1) I’ve avoided the parchment paper issue lately by switching to the BreadMat from Rosehill Sourdough. It’s reusable and it’s got little handles for putting it in and lifting it out of a screaming hot Dutch oven. https://rosehillsourdough.com/product/the-breadmat/ (I also love Mike’s ebook “Rosehill Sourdough” it’s $20 and explains sourdough better than any book I’ve ever seen. He’s a former engineer at Ooni and he’s also got great videos and whatnot. And his new product is a wood-pulp proofing basket that I like much more than my old linen/rattan ones.)
2) as for the cook/baker dichotomy I think it’s real, but I think we should shift our terms a bit. I think of it as cook/pastry instead. To me, cooking and bread baking share a lot in common. Both benefit from being rigorous and precise until you know your materials really well. Think back to when you first cooked. You used recipes. You measured. And now it’s intuitive. Bread baking is a lot the same. You can change hydration. You can add more salt. Less. Change your flours. Once you know the basic ground rules, suddenly improvisation is open to you. (And hell, depending on your ambient humidity/temperature/what that particular batch of flour is like/etc even that precise recipe in grams has to be adjusted using a bit of intuition.)
Pastry? That’s a world that doesn’t play so well with improvisation. That’s a world where precision and a cook’s mindset doesn’t play as well (excepting of course when you get to be wildly good at it, as it true with any art). The biggest thing I ever did to improve my bread baking was to let go of the idea of precision and it being different from cooking by a ton. Instead I just relaxed. Sure some things will not be perfect, but you still have bread and you can learn from the mistakes for the next time. That’s exactly the same as cooking.
I think the intimidating part is that we cook every single day and it doesn’t really take that long. You forget failure quickly. But with bread, we do it MAYBE once a week and it can take a whole day, so failure FEELS like a bigger thing.
I love pizza (like I eat an embarrassing amount) and sometimes just don’t want to turn on my inside oven. I’ve got a great back deck and table so it’s insanely tempting especially for when the weather is nice.
I just got an Ooni myself and I've only had a few chances to use it so far (weather hasn't been ideal yet), but the results are spectacular. Looking forward to trying some sourdough pizza crusts now.
Hubs grills/smokes in all weather (he did pulled pork in 6” of snow). I’m guessing I can tempt him into helping in bad weather. Sourdough crusts are going to be great!
"I’ve worried about my parenting, wondering if I’m actually a good dad or just someone who plays the character well."
I'm not sure there's much of a difference here.
I once opined that I wasn't sure if I've become less socially awkward as I got older or did I just figure out how to mimic what other people who were not socially awkward were doing and someone told me that it doesn't matter, because if I am doing that with any kind of regularity, it doesn't matter how I arrived there.
So if you're playing the character well, that means you have to be doing the things that would allow you to believe that, which means that you're more than likely doing the right things.
Totally, totally 100% agree. I can't remember where I heard it, but somewhere along the line someone told me, "there is no such thing as life -- there are only living things." What they meant by that, I think, is that there really aren't any rules that apply to all of us -- we're all an experiment of one, and that goes for parenting and children too. I've read SO much advice over the years about parenting, and been able to implement precisely 0.00000001% of it. Very little of it seems to apply in the case of my family and my kids.
The best thing, I've found, to be a good parent is just to *be there* -- being present a lot (which I get to do, b/c I work from home 3 days out of 5), I get to see our kids a lot, and just be in more situations with them than I would be otherwise. I try not to get too lecture-y, though I'm sure I slip into that more than I probably realize; but otherwise I mostly just hang out with them. (You can't sell many books with that advice, though!)
My degree literally has the word “food” in it, I’ve worked at a major-you-have-heard-of-it company in their baking division and had an internship at company that made, amongst other things, French bread for frozen pizzas. Despite all that, I cannot make a real loaf of bread worth anything. Focaccia, yes. Sourdough was a failure (how did the entire thing become hollow?)
"This is a microcosm of my personality at large—I’ve always been someone who favors an essay test over a math problem, a jury-rigged solution over a precise answer, a feeling over a fact. I’m a bullshitter, to put it another way. I’m happy to talk my way in and out of situations without concerning myself too much with nagging exactitudes."
