I Finally Got It Right This Time (well..mostly)

 My ciabatta was great! Very light and flavorful. As you cans see, the wholes are a little bit regular meaning that it was probably slight overproofed during the bulk fermentation, but it was wonderful all the same. And it was my own recipe! I put the recipe down as I meant to make it rather than as it was actually made (as I over-proofed it a bit.

Recipe

Sourdough Starter Elaboration
75g of whole wheat sourdough starter (100% hydration)
162g whole wheat flour
163g water (about 75 degrees F)

Dough
245g Bread flour
175g water (about 75 degrees F)
10g Salt (2t)
400g Poolish (all of it)
14g Olive Oil

Directions
Mix together the ingredients for the sourdough starter elaboration until they are completely incorporated. Let sit for 4-8 hours for it to almost double. If you don't want to use it immediately, put it in the refrigerator for up to four days.
 Use the starter immediately or remove it from the refrigerator and use it immediately or after it warms up. If you use it directly out of the refrigerator, use slightly warmer water. Mix the starter with the water, then mix in the flour and the salt. Mix until the dough is course and sticky. Let the dough rest for five minutes in order to fully hydrate the flour.

Drizzle the olive oil over the dough. Kneed by hand for 2 minutes. Let sit for 5 min.
The dough is stretched-and-folded 4 times over a 40 minute period (as per Reinhart's instructions).
  Place in a lightly-oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and place in the refrigerator overnight.

After this initial rise, place the dough in the refrigerator overnight.

On the next day, remove the dough from the refrigerator about 4.5-5 hours (perhaps a little longer) before baking (if you let it rise at about 75 degrees). At about 1.5 hours in, go through the shaping process.

To shape, turn the dough out onto a floured surface. shape the dough into a rectangle a loose and cut into two pieces with a bench knife or a large, sharp kitchen knife. Gently, without degassing, stretch the dough a little and then fold it in thirds, placing it on a floured surface, seam side down. Dust the top with flour and place under a bowl or under plastic wrap. Let proof for an hour under plastic wrap. Turn seam-side up and stretch into loaves and pat the sides gently to make them rectangular. If you want, you can place them on lightly floured parchment paper, or proof them on the floured surface (if you plan to put the loaves directly onto a peel and then into the oven). Let proof for another two hours. Heat the stone about 30 minutes before you begin to bake. You can load directly from a peel or use a peel or a baking sheet to load one on the parchment paper. Bake at 450 degrees F (or 425 convection) for 15 minutes under steam and then turn the bread around in the oven for 15 minutes to finish. 

The bread was fantastic. Enjoy!

Ciabatta - Yet Another Formula

It's been a busy couple of days. I've been doing some emergency tutoring for a student with an impending exam as well as reading Greek and getting used to studying for my German class.

As a break, I have decided to try out my half whole wheat recipe for ciabatta as my last off-the-cuff ciabatta recipe turned out so well. We shall see how it works.

Bagels: A Fun, but Questionable Enterprise

So I decided to go wild and make some bagels. I now realize while some authors caution people about bagels: they're really hard. A bunch of the mistakes I made were from attempts to alter the recipe. However, most of the problem was that I was simply not prepared for the difficulty of the boiling process. I tried to make a modified version of Wild Yeast's Potato Peppercorn Bagels and a modified version of the whole grain bagels from Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads.

Soudough Potato Peppercorn

Spiked Sourdough Whole Wheat

You can see that the bagels were not exactly perfect. I accidentally did not let the Potato bagels rise enough before they went in the refrigerator, and consequently there were very small and dense. I changed the whole wheat bagels so that they used sourdough starter spiked with 3/4 teaspoon of baker's yeast. I left them out for slightly too long and they overproofed. They became really wide and did not rise very much. However, they still taste fairly decent. I need to add more honey next time.

Maybe I'll try again some time in the next few weeks.

Wine Snob: Cabernet Sauvignon Double Feature

Two great wines, one post.

On Servia's birthday, we went out to dinner at one of our favorite local restaurants. It's a lovely little Italian place and we brought a bottle of wine given to us by my mom's brother on his last visit. It was a 1998 Christopher Creek Cabernet Sauvignon from Dry Creek Valley (Bradford Mount). The wine was a dark ruby color and it was a medium bodied wine that was musty and spicy. I happened to read the label after I had written my account of the wine. It said: "rich, fruity, intense, full-bodied, ruby wine." It's interesting how a wine changes over the years. It balanced wonderfully with the food. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture.

On the night before Father's Day, on which we were also celebrating the birthday of a long-time friend of the family, we had another lovely wine. It was one of the Mystery Wines from Garagiste, meaning that it was repackaged under the name Renegade Wine Sellers. It was a 2007 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon from Columbia Valley, Washington.

Having a coding problem righting the bottle.

Unlike the 2007 Columbia Valley Red Wine packaged under Renegade's label which was merely mediocre, this was a fabulous wine. This fabulous Cabernet was aubergine and smelled acetone or the interior of an old trunk (the drinkers were divided in the assessment). It was a full bodied wine with notes of truffles, dark chocolate, with a bit of rich soil and a dash of nutmeg or cloves. As an important note, we let this wine decant for about two-three hours, or maybe a little more before drinking it because every review said it needed substantial decanting. I am glad we took that advice. I would highly recommend both the wine and the decanting of it.

A picture of the bottle is forthcoming.

Reading vs. Speaking

 

I am taking a German class for graduate students this summer (starting Monday) in order to prepare me for graduate school. Any graduate program in classics will require translation exams in (usually two) modern languages. Much classical scholarship appears in Greek and French. I need this not only to pass the exam but to also look like a serious candidate for a department. On Stanford's website they say: "Modern languages are needed, too--as part of your professional development, you will have to pass a German translation exam plus one in French, Italian or modern Greek, and there is very little time in graduate school to learn these languages from scratch" (Classics department website).

