Two new bread books this week, and definitely too little time to read them.

One I bought used at Rodney’s book shop in Central Sq, across from where I work. It’s called Bread Alone: Bold Fresh by Daniel Leader and Judith Blahnik. This book caught my eye because it was cheap, it covered variety of breads (most notably sour dough, which I’ve been wanting to get into for a while), and it seemed respectable: It had measurements in weights, it had no 50s-era photos of nasty Wonder Bread loaves—in fact, it had almost no photos at all. Densely informative.

This book has failed me so far. I haven’t been inspired to make anything from it yet. The learning curve is too steep, partly because Leader is so demanding about his ingredients and I have a hard time deciding which recommendations I should take seriously and which I should ignore. Page 48: “Grind your own coarse or fine whole wheat or rye flour from hard spring wheat berries.” Yeah, right. Even if I don’t mill my own flour, the flour required for most recipes is almost impossible to find without mail ordering, so I’d have to mix it at home from two or three different kinds of organic stone-ground flour. So I’ve had a hard time getting beyond the 60-page introduction and into the actual recipes.

But I did read through some of the recipes, and there’s something uninspiring about how they’re presented. In 332 pages of technical discussion and recipes, this book has only one illustration of process: a time-series showing how a poolish looks hour-by-hour as it develops. The rest of the photographs are of Parisian celebrity bread chefs and their breads. I’m still not inspired.

Beyond that, the unbleached paper and frequent mention of stone-ground whole wheat suggests these recipes are way too healthy for me to bother. Timelines are given for many recipes, so at least I know how long things would take a professional, but he does nothing to convince me that I, a mere mortal without my own flour mill, can make an edible loaf with one of his recipes.

Putting my own laziness aside, I’d venture to bet the actual recipes are fantastic. But my MTV brain needs more visual stimuli to understand the process better and get inspired.

I got the inspiration I needed with the second book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. It’s a photo-rich book that just oozes with potential. The breads in here make my mouth water. Color photographs in each recipe show key parts of the process.

And it’s not all eye candy. The information design is great. I get the feeling I’d learn more by reading this book than I would in a local bread class. Reinhart includes, for example, the baker’s percentage formula for each recipe and an explanation of the baker’s math-formula system, so I can scale any of these recipes up to whatever size I want. I picture myself starting a bakery using only this book and a Hobart floor-standing industrial mixer, weighing out yeast by the pound. He includes kneading times for standing mixers and hand kneading. He talks about the “mise en place” and gives a checklist. He illustrates the general process of bread making well, then expands on it with the recipes.

It’s well designed and well written. Step-by-step photos illuminate many of the recipes. Some cookbooks get by without photographs or drawings, but because bread is so physical, so technical, so… visceral, I think a great bread book must explain in more than one form if the reader is expected to start from scratch. Reinhart has succeeded.

I made a loaf of Ciabatta from this book a few days ago. It’s the first bread I’ve made with a poolish, which is a very wet pre-ferment (as opposed to the more doughy biga). What you’re going for with Ciabatta (and with most poolish-based loaves, I’d imagine) is as wet of a dough as you can handle—wetter dough makes chewier bread. I followed Reinhart’s ratios exactly and ended up with a dough that wasn’t wet enough, I think, but I pushed on through, not wanting to adjust the recipe the first time through. The result was a good chewy loaf with too-small holes and a too-soft crust. For bigger holes, I think I just have to add to the rising time… but the crust is the tough part. I’m quickly finding out that crust control is the biggest challenge of breadmaking.. my goal is to get that almost-crunchy crust of an Iggy’s loaf, but I’m not sure where to begin. Lots of things can affect the crust: the shape of the loaves, the rising time and gluten development, the decision to slash the loaf before it goes in the oven, and of course the temperature and humidity in the oven. Steam is key to a good crust, but producing a good blast of steam in a conventional home oven is not easy.

But with this book I feel at least a few steps further along. I don’t need any more bread books now—I just need to bake a few hundred loaves and I’ll get the idea.

