White sourdough Try 3

In White sourdough, I gave a recipe that sort-of worked for a white sourdough loaf, and two weeks ago in White sourdough Try 2, I had a disaster, because the yeast in the sourdough starter had died in the freezer.  I’m going to try again. I added more yeast to the starter 2 weeks ago and have been growing the starter in the refrigerator ever since.

As before, I’ll make a light dough to rise and sour overnight, then add more flour in the morning.

Mix

1 cup sourdough starter
3 cups bread flour
1½ cups water

together using a silicone spatula.  Cover and let rise overnight.

In the morning, set aside one cup for future starter. To the remaining, mix in

2¼ cups bread flour
2 Tablespoons sugar
1 Tablespoon salt
2 Tablespoons olive oil

with bread hook, then knead in

½ cup bread flour

by hand, to get a smooth, springy, but not stiff dough. Grease the mixing bowl with

 1 Tablespoon olive oil

Place in dough in greased bowl, cover, and let rise 3½ hours.

Punch down and divide into three parts. Roll into cylinders. Place on baking parchment for final rise, about 3½ hours.

Boil

½ cup water
1 teaspoon cornstarch

in microwave and cool to room temperature.

Preheat oven to 400°F with shallow pan of boiling water on bottom of oven (high humidity in oven makes for crisper crust).

Puncture any large bubbles on the top surface of the bread with a skewer.

Brush loaves lightly with corn-starch water and place in oven.  Try not to let any of the corn-starch water get under the loaves.

Bake 5 minutes, and brush again with corn-starch  water.

Bake 5 minutes, and brush again with corn-starch  water.

Bake 10 more minutes.

Remove pan of water from oven and bake another 10 minutes.

Remove baking parchment and bake another 5 minutes directly on baking tiles. The bottoms of the loaves should sound hollow when tapped.

Update 2020 Aug 30: I forgot to photograph the loaves, though they came out quite photogenic this time. There was no sticking to the parchment at all—I could just slide the parchment out.  The crumb was a bit finer than I expect for a sourdough, and the crust rather soft.  The flavor was ok, but nowhere near as sour as I like.  Overall, the loaves came out more like an ordinary white bread than like a sourdough bread.

Zoom performance of Imaginary Invalid

My son is performing in a Zoom theater performance of Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid with Actors Ensemble of Berkeley on Sunday 13 September 2020.  I encourage everyone to watch.

[Click for full-size image]
Poster for Actors Ensemble of Berkeley’s performance of The Imaginary Invalid

Free tickets can be obtained at Brown Paper Tickets, more info at aeofberkeley’s site.

 

News from Santa Cruz

I’ve not been posting lately—mainly because I’ve not been doing anything worth posting about.

I’ve been keeping up with my video creation schedule, and I’ve split the playlist into Part A and Part B, corresponding to the BME 51A and BME 51B courses.  Only about 2 hours have had the captions edited so far, and there are still 10 hours to edit on the BME 51B videos.  I have a total of about 12 hours of video of BME 51B and 4 hours for BME 51A, but I need to create about 10–12 more hours of videos for BME 51A. With 39 days until classes start, I need to record 18–20 minutes of video a day to meet my self-imposed schedule.

Other than the videos for the course, I’ve been doing a little work for the Committee on Courses of Instruction (which meets over the summer this year, for the first time) and a little student advising as undergrad director.  Neither of those take up much time (about 20 hours so far this summer for CCI and probably about the same for student advising).

Mostly I’ve been following air-quality maps and fire maps for the CZU Lightning Compex fire that is about 5 miles from my house. That fire is currently about 71,000 acres (111 square miles, 287 sq km) and 8% contained. The fire is record-breaking for our County, but is only the third largest in the state at the moment, and doesn’t make it onto the top 20 all-time list for the state.  The Sunday YouTube video provides a good update on the current status—the audio is not great, but it is much better than the really terrible audio for their Twitter and Facebook feeds from the morning and evening briefings.

It is looking now like we will not have to evacuate (unless the winds pick up and the fire roars over the contingency fire lines cut across Wilder Ranch State Park and UCSC campus).  Our air quality has been ok, or even good, at night when clean air comes in from Monterey Bay, but has gotten quite bad at times during the day.  I have found the purpleair.com map the most useful for air quality, though the fire.airnow.gov map is also good.  The most useful fire map has been the NASA one, which can be set to show how intense the hot spots are.  In the first day of the fire, there was a huge mass of red, but it has cooled now and there is a ring of blue around the edge of the fire, with no hot spots showing in the center.

They’ve finally (just today) gotten air support up for our end of the fire—smoke had been too heavy in previous days and they were only able to do flights over the northern end of the fire.