Ha ha yeah I man. So on a completely unrelated topic can I get an annotated list of the buildings you've worked on? Like, a REALLY exhaustive and complete list? No reason, just ~interested~.
The architect you should be worried about is the one who *doesn’t* worry constantly. Also, usually when people worry about architects, they’re actually thinking about stuff that’s the structural engineer’s purview.
(Totally kidding , I'm an engineer and much the same way. People generally don't understand how much creativity and lateral thinking is involved in disciplines they imagine are very rigid and math-based. There are times I will look at a really tough to decipher issue and my brain lights up like a christmas tree and I spout out the answer immediate; there are many other times I stare dumbfoundedly at various pieces of data collected over a period of weeks and struggling to even come up with a theory of what's going on.)
This is absolutely true. As an engineer I love when I can get a clear cut yes or no answer to something but there really aren’t as many of those as one would think. The most common phrase in the primary manual my profession uses is “use engineering judgment” because not everything has a clearly defined right answer.
The best part of engineering is when you get to be creative to solve a problem. I hate math, but poring through software to find a creative use for it? Staring at an intersection and looking for ways to make it work better? Doing some basic data analysis in a spreadsheet and spotting a trend and then following that trend down the rabbit hole to find the underlying issue? That's what I live for.
The only way to get good at something is to fail and learn from each failure.
Even success will have an area that isn't perfect since nothing is perfect.
Long ago I took a class (and even longer ago had another thing) at the American Institute of Baking in lovely Manhappiness, KS, as part of the class we had a tour. The professional bakers were learning things such as how to tell you had too much, too little of ingredients/baking/rising/mixing/etc. These were individuals who were already being paid to turn out massive quantities of baked products. And they were still learning.
Patience is so easy to say, hard to practice and mastering is at another level. And you have to have the patience to keep executing/trying/analyzing when you are trying to do better at a thing.
I’m absolutely a baker over a cook. In another life, I’d have been a lab scientist (instead of a social scientist/statistician). I recently started a new Bread Pitt (name your starter, obviously); I’m mainly using Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf. Easy to follow and LOTS OF PICTURES. I have The Bread Bible too, but while there are some nice recipes, I absolutely abhor the writer’s style (I’ve called her some....choice words, while just trying to read the book. I feel Holly would approve. Can’t really recommend the book but she’s a well known baker for a reason).
Pro tip: parchment paper is your best friend for baking. Pro tip 2: weighing baking ingredients makes things turn out 1000% better.
WaPo has a phenomenal overnight dutch oven bread that’s embarrassingly easy but gets so many compliments. Literally can you stir? Check. Can you They also did a 6 week baking challenge type thing that was a nice intro for non-bakers in late 2019, but the recipes can still be found readily.
Naturally leavened loaves (like sourdough) are surprisingly forgiving on proofing time. My recipe said 2-4 hours to double during the last proof, but I just wasn’t happy with where my bread was so I said fuck it and let it go another 8 hours overnight. YMMV, but my house leans chilly and the bread was still fine.
I read "Classic Sourdoughs, Revised: A Home Baker's Handbook" by Ed and Jean Wood. It was a good read and I probably need to re-read it. It was interesting to learn about the starter.
I’m a millennial marketing professor; of course I’m unfortunately still on the Facebook train. Then again, I find good houseplant groups so...roses and thorns.
FWIW- Someone told me to put parchment paper on the bottom of the dutch over, helps to put the dough in and take it out.
As for the parenting, my wife recently opined that the skills needed to parent toddlers like carefully watching them, giving them endless attention and structure, is very different from the skills needed for school age kids. They need to be parented much differently with the space to make mistakes, be on their own, manage their own problems, etc. It may be obvious, but you've developed mental muscle memory that you need to unlearn.
I've long been a proponent of using parchment paper (I use it when making pizza), but in this class, it was advocated against--James noted something about the silicone in it off-gassing at the higher temps for bread. I don't know how big a concern it is, but it threw me into some doubt about how much I use it.
Parchment paper typically has a listed max temp (usually around 425 if I recall correctly) - I can't really speak to the off-gassing but if I learned anything from Fahrenheit 451, it's that paper combusts at 451° (that was the main point of that story, right?) so I'm nervous using it any hotter than 425 (especially since ovens can lie about their temperature) even though I know that the paper itself is probably not going to reach that temperature
I slide parchment paper under pizzas when usng my baking steel up to 500 degrees. The edges are certainly browned, but not on fire. For fire you need heat and ignition.