Collect your data: go to ATM machines around town and dig through the trash for ATM receipts. Randomly gather 100 or so for each ATM, going out of your way to get a good geographical and bank distribution.

Now enter the balances, withdrawal amounts, and dates into a spreadsheet with the ATM’s location. Map the average account balances at each ATM’s location to get a picture of who’s got the money. Map the withdrawn amount to see who’s spending it. Map cash volume at different times of the day to see where people are spending at 8pm, at 4am, at noon.

Take daily samples from the same ATMs. Is there an ATM in the financial district that noticably follows the stock market? How about the one in the ‘hood that follows the MegaBucks lotto jackpot?

Take monthly samples from the same ATMs and adjust for inflation. Map who’s spending more or less (the rich or the poor) from month to month and year to year. Who spent the most last December, and who was holding back? Which part of town got hit the hardest by the last recession?

Here’s part of an article my mom sent me about giftedness. She asked if I was gifted.

to Mom:

The last time someone asked me that was in 5th grade and I said yes. But I didn’t know what they meant. In fact I still don’t know what “gifted” means, really.

Who wrote this document, and where was it published? I wonder how credible it is.. how well it stands up to the larger scientific definition of “giftedness”, if there is one.

I’d say I fit some of the things here, but certainly not all of them. It sort of reads like a fortune cookie to me, and I think a lot of people would feel that way. So the short answer is no, I don’t think I’m gifted.

But what I’m really questioning here is the definition of “giftedness” .. I guess I see a gradient, not a yes/no kind of thing, when it comes to intelligence. So what’s the point of a term like giftedness—what value does it add? If you can’t pinpoint this thing called giftedness with some sort of test, or gene, or something, then what is it other than a term we’ve made up for people who exhibit most of the characteristics in this list? What’s the purpose of grouping people this way at all?

I think I know what the purpose is. I think to define giftedness is to define the constituency of MENSA… so they need this term. It’s not useful for much else until we really know more about how the human brain works.

Carl

Talking to Karl at length tonight about activism. He got me thinking (as he usually does). Why haven’t I been an activist all along?—especially when it comes to causes that affect me directly (many orgs do) and/or where there are interesting people and projects. I think it’s threatening to me, in a way, and my tendency when being threatened by something is to fly above (abstract and mull over) the situation, delaying resoluion. I was thinking I might do this when it comes to activism, to keep myself from getting embroiled in the issues and, the thought goes, from getting hurt. In fact, I’m abstracting my role as an activist right now just by writing this paragraph.

In one sense this is a good defence mechanism (I’m definitely not getting hurt), but there are big disadvantages if, in fact, I’m feeling nothing at all. I’m struggling with this… but I know I don’t take the abstract fly-over approach for an issue if I have some preëxisting context or some clearer sign of personal impact. (In my sheltered life,) I feel a responsibility to be an informed citizen, but reading the paper every day so I can understand and respond to everything coming down the pike is a bit much.

So I think I’m struggling to find how and when this stuff fits into my already cluttered life. Especially the how part. I’m happy to be working for a company that considers itself environmentally friendly, but that’s about all I can say for myself. The real question is: How can I find out where I’ll have the most impact and, simultaneously, enjoy my volunteer work enough to not get frustrated? I don’t think it’s selfish to say I should get something out of it (even just a sense of having done my civic duty). It’s just practical.

Speaking of activism, earlier today I found myself in a long conversation with Greg about globalization. A box of electronic components arrived today from Taiwan, and we started thinking about who made them and so on. Did they come from a sweatshop? Or a place with decent labor practices?

Hard to say. Where do you get the hard data on companies and their labor practices, halfway across the world? (is this a web site idea? even if it is, you’d have to have the data first)

This also got me thinking about ways to balance capitalism with the desire to at least do no harm… but I don’t see feasible options here, unless companies either take this stuff to heart as part of their “brand strategy” (eg Aveda) or have a serious PR problem (like P. Ditty’s Haitian t-shirt sweat shops for his “Sean Jean” clothes) and need to address it by paying a higher price for fair labor.

