The last post about bread (and the first about Bruce Lee)

I think a 3-post run is about as long as The Sourdough Chronicles can hold an audience. So, here it is, the last installment!

Bread is a uniting factor of humanity. There is a distinctive type of bread in most societies, but we all have some form or other. For me, learning to bake sourdough bread has been a connection to history and an entry into the scientific part of making food. As my good buddy Alton Brown says,

Cooking is an art, Baking is a Science.

So let's get scientific.

• Early bread was dense because I retarded the development of the yeast by keeping it in the fridge. Lesson: Hygiene be damned, we're keeping the starter in the open. At least, when operating in winter. Maybe in summer, I'll be able to keep it in the fridge. Anyway, look at my pet now!

• The density of earlier bread may also have been due to my use of what Justin calls "Fancy Hungarian Flour." I have heard that the bleached, enriched white flour we're more used to is more amenable to bread-baking. So I've beenusing regular white flour to make the bread and feed the starter. There's some discussion of this at this sourdough Q & A site. (Thanks, Travis)

• Early bread had a hard crust because there wasn't enough moisture in the dough. Adding 1/4 cup of water to the recipe and spraying/rubbing water on the crust before or during baking (risky!!!) seems to yield a crust that's just right, probably cooling and moistening the exterior while allowing the interior to continue to absorb heat from the stone.

(It's so good to have a late-night snack of warm sourdough with olive oil & Balsamic Vinegar, some freshly-cracked black and red pepper... yum.)

• Slate may be a natural stone, but its porous and stratified nature causes problems. I rinsed the stone between uses, to get rid of the burned flour, but over several heating cycles the water probably penetrated the stone and caused the split. I looked at Home Depot and ACE but my local ones didn't carry unglazed tiles.
  

  

• The dog likes sourdough starter. I think it's just a weird enough smell for him to be entranced with it. I'll be kneading or feeding the starter and he will try to get between me and my other pet.

Hypothesis: jealousy.

Anyway, I think this is all I'll post about my bread-baking hobby. That is, until I try some new and more complicated project.

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The realization that it was probably the water that broke the stone reminded me of Bruce Lee. In his Tao of Jeet Kune Do, he says

Be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.