Trust me on this, I'm an eagle scout who has burned just about anything you can think of.
I had a review at work recently and the manager of my team asked me if I was familiar with Imposter Syndrome. I'm worried that I reacted too enthusiastically.
As a cook that doesn’t really use or follow recipes baking has always been terrifying.
My pandemic projects included scones and bagels, scone being pretty easy when I realized you could grate the butter and the folding process is easy.
I’ve never tried bread despite a farmhouse levain or sourdough being one of my favorite things ever (esp having relatively close proximity to Tartine bread).
If it's any consolation, my extremely meticulous, science-brained husband who has multiple chemistry degrees attempted to start a starter from scratch and it failed after 5 days... Sourdough is very hard! But that bread looks incredible!!
In the non-sourdough realm, my husband swears by the Rustic Crusty Loaf recipe from John Kirkwood, who has a delightful YouTube channel, if you're not already acquainted.
The trick someone told me that changed everything for biscuits was to freeze the butter and grate it into the flour. Also the pre-made self-rising flour from White Lily is perfect.
Yep, gotta be the white lily flour, my biscuits were garbage before my friend clued me in. Also best advice I got for biscuits was that they should take no more than 20 minutes to get in the oven and if they do, you’re doing something wrong. Helps me not overthink it
Two thoughts here:
1) I’ve avoided the parchment paper issue lately by switching to the BreadMat from Rosehill Sourdough. It’s reusable and it’s got little handles for putting it in and lifting it out of a screaming hot Dutch oven. https://rosehillsourdough.com/product/the-breadmat/ (I also love Mike’s ebook “Rosehill Sourdough” it’s $20 and explains sourdough better than any book I’ve ever seen. He’s a former engineer at Ooni and he’s also got great videos and whatnot. And his new product is a wood-pulp proofing basket that I like much more than my old linen/rattan ones.)
2) as for the cook/baker dichotomy I think it’s real, but I think we should shift our terms a bit. I think of it as cook/pastry instead. To me, cooking and bread baking share a lot in common. Both benefit from being rigorous and precise until you know your materials really well. Think back to when you first cooked. You used recipes. You measured. And now it’s intuitive. Bread baking is a lot the same. You can change hydration. You can add more salt. Less. Change your flours. Once you know the basic ground rules, suddenly improvisation is open to you. (And hell, depending on your ambient humidity/temperature/what that particular batch of flour is like/etc even that precise recipe in grams has to be adjusted using a bit of intuition.)
Pastry? That’s a world that doesn’t play so well with improvisation. That’s a world where precision and a cook’s mindset doesn’t play as well (excepting of course when you get to be wildly good at it, as it true with any art). The biggest thing I ever did to improve my bread baking was to let go of the idea of precision and it being different from cooking by a ton. Instead I just relaxed. Sure some things will not be perfect, but you still have bread and you can learn from the mistakes for the next time. That’s exactly the same as cooking.
I think the intimidating part is that we cook every single day and it doesn’t really take that long. You forget failure quickly. But with bread, we do it MAYBE once a week and it can take a whole day, so failure FEELS like a bigger thing.
Handles! Hell yeah.
Ooni is my bucket list item (read: tenure gift) once I get my house slightly more in order (and have the official notice from the board of governors).
Ooni is absolutely worth it. I don’t use it nearly often enough but when I do I am always thrilled with the results
I love pizza (like I eat an embarrassing amount) and sometimes just don’t want to turn on my inside oven. I’ve got a great back deck and table so it’s insanely tempting especially for when the weather is nice.
I just got an Ooni myself and I've only had a few chances to use it so far (weather hasn't been ideal yet), but the results are spectacular. Looking forward to trying some sourdough pizza crusts now.
Hubs grills/smokes in all weather (he did pulled pork in 6” of snow). I’m guessing I can tempt him into helping in bad weather. Sourdough crusts are going to be great!
"I’ve worried about my parenting, wondering if I’m actually a good dad or just someone who plays the character well."
I'm not sure there's much of a difference here.
I once opined that I wasn't sure if I've become less socially awkward as I got older or did I just figure out how to mimic what other people who were not socially awkward were doing and someone told me that it doesn't matter, because if I am doing that with any kind of regularity, it doesn't matter how I arrived there.