Speaking of fair labor and such, I was reminded that I an idea long ago for a documentary film that takes an object, say a bag of potato chips, and examines the entire production, origins, use, and eventual death of that bag of potato chips. What does the life cycle look like? The bag of chips, lying in a landfill heap, is at once both a tiny, inconspicuous object (micro/macro with the larger pile of trash) and an illustration of so many larger things: natural vs artificial (the expanse between raw materials and final product), neglected environmental responsibility, industrialization, social issues (obesity, etc), globalization and labor issues, and so on..

I am scared by how big this idea sounds. It’s not necessarily any good, but it’s big. I think it takes someone like Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi) to cover this kind of ground in a meaningful way.

Anyway, the really important bit here is to show a glimpse of an object’s impact on the world… and tie that back to society and responsibility and so on.

Another idea is to create a chart of these product life cycles. But unlike most corporate versions of this chart (which end when the product leaves the door), this life cycle would continue to consumption and eventual disposal (or, the myth thereof). Create a time bar for each product. The color of the bar at a given point indicates its place in the life cycle (raw material collection, production, shipping/sales, consumption, and eventual decomposition). The length of the line would indicate the length of the entire cycle. What would the line look like for an apple (minimal raw material collection, no production, short shipping/sales cycle, quick consumption, quick decomposition) vs, say, a light bulb (difficult raw material collection, a non-zero production cycle, longer shipping/sales, longer consumption, and longer decomposition)

I tried it alone. I tried it with jam on top. I tried it dipped in coffee and with tea. I tried butter. I toasted it and tried that. But no amount of dressing up made it remotely tasty, or even mildly edible. I’d made a shitty loaf of bread.

There was really no denying it when I sliced that first slice and found a dense whole-wheat grain that resembled the edge of a broken cinder block. I might have gotten the hint earlier, though: removing it from the oven after 45 minutes without any rising, I saw that my 6 cups of flour had turned into a fist-sized loaf which, on lifting, approximated the density of tungsten. I might have even known it while I was kneading the loaf earlier and my standing mixer started made the same sound a lawnmower makes when you happen upon the hidden stump of a Civil War-era oak tree.

But as usual I didn’t pick up on these subtle hints, and a gentle tap on the finished puck elicited not the deep hollow sound I expected, but a sharp knuckle pain and a faint knock. Better luck next time.

Went down there last night to see what the hubbub was all about. Here’s what the hubbub was all about (click for larger pix):

Dear Apple,

I own an Apple 14.1” iBook, which I purchased in December of 2002. This was, in many ways, the ideal computer for me: affordable, portable, expandable, and elegantly designed. This iBook was my first Apple computer purchase, and I was thrilled with it.

I realized soon after getting my iBook that OS X was truly the hacker’s dream operating system. Having the power of UNIX, interoperability with just about everything else, and features like Expose made this machine ideal for my purposes. I can’t think of a better environment for serious thinking tasks of design and programming.

I’m a computer engineer at a small transportation company in Cambridge, MA. Soon after buying the iBook, I started trying to persuade my boss to replace my Windows machine with a Mac at our office. He finally gave in a couple months ago, and I now have an eMac on my desk, which has worked out brilliantly. Unfortunately, we don’t have a G5 budget, but the eMac is a surprisingly good office machine, especially when coupled with an LCD monitor. I’m so pleased to have such a wonderful, functional, compatible, and virus-free machine at the office, and I’m hoping that our whole company can make the switch soon.

OK, now that I’ve buttered you up, I have to tell you that I’ve had some major problems with my iBook. I’ve suffered the dreaded iBook logic board video problem four times in the past year. My laptop moves very little from its place on my desk, so I don’t understand how this problem came up in the first place, especially with the frequency that it has. I’m beginning to think I purchased a lemon.

Dealing with the problem has taken a lot of time and patience on my part: waiting in long lines at the Apple store, working and living without a computer at home while mine is in the shop, and always wondering whether the problem was actually fixed or simply delayed for another few months.

