The official abbey bread


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Any proper abbey (or so I have thought for a long time) ought to have its trademark bread. And any abbot worth his salt ought to be able to bake it. Not just any bread will do. There has to be something special about it. So gradually I have been refining the recipe for Acorn Abbey’s signature loaf.

I just used the dreaded word “recipe.” I’ve been making bread for decades, measuring vaguely and just baking out of experience. But with the rustic sourdough loaves, I have been measuring, by weight, using a kitchen scale. This is because I’ve found that to get consistent results, one needs to control the “hydration” of bread — that is, the ratio of flour to water. Abbey bread at present is 85 percent hydration (100 parts flour to 85 parts water, by weight). Though wetter bread would be nicer, it’s much harder to handle. I probably will experiment with trying to increase the hydration a few percent and see how it goes.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the abbey bread is inspired by Michael Pollan’s book Cooked, in which the bread concept is based on the sourdough bread at Tartine bakery in San Francisco. It’s baked in a Dutch oven.

There was one part of Pollan’s method that just did not work for me. He gives the dough its final proofing in a bowl with the loaf face down. He upends the bowl over the Dutch oven and lets it plop. I found that unworkable. What if the dough sticks to the bowl? What if the dough loses its loft from the fall? I’ve settled on a method which is a bit more trouble but which is reliable. I line the proofing bowl with wide strips of parchment paper, then set the loaf right side up on the parchment paper for the final proofing. When it’s ready for the Dutch oven, I lift the loaf by the ends of the parchment paper and set it gently into Dutch oven.

The total amount of time to make decent sourdough bread is not that great. But one must start the night before, and the bread requires regular attention on baking day. The abbey bread is usually done by 5 p.m.

I’ve settled on a kind of Mediterranean schedule of baking every three days. Strangely enough, this has reduced the net amount of bread, and therefore carbs, consumed at the abbey. This is because I’ve stopped making biscuits and rolls, all of which tend to get eaten at one meal. On day 1, the bread is served warm for supper. On days 2 and 3 it comes back as toast or in slices at supper. If there is any left (rare), then the chickens get it.

From the orchard

There were many apple pies this summer, but only one pie from the abbey orchard. Though the five-year-old trees produced a respectable quantity of apples this year, the squirrels got them before we did. At present, the squirrels are stealing the figs.

Grocery store apples, as far as I’m concerned, are useless for pies. I like ugly, old-fashioned apples. Ken noticed an apple tree in someone’s yard about a mile up the road and was bold enough to ask if we could buy some apples. They gave them to us, of course. It was an old tree that had gone feral, and the apples were sublimely ugly. We got four pies out of those very local apples.

Fermented onions

Ken was away for an unexpectedly long time in June to visit his parents and also traveling to do publicity appearances for his book. Consequently the garden got a bit out of hand, and a surplus built up. In particular there was a surplus of onions, and onions, being sacred, are much too good to waste. So what to do?

Ferment them.

Though all my fermenting experience is with sauerkraut, pretty much any kind of vegetable can be fermented if you know the process. The process isn’t complex: Put the vegetables, appropriately sliced or shredded, into a crock and use the right amount of salt or brine.

As with sauerkraut, the prep work is a huge chore. I