I had five years of what I might call "tourist French" over the course of middle school and high school. It was basically useless. I can mostly understand basic French when it is spoken to me at a moderate pace and read very very basic short pieces (with a dictionary), but I can neither write nor speak with any skill whatsoever (other than asking for directions to the nearest bakery or similar). I have spent a little bit of time over the past week attempting to revive my French. It is going to be a hard slog, but it appears that learning Latin has made French a little easier.

My class this summer will take me through the process of learning how to read and translate German, with little to no emphasis on speaking. In general, I'm pretty excited. Even the practice sentences in the textbook are more interesting than any modern language textbook I have ever seen (mostly basic assertions of fact about famous physicists and philosophers). But I do have that nagging feeling: what if I actually need or want to talk to someone in German at some point? Have I chosen the wrong path?

The rational answer is probably not. I can always learn to speak (at least to people in my own field) once I build a technical vocabulary and I will far prefer reading scholarly texts than anything else I might read in a basic introduction. Plus, it's what I need for graduate school. I think I made the right choice.

Gore, Fire, and Random Updates: A Collection of Thoughts

For politicians in the United States, Friday is affectionately known as "take out the trash day." The reason for this is that media outlets have some number X column inches to fill and if you give them one story on Friday (as less people read the headlines over the weekend) they will fill it with that, but if you give them five stories, each story is only X/5 column inches. So, in general, politicians dump their negative stories in the Friday trash.

In that tradition, I thought I would jumble a bunch of stories together for today's post. This is just because I have a couple of things on which to follow-up as well as some general thoughts and I have been rather busy in the last few days as there is now a deadline for transition in my life: I am going back to school in the Fall. I now am trying to prioritize what i need to do before beginning school.

Gore: By "gore" I mean the noun version of "gory" rather than the former vice-president. Last night I spent a while typing up a preliminary version of my reading list for my graduate school applications. Many of the grad schools require that applicants send a list of all of the texts that they have read in the original classical languages. As I was hunting down syllibi and typing up my list, I realized that I have little memory of any of the texts that I read for my Latin Civil War class. I was stressed and tired during my final semester in college and poured myself into my thesis more than anything else. I also had terrible insomnia because of all the stress and my memory became very poor. I almost think it's insincere to write down the whole number of pages I read in this class. My original solution was to reread it. But then I remembered: I also really did not enjoy the reading. The class itself was ok. The teacher was great and I remember loving her military diagrams. However, we read Caesar and Lucan's account of the civil war in Rome. Caesar's account is a complete bore and the battle plans are often hard to follow (hence the military diagrams). Lucan's account is interesting for about the first 200 lines until he starts talking about the civil war. At that point it becomes so melodramatic and gory that it's just completely joyless to read. For context, Lucan the nephew of Seneca the Stoic philosopher, and a writer in Nero's court. Lucan was one of Nero's contemporary and rumor has it that Nero sentenced Lucan to death because Lucan was a better writer than the emperor. To be fair, Lucan was probably involved in an attempt to depose Nero. Furthermore, Lucan's Latin is tough: he writes Silver Epic and the commentaries are almost completely useless except for intertextual references. This is partially because no one likes Lucan: his content is overblown and his hexameter is boring. I may reread excerpts or read them in English so I don't babble like an idiot when asked about them.

 

Fire: There was an interesting article about Mercury today in the New York Times.

Random Updates: If you have been following my blog, you probably remember that last semester I took a Calculus class at a local community college for fun. I enjoyed most of the class, but I found some of the relearning more difficult than I had expected. Worse, when I showed up for the final, half of it was completely foreign and I left feeling dejected, as I had spent a long time studying. To my great surprise, I actually did well on the final and got fairly good grade in the class. Woohoo! I am even considering taking the next calculus class when I get the chance.

Graduate School

Cerinthus reminded me recently that I have to start getting my graduate school applications together and take my GRE. It's going to be a long slog: I have to do a lot of research into which departments have professors with whom I am eager to work, have strengths in my areas of interest, and provide funding, as well as trying to figure out how to rank schools by my choice and by the likely hood of acceptance.

It's going to be a really long process. Some of the schools want a 15-20 page writing sample while others allow it to be up to 30 and each seem to have slightly different requirements. Some universities give strict guidelines about statements of purpose or lists of ancient texts read by the applicant, while others provide vague parameters or use odd terminology. Luckily Propertius II and Herodotus II both journeyed quite successfully through this process and will be of some help, although I will greatly miss meeting over skype to translate with both of them (they will be very busy in their Greek prose survey class as well as everything else).

A professor at the wonderful school which will welcome both of my dear friends in the fall demanded a bare minimum vocabulary of 1500 words from Campbell's Classical Greek Prose: A Basic Vocabulary. I have a lot of work to do. Although I recognize quite a few works, I am having trouble with my 50 flash-card section of Greek, Classical Vocabulary Cards: Academic Study Card Set. Oy.

Time to Move On

Today, my bread was beautiful. Both of my loaves sang like angels (well...I exaggerate...the crust crackled sweetly) and it tasted wonderful. So I have decided I need to move on. My Tartine bread is great and it is time to learn my next bread craft. Here are some pictures. More tomorrow (I have a lot of Homer to read).

My whole wheat turned out well, but the crumb was not perfect. I also still have not learned how to properly roll a brad in rolled oats or seeds. Someday soon, I hope. It was really yummy, though.

 

Enjoy!