EDIT: Appears the author has one for Pizza Dough[0]. Gotta try that one out as it's more applicable to me than sourdough.
The dev team tried to butter over these concerns, but it wasn't enough. It was forgotten and the codebase is mostly stale now.
More generally, I would love a recommendation on any text that can explain how to design grain dough-based products from first scientific principles. Using just wheat we get noodles, a huge assortment of breads and crusts, pastries, crackers, etc. And then there's also barley and buckwheat and corn and hundreds more.
Disappointed, but I’ll have to learn to adapt! My hydration levels were way too low the last time I tried. (Any joke you find in there is probably true about my experiences haha).
All this isn't about knowledge that can be imparted in a book; it's frankly about kaizen. The art of doing it a little better this time than you did it before. If you do it 2% better each time, after ~35 times, you're twice as good. Don't get me wrong, I love (love!) the open knowledge here. But OP cannot put in the reps for you. Only you can put in the reps.
I definitely wasn’t doing it 2% better each time — I was experimenting, trying out new things, seeing how they changed the outcomes, and building an intuition for how stiff the pancake batter was, what color it was, how much the chicken skin glistens, etc. When I tried something new, sometimes it was 2% better, but more often it was 25% better or 40% worse. Either way a success, because I learned what kinds of things were likely to work and what weren’t.
The “reps” help you not just get better, but (as you describe!) they build your mental connections between what you see, smell, and feel, and results. You start to recognize when things look or feel a little different, and adapt.
Honestly it’s a lot like developing expertise in programming!
If you don't have that, try to not vary more than one thing at a time.
> It is crazy if you think about it. People have been using this process despite not knowing what was actually going on for thousands of years!
Just wait until you hear about literally everything ever
Or a lot of modern medicine right now. Lots of useful drugs are discovered totally by accident: "Oh look, my patient took this for foot sores and it turns out it helps his hair loss", and then the drug gets used forever more, despite having really no idea at all why it should work. We don't even really know how paracetamol works.
[1] https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2021/214/7/efficacy-and-safet...
We love the idea of managing and distributing a book through source control like this. Brilliant execution, and fantastic content!
I think git (and vcs in general) could be revolutionary to the way experts in all fields including law, medicine, book editing & publishing, etc can collaborate and track changes on shared documents, but yeah, we really haven't figured out how to handle necessary accoutrements like images without blowing up the repo size.
Otherwise, definitely enjoyed seeing a project layout using directories for chapters. Might crib (with attribution!) the project layout next time I feel like writing something.
I love to see people share these sorts of experiments and document their evolution
So is this a case of an ill-fitting name that does not do justice to the content, or is the content just limited to sourdough as the end-all of bread making?
I'm personally not found of the sourness of sourdough bread compared to a Ciabatta or a French baguette
I think that the sour taste reputation comes from particular styles like "San Francisco sourdough" and the fact that many folks over-do it with the starter or allow the dough to rise for too long.
Try bread from some artisanal bakers, you'll very quickly experience the range of naturally leavened bread.
Otherwise it's a (bad name IMO for a) leavening method. Basically just not using controlled/commercial/instant yeast, but from the environment.
Guarantee original baguettes were made with an environmental yeast starter/levain, probably some bakers continue to.
Toughts I didn't take the time to put in an mr:
-The text is dense like a fruitcake. A bit of air would go a long way to make it more digestible. Sometimes long explanations on progressions are mixed in with key information, and it makes it hard to follow.
-I forget if I compiled it or used the pdf but by memory it was the default latex font, which makes the text look like a paper.
-Starter care and setup was the hardest for me to parse. Having bullets for key concepts would really help. The diagram helps but still has some ambiguity.
Even my grandma, impressed by my beautiful bread, adopted your technique :)
It's so much about bacteria, flour type, humidity, heat/cool, rest, gluten, proteins and practice.
A good idea is to use the same flour when you practice. Over and over again.
Use less water in the beginning and use a machine for kneading. Don't be pedantic about exact grams but be as precise as you feel.