This last point is the most important. I’m frustrated by having to send my laptop many times to your repair depot, and by the lack of any prognosis from you, beyond your acknowledgement of being “pleased that we could repair your Apple product.” Is it really repaired, or will I once again be waiting in line at the Genius Bar two months from now? Even your online FAQ for this problem does not mention whether you’ll fix the problem permanently at the depot, or simply continue to fix it each time it comes up. Is my iBook the bad apple among Apples—the machine nobody wants?

If you cannot acknowledge that the deeper problem is indeed fixed after my most recent repair, and that the symptoms will not return under the normal operating conditions on my desk, then I’ll have bought this computer in error, and I’ll know to avoid the hassles of owning Apple laptops in the future. Furthermore, if this problem isn’t truly fixed, I won’t be able, in good conscience, to sell my iBook to anyone without a major disclaimer and a considerable price reduction.

This computer was a major purchase for me, and I want to be assured that it the most recent repair of my logic board has irrefutably solved the problem. Please restore my faith in the reliability of your products and support (and the resale value of my laptop!). I await your response on this issue.

Sincerely,

Carl Tashian

Noticing that more and more people I hang out with do not own televisions.

Interesting dinner/discussion this evening with the FoP (Friends of Paul— mostly MIT alums). Specifically talking about the primaries, and that the Democrats lack someone who can appeal to the hearts and souls (not to mention minds) of this country. I believe that person has to take a strong position on issues, and not come across as a wuss, in order to get people interested. Bush certainly knows what he wants, he has a plan, even if it’s insidious, and that’s powerful. I’m not happy with what little I’ve seen from Kerry. It’s time for him to step up to the plate.

New media purchases today:
The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso & Sheila Lukins. Excellent general cookbook, though sometimes a little advanced/obscure.
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. 1930s British high society satire.
Curious New England: The Unconventional Traveler’s Guide to Eccentric Destinations by Joseph A. Citro and Diane E. Foulds. Good research resource for BS.
Bodysong soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. He’s definitely working on the outside.

TODO for Thursday:
- cancel Fri haircut
- InDesign practice
- setup BS Wiki or web/db
- food for ZC lunch
- Apple note re: repeated iBook failure
- play with Rolleiflex MF camera
- e-mail Courtney re: BS
- “my five year plan” and evaluation of current projects
- sweep
- ZC shoot: downtown for sunset with 10D and tripod

Finally made the cheddar pepper loaf yesterday for Karl.. yet it turned out to only be a pepper loaf. I added a couple handfuls of shredded cheddar cheese to the dough and it completely disappeared in the final loaf. No trace of it whatsoever. Next time I’ll use more cheese (in cube form) and add it later in the kneading process.

Meanwhile, I found out that a pepper loaf is pretty tasty.

Sasha gave me this fantastic Talk Talk CD today, called Laughing Stock, released in 1991. This is really a beautiful and underappreciated disc. It has lyrics but might as well be an instrumental disc, very relaxed, but loaded with texture. This is the kind of CD I hear one time and just know that I’ll be listening to for a while. (prior to this, it was Neil Finn’s Try Whistling This)

I own Talk Talk’s Natural History greatest hits CD, but Laughing Stock is entirely different. No pop hits on this one, just straight up vibe. The songs are odd and eerie but beautiful. I’m reminded of Radiohead because of the arrangement and musical experimentation on this disc, and of Doves because they’re willing to take you over the edge and then reel you back in. But you can tell that Talk Talk is something different, that the members combine to form an unmistakable style. I like it when a disc is heavily layered in the sonic space but the micro scale is left intact (you can still tell which pieces make it all work, isolate the individual musicians, and so on).

Anyway, after rereading the previous paragraph, I’ve realized that music reviews are bullshit when discussing the music alone. I don’t know the people story behind Talk Talk, and there are only so many adjectives that describe a sound—so isn’t it sort of futile? In citing people—influences rather than my sonic perception—I could point vaguely to “jazz” and Brian Eno and perhaps Pink Floyd’s DSotM, but I’d say this only to serve your understanding of how it sounds, when you should really just listen for yourself and get whatever it is you get out of it.