So if you're playing the character well, that means you have to be doing the things that would allow you to believe that, which means that you're more than likely doing the right things.
Totally, totally 100% agree. I can't remember where I heard it, but somewhere along the line someone told me, "there is no such thing as life -- there are only living things." What they meant by that, I think, is that there really aren't any rules that apply to all of us -- we're all an experiment of one, and that goes for parenting and children too. I've read SO much advice over the years about parenting, and been able to implement precisely 0.00000001% of it. Very little of it seems to apply in the case of my family and my kids.
The best thing, I've found, to be a good parent is just to *be there* -- being present a lot (which I get to do, b/c I work from home 3 days out of 5), I get to see our kids a lot, and just be in more situations with them than I would be otherwise. I try not to get too lecture-y, though I'm sure I slip into that more than I probably realize; but otherwise I mostly just hang out with them. (You can't sell many books with that advice, though!)
My degree literally has the word “food” in it, I’ve worked at a major-you-have-heard-of-it company in their baking division and had an internship at company that made, amongst other things, French bread for frozen pizzas. Despite all that, I cannot make a real loaf of bread worth anything. Focaccia, yes. Sourdough was a failure (how did the entire thing become hollow?)
"This is a microcosm of my personality at large—I’ve always been someone who favors an essay test over a math problem, a jury-rigged solution over a precise answer, a feeling over a fact. I’m a bullshitter, to put it another way. I’m happy to talk my way in and out of situations without concerning myself too much with nagging exactitudes."
Ha ha yeah I man. So on a completely unrelated topic can I get an annotated list of the buildings you've worked on? Like, a REALLY exhaustive and complete list? No reason, just ~interested~.
The architect you should be worried about is the one who *doesn’t* worry constantly. Also, usually when people worry about architects, they’re actually thinking about stuff that’s the structural engineer’s purview.
(Totally kidding , I'm an engineer and much the same way. People generally don't understand how much creativity and lateral thinking is involved in disciplines they imagine are very rigid and math-based. There are times I will look at a really tough to decipher issue and my brain lights up like a christmas tree and I spout out the answer immediate; there are many other times I stare dumbfoundedly at various pieces of data collected over a period of weeks and struggling to even come up with a theory of what's going on.)
This is absolutely true. As an engineer I love when I can get a clear cut yes or no answer to something but there really aren’t as many of those as one would think. The most common phrase in the primary manual my profession uses is “use engineering judgment” because not everything has a clearly defined right answer.
I tend to remind my boss regularly that failure is always an option.
The best part of engineering is when you get to be creative to solve a problem. I hate math, but poring through software to find a creative use for it? Staring at an intersection and looking for ways to make it work better? Doing some basic data analysis in a spreadsheet and spotting a trend and then following that trend down the rabbit hole to find the underlying issue? That's what I live for.
Bread is magic beyond my ken.
Are you mixing in the correct direction? Wrong direction could be as bad as Ray seeing the Stay-Puft marshmallow man.
Bread: the Amanda of foods.
Believe in yourself Scott.
The only way to get good at something is to fail and learn from each failure.
Even success will have an area that isn't perfect since nothing is perfect.
Long ago I took a class (and even longer ago had another thing) at the American Institute of Baking in lovely Manhappiness, KS, as part of the class we had a tour. The professional bakers were learning things such as how to tell you had too much, too little of ingredients/baking/rising/mixing/etc. These were individuals who were already being paid to turn out massive quantities of baked products. And they were still learning.
Patience is so easy to say, hard to practice and mastering is at another level. And you have to have the patience to keep executing/trying/analyzing when you are trying to do better at a thing.
Just ignore Holly's judging.
Every detail that cookbook shares of his daughter is truly chaotic.
I’m absolutely a baker over a cook. In another life, I’d have been a lab scientist (instead of a social scientist/statistician). I recently started a new Bread Pitt (name your starter, obviously); I’m mainly using Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf. Easy to follow and LOTS OF PICTURES. I have The Bread Bible too, but while there are some nice recipes, I absolutely abhor the writer’s style (I’ve called her some....choice words, while just trying to read the book. I feel Holly would approve. Can’t really recommend the book but she’s a well known baker for a reason).