It's a really really interesting process and it becomes interesting because its a living thing. It's bacteria that does the magic. Love it
Recipes are code, just a different form.
He taught everything from creating your starter from just water and flour. And then goes in to so many little details that made my first sourdough bread actually something I was proud if. He’s a great teacher.
It’s really fun and you don’t need that much to get started.
Not sure if Docker itself will still be around or the dependencies will be available, but at least that's a clear build target and there's a fighting chance it will still somewhat work.
Leave it in Docker to save people the hassle.
I was recently following some of his YT videos, the invaluable tip that I got from him (and I haven't seen elsewhere) is to take a sample of the dough and observe its rise, to know when the main dough is ready for baking.
I just made a beautiful baguette yesterday using this tip!
While I'd normally call a document like this a deep-dive into a "technique" or, maybe a collection of techniques, calling it a framework might be a useful mental model for the dev crowd. Recipes lie-- without knowing the underlying reasons that certain techniques work the way they do, you'll never really know what you're going for and why. This stuff is not difficult to explain, but recipes aren't the appropriate places to explain it. Most people are really surprised to see how few recipes there are in many professional cooking text books. They're similar to books about programming languages while cookbooks are essentially collections of standalone tutorials that don't explain much theory.
Is there any particular deep dive you'd enjoy reading about? Meat cookery really trips people up. As does seasoning. Sauces too.
Incidentally, that also matches the way I’ve learned programming, and likewise, I notice the same downsides - sometimes, I know there’s a better, or more reliable, way to achieve something, but I lack the theoretic background to go there.
Having said all that: I would really appreciate learning the way different taste combinations work out. High quality restaurants always seem to combine simple ingredients into an elegant „pattern“ of aroma (you see I notice good terms), something I never quite manage. I bet there’s some simply chemistry involved, some generic rules broadly applicable. I’d love to read that!
That's how most professional cooks I've known have learned to cook, initially. Those sorts of experiences certainly help form your personal taste, intuition, and artistic perspective.
> sometimes, I know there’s a better, or more reliable, way to achieve something, but I lack the theoretic background to go there.
I think a lot of people are in this boat, but probably underestimate the utility of that theoretical knowledge. I think it's akin to being a musician-- while many people who play instruments in their spare time can likely play a few songs that are quite appealing to most people, there's probably a vast gulf in the raw, general-purpose capability of an experienced, dedicated professional or a degree-trained music student.
> High quality restaurants always seem to combine simple ingredients into an elegant „pattern“ of aroma (you see I notice good terms), something I never quite manage. I bet there’s some simply chemistry involved, some generic rules broadly applicable. I’d love to read that!
Sadly, that pattern doesn't exist. While the fusion chefs from a few decades ago tried their best to codify this (and came up with some pretty tasty food in the process, even if it is a bit passe,) it's just not that simple.
So how do they do it? Imagine your five favorite dishes... now imagine how much you might learn about them if you cooked them repeatedly for 60-80 hours per week for a month? A year? A decade? Now imagine that in this process, you'll have worked with dozens of other people who've dedicated their lives to creating and reasoning about food and flavors that are all also cooking your 5 favorite dishes with you? And on top of that, you're serving them to a fickle dining crowd who will throw it right back at you if it doesn't delight them? To boot, restaurant food is WAY more labor intensive than home cooking because economies of scale allow it. You have professional prep cooks that will simmer that beef stock for 16 hours to get it exactly like you want it. Things like that add so much to the final product, but you just can't put your finger on how.
