I'll need to put in a load of stone chips and roadbase and get it graded. It's just as well that I didn't spend the money to do it last summer: the conditions this winter would be ripping it to pieces.

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Sourdough

Posted at 11:26 am MST to Technology

I will be baking later today or tomorrow, so my jug of sourdough starter is sitting out on the kitchen counter, warming up to room temperature for its feeding. My culture is derived from one supplied by the King Arthur Flour Baker's Catalog.

It's actually the second culture I've had from that source: I managed to let the previous one starve while I was travelling. Before that I used a homemade starter for a while, but it didn't rise well: I don't think I ended up with a good strain of yeast, and I think the non-yeast bacteria were too aggressive, so it tended to get unbalanced and funky easily.

The King Arthur starter rises nicely and seems to be fairly stable. This culture even migrated to Boston and back with me and survived well. And I think having a New England derived starter works well for my palate, since I grew up in the east.

I think part of what killed off the previous batch was that I tried to migrate it over to living on wholewheat flour instead of All-Purpose. I think that unbalanced things. And even though I was using white wholewheat flour, not the usual darker 'red' stuff, the starter turned hideous: sort of dark and muddy looking, with dark gray hooch collecting on top. Not appetizing. Maybe useful for a movie special effect, though.

I do like the White WholeWheat flour in bread, but I include it in the main recipe, not the starter culture. Plain flour based starter can be used in more different recipes, too.

And King Arthur flour definitely works better than the big supermarket brands. I first encountered it at Whole Foods, but now it is available even at the many of the big general supermarkets. I still sometimes need to get the White WholeWheat at Whole Foods or Wild Oats, but since Wild Oats is my nearest grocery store these days, that's no longer a problem. They even have 100% Organic White WholeWheat now.

I don't really use a written recipe when I make bread any more. My bread is about a cup each of water and starter, some salt, a little olive oil, and add flour (plain and whole wheat) until the texture is right. It's nice to be able to use the Kitchenaid to do the combining, now that I'm home again. Then knead it a little by hand, set it to rise until double, knead it again to punch it down and shape it, let it rise again and bake.

My sourdough pancake/waffle recipe is based on one from a book about Sourdough I got at the supermarket years ago when I first started playing with starter. (I've cut the quantities to 1 egg's worth.)

Sourdough pancakes or Waffles

Dry
1 1/4 cups flour
2 tsp Bakng powder (1.5ish at Boulder's altitude)
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Wet
1 cup starter
1 cup milk (3/4 cup for waffles)
3 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 egg
1 Tbsp sugar

Stir dry together. Stir wet together. Add wet to dry. Blend until just moistened.
Cook.

I'm going to try waffling with the George Foreman grill again this weekend: last week's experiment result was ... edible. But I used a mix I had in the cupboard, not my sourdough recipe.

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