We had made reservations in Hotel Paradox, across the river in Santa Cruz for Friday night through Monday night, just in case we had to evacuate, but we cancelled the reservation Saturday night, as we no longer felt imminent threat.  If we do have to evacuate, it will probably not be within the period we had reservations for.  It is not clear to me how much they will charge us for the room we didn’t use.  If they follow their 24-hour cancellation policy, we’ll have to pay for Friday and Saturday night, but nothing has been charged to the credit card so far.

I’ve not been mowing the lawn or clearing out blackberries and ivy lately—first it was much too hot, then it was much too smokey.  I’ll get back to doing yard maintenance once the smoke clears.

Friday was a bit strange for me, because, while I was showering, the water to the house stopped.  It turns out that the City was doing emergency repairs to the water main at the bottom of the block, and we were without water for one hour.  They didn’t give us any notice until after they had restored the water.

In another water problem, I had to replace one the hoses under the bathroom sink—it started spraying water on Thursday.  I went to the hardware store for a replacement early in the morning Saturday, when I thought the air would be fairly clean.  It wasn’t (the air quality is best at night, and jumps up as the sun rises and the direction of the ocean breeze reverses), but I wore an N95 mask (left over from purchases a couple of years ago when we were downwind from fires further north), so I don’t think the risk was too high.  The under-sink repair itself took about 10 minutes. The air quality within our house has been pretty good, as we’ve been running a HEPA air filter all day in the breakfast room (where we spend most of our time) and all night in the bedroom.

Other than obsessing about COVID-19 and the fire, I’ve mainly been reading and commenting on Reddit (r/Professors and r/UCSC), re-reading old fantasy and science fiction books, and sleeping. It has been hard for me to focus on doing work (like the 11 to-do notes I still have for edits to the book, or edits to department web pages).

 

PteroDAQ installation video

As part of my lecture videos for the first half of the electronics course, I’ve created a video on installing PteroDAQ:

and put in the playlist Applied Analog Electronics Part A.  The instructions are only for macos, but similar steps are needed on Linux and Windows machines.

White sourdough Try 2

In White sourdough, I gave a recipe that sort-of worked for a white sourdough loaf. I’m going to try to improve that white sourdough recipe.

I took my sourdough starter out of the freezer earlier this week to thaw in the refrigerator, and I started early this morning, adding a cup of water and a cup of bread flour to the starter and leaving it out all day, covered with a damp kitchen towel.  The sponge did bubble, but it was rather slow—I suspect that a lot of the yeast did not survive freezing.  Maybe what I have now is more freeze-tolerant.  This evening I stirred the sponge and set aside a cup of it in the refrigerator for starter for next week.  That left me with 1½ cups of a rather wet starter to use.

As before, I’ll make a light dough to rise and sour overnight, then add more flour in the morning.

Mix

1½ cup sourdough starter
3½ cups bread flour (all I had!)
2 cups water

together using bread hook on the KitchenAid mixer.  Cover and let rise overnight.

In the morning, mix in

4 cups all-purpose flour
2 Tablespoons sugar
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 Tablespoon salt

with bread hook, then knead in

½ cup all-purpose flour

by hand, to get a smooth, but somewhat slack, dough. Grease the mixing bowl with

 1 Tablespoon olive oil

Place in dough in greased bowl, cover, and let rise 2½ hours.

Punch down and divide into two parts. Knead each part lightly until smooth and surface is not greasy.  Roll into cylinders. Place on baking parchment for final rise (seam-side down), about 3½ hours. (I had to reshape about half an hour before baking, because the dough was too slack and had spread horizontally too much.)

Boil

½ cup water
½ teaspoon cornstarch

in microwave and cool to room temperature.

Preheat oven to 400°F with shallow pan of boiling water on bottom of oven (high humidity in oven makes for crisper crust).

Slash tops in long diagonals.  Brush loaves with corn-starch water and place in oven.

Bake 5 minutes, and brush again with corn-starch  water.

Bake 5 minutes, and brush again with corn-starch  water.

Remove pan of water from oven and bake another 20 minutes.

Remove baking parchment and bake another 15 minutes directly on baking tiles. The bottoms of the loaves should sound hollow when tapped.  (I again had problems with one of the loaves sticking to the baking tiles after removing the parchment, but the other one was fine.  It was probably a result of brushing on too much of the cornstarch water, and having some pool under one loaf, so the bottom of that one was too wet.)

Top view showing slight browning of crust.

Low-angle view to show the spreading, rather than rising of the bread.

Bottom view, showing damage from loaf sticking to tile.

Note: I did not do a bread-and-tea event featuring this loaf—it was much too hot today to sit at the computer for an hour or so.

The bread itself was a failure—the dough did not rise at all, and the insides were still a mass of unrisen, not quite baked dough. I think that the yeast in the sourdough starter did not really survive the freezing. Though the dough seemed ok after the first rising, it had only risen a little bit. I’ll probably have to add a little more yeast to the sourdough starter, if I want to do another sourdough loaf. And I won’t try freezing the starter again.