When it comes to things that tongues sense-- saltiness, sweetness, tanginess, glutamates, bitterness-- there are pretty straightforward ways of reasoning about them even if the rules are a bit nebulous. Saltiness tends to tamp down bitterness which is why it's lovely with chocolate and dark caramel, for example. Sweetness tends to round out tanginess really well which is why many things from citrus glazes to high quality candies to many cocktails are so much more delicious than something that is either merely sweet or sour. When people say your sense of taste is dulled because of a cold, they're mistaken. Your tongue senses everything just as well as it did before-- but you can't smell anything. If you take a cherry hard candy and a lemon hard candy and put them in your mouth with your nose totally blocked, you won't likely be able to distinguish between them. As soon as the aroma hits your olfactory bulb, they're as different as different can be. When you sense something intensely with your olfactory bulb AND your tongue is activated, that is when your brain says "there's something in my mouth right now." That's why it's so difficult to eat in the midst of unpleasant smells, and why under-salted food tastes so boring. Playing with things sensed by your olfactory bulb-- pretty much anything you consider part of flavor that isn't one of the broad-stroke things sensed by your tongue-- is dramatically more complex.
These do it so well because a) they've spent years, if not decades, deliberately training their palate, personal taste, and understanding of these interactions, b) spend 60 or 80 hours per week cooking and understanding how these things work together, c) have their dishes are tasted, workshopped and tweaked by all of the other experienced professional cooks around, d) etc. etc. etc. It is truly the 'art' in culinary arts and the only way to get good at it is to do it a whole lot for a long time.
A really good example from my recent past is a parmesean peppercorn dressing I've made hundreds of times. One time, I was in a hurry and toasted the black peppercorns far more than most generally would, so the citrus notes totally subsided and it took on this deep toasty property. I was worried the dressing would taste burnt, but it was Fucking Magic. The people I was cooking for-- all competent and experienced cooks-- looked at me like I'd just spun gold. Black pepper in most circumstances doesn't benefit from being that heavily toasted, but it's just one of those things that you kind of have to be taught, specifically, or discover by yourself.
A good resource for reasoning about these things is The Flavor Bible.
Your introduction suggests that you know people's input variables (type of flour, environment, other ingredients, etc) have a heavy influence on the end product. It might be easier to generate custom instructions rather than generate content for every possible combination.
All the recipes I've found so far either require egg, or mixing in a bit of spelt.
I literally got so fed up with trying to debug another team's service that I stood up to quell my frustration by eating, like most people do. In my attempt to procure a sandwich, the POS terminal — which has only a hole for chip and pin cards — asked me to swipe the magstripe on my card.
Since I can't even buy a sandwich, I suppose this guide will come in handy for the bread.
Interested to notice the standalone 'pizza-code' this time when I had another skim - I've been using the (third party contributed believe) pizza dough recipe in the bread code recently.
(I still use it rather than this repo just because, in the case of bread, it's in my head; for pizza, it's easier to reference in the old repo structure/format on mobile, not being formatted for book.
Looking forward to that Kickstarter campaign :)
I started out like many by watching some Youtube movies. Except I did it a few years before Covid. So, slightly before it got really hip to do it.
Some things that I've learned over the years (with the help of lots of Youtube wisdom):
- There are a lot of Youtube bakers parroting each other and not all of what they insist is the one and only way to do it is necessarily very valuable or good advice. The key thing to realize is that you are implementing a process, not following a recipe that is set in stone. It's not that they are wrong but they tend to present a detailed recipe without a lot of context. If you don't understand the process, that's not going to end well. Unless you get lucky. Look for the ones that explain why they are doing certain things. The ones that explain the process.
- The fridge is your best friend. You can park your starter there for long periods of time. It will be fine and you can revive it in a couple of days when you need to. This also largely removes the need to discard left over starter. A well established starter can take a lot of abuse. Move it to the freezer if you really plan to not bake for a few months/years. Countless youtubers tell you to keep it outside the fridge and feed it daily. You don't need to do this unless you want to. The fridge works like a pause button on metabolism. My starter has survived a lot of abuse over the past five years. And it still works fine.
- Flour matters. But most flours can work. Whole wheat and rye are tasty but also more tricky to deal with. For beginners, use some proper bread flour with a high protein content. Hold off on the more complex mixes until you can nail that the simpler white bread.