Pro tip: parchment paper is your best friend for baking. Pro tip 2: weighing baking ingredients makes things turn out 1000% better.
WaPo has a phenomenal overnight dutch oven bread that’s embarrassingly easy but gets so many compliments. Literally can you stir? Check. Can you They also did a 6 week baking challenge type thing that was a nice intro for non-bakers in late 2019, but the recipes can still be found readily.
Naturally leavened loaves (like sourdough) are surprisingly forgiving on proofing time. My recipe said 2-4 hours to double during the last proof, but I just wasn’t happy with where my bread was so I said fuck it and let it go another 8 hours overnight. YMMV, but my house leans chilly and the bread was still fine.
Here’s the overnight recipe for those scared of bread: https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/overnight-dutch-oven-bread/17160/
I read "Classic Sourdoughs, Revised: A Home Baker's Handbook" by Ed and Jean Wood. It was a good read and I probably need to re-read it. It was interesting to learn about the starter.
I’ll have to check it out! R/breadit has had some great tips (my starter kept getting too...sour, so I’ve learned how to temper it!).
If you're on Facebook, the very active "Sourdough Geeks" group is, incidentally, run the James mentioned in the post!
I’m a millennial marketing professor; of course I’m unfortunately still on the Facebook train. Then again, I find good houseplant groups so...roses and thorns.
FWIW- Someone told me to put parchment paper on the bottom of the dutch over, helps to put the dough in and take it out.
As for the parenting, my wife recently opined that the skills needed to parent toddlers like carefully watching them, giving them endless attention and structure, is very different from the skills needed for school age kids. They need to be parented much differently with the space to make mistakes, be on their own, manage their own problems, etc. It may be obvious, but you've developed mental muscle memory that you need to unlearn.
I've long been a proponent of using parchment paper (I use it when making pizza), but in this class, it was advocated against--James noted something about the silicone in it off-gassing at the higher temps for bread. I don't know how big a concern it is, but it threw me into some doubt about how much I use it.
Parchment paper typically has a listed max temp (usually around 425 if I recall correctly) - I can't really speak to the off-gassing but if I learned anything from Fahrenheit 451, it's that paper combusts at 451° (that was the main point of that story, right?) so I'm nervous using it any hotter than 425 (especially since ovens can lie about their temperature) even though I know that the paper itself is probably not going to reach that temperature
Great something else to think about. Do they make free-range parchment paper with safe silicone?
I slide parchment paper under pizzas when usng my baking steel up to 500 degrees. The edges are certainly browned, but not on fire. For fire you need heat and ignition.
Trust me on this, I'm an eagle scout who has burned just about anything you can think of.
parchment paper is awesome-sauce. I use it to line just about everything when baking, or at least the stuff that is supposed to release when done.
wait two hours before consuming freshly baked bread? what madness is this.
I had a review at work recently and the manager of my team asked me if I was familiar with Imposter Syndrome. I'm worried that I reacted too enthusiastically.
As a cook that doesn’t really use or follow recipes baking has always been terrifying.
My pandemic projects included scones and bagels, scone being pretty easy when I realized you could grate the butter and the folding process is easy.
I’ve never tried bread despite a farmhouse levain or sourdough being one of my favorite things ever (esp having relatively close proximity to Tartine bread).
If it's any consolation, my extremely meticulous, science-brained husband who has multiple chemistry degrees attempted to start a starter from scratch and it failed after 5 days... Sourdough is very hard! But that bread looks incredible!!
In the non-sourdough realm, my husband swears by the Rustic Crusty Loaf recipe from John Kirkwood, who has a delightful YouTube channel, if you're not already acquainted.
I'm not a baker at all but I've been getting into scratch-made biscuits. Tee-ball compared to the loaves you're making here, but still kinda fun
The trick someone told me that changed everything for biscuits was to freeze the butter and grate it into the flour. Also the pre-made self-rising flour from White Lily is perfect.
Yep, gotta be the white lily flour, my biscuits were garbage before my friend clued me in. Also best advice I got for biscuits was that they should take no more than 20 minutes to get in the oven and if they do, you’re doing something wrong. Helps me not overthink it
I think that's why I like them. It's just not that big a project
Gluten-free bread doesn't care whether you're full of shit; it does what it wants anyway.