- Measure by weight not by volume. If you know what you are doing you can totally eyeball it and go by feel. I baked sourdoughs for over a year before even buying scales. Lots of failures but also lots of tasty bread. But being exact is what makes your process repeatable and allows you to fine tune, optimize it and get luck out of the equation. E.g. dialing back the hydration requires that you kow what it was to begin with. Be aware that you still need to adjust for temperature, flour, humidity, etc. There are a lot of variables that you can't control. Measuring by volume your margin of error is too high to say anything definitive about hydration levels. It might be 80% it might be 65%. The difference is important if you want to fix your mistakes.
- Larger quantities make it easier to measure more accurately. Bake 2 breads instead of 1. Again this matters to make the process repeatable.
- All the numbers are arbitrary, up to you, need adjusting for environment and flour, and largely a matter of taste. Understanding what happens when you change the numbers is the key to producing good results consistently.
- Use the clock for planning. But always verify your dough is actually in the state where you assume it to be. This is subject to so many variables (temperature, dough, humidity, how fresh your starter was, etc.) that it can be hard to predict. So, use the clock to plan when to check. Check more often if it is warmer. Things go quicker. Keeping track of weights and timings makes it easier to figure out the correct timings.
- Use a Dutch Oven. It helps. The lid traps the steam and that allows the bread to expand before a crust forms. Bake with the lid on at the max temperature of your oven. Basically until it is done expanding. 15-20 minutes typically. Remove the lid, and lower the temperature until the bread is done (I like my bread dark & crusty). Size of your loaf matters obviously. Adjust timings to your taste. another 20-25 minutes would be normal. You can play with the temperatures and timings of course. And what actually works will depend on your oven of course.
* Timing is flexible. Especially if you toss in a tiny bit of yeast.
* The dutch oven is great, but it complicates baking. You get to do one loaf at a time. OTOH, It's a relly good loaf. Sadly though, the electricity costs are high.
* Wet doughs can use basic flour, which is good because hi-gluten bread flour has been scarce in Ireland for the past couple of years.
What I do:
540g bog standard white flour. (lidl, definitely _not_ self raising or with raising agents like most of the flour in Ireland). Replace up to 200g with coarse wheaten flour.
280g water
1 tbsp salt
1/8tbsp yeast if it's cold.
300g 1:1 flour/water starter.
In the morning, Mix the dry ingredients with a spatula, mix in the wet ones to a mixed dough. Let it sit for 1/2 hour. Lightly knead in your hands for 30 sec or so. Oil the bowl, put the dough back in and wiggle it around, then cover with plastic wrap. Do other stuff till dinner time.
Quickly (1-2 turns) form the loaf, plop it on a baking paper back in the bowl.
In an hour or two, depending on how warm it is and if it's final rising fast or not, start the oven with the dutch oven in it. Preheat at least 30 min. Bake 30 lid on +30 min lid off at ~180c fan.
Things not to do:
* Forget to start the oven, get ready to go to bed and realize that the loaf is still sitting on the counter.
* Worry too much. It's all grand.
* Forget to take it out, though an extra 30 min is surprisingly ok. Just thicker crust.
The starter gets equal weights of water and flour, supposedly every night, but more likely the night before baking and the morning of baking. I bake every 2 days.
Building on this, make more than one loaf and keep it in the fridge until ready. For some reason I would make two loaves and bake them the same day. Then it was a rush to eat them before they lost their tastiness. Now I make two loaves and take my sweet time eating them. Making two loaves is only marginally more labor than one loaf.
Do people do this with music? I really like the idea of programmatically making music and compiling it.
https://www.mutopiaproject.org
...it really helped me understand why "$SCORE = ( $MELODY + $BASS )" was sometimes superior to viewing sheet music as a "wall of notes and chords". You have to "play the wall" as it comes at you, but mentally, thinking of it as "melody goes la la la, bass goes boom bang boom" helps to provide context to what are the roles of the two notes you're playing.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/compilin...
Here it's really a two pass compiling. One by human and one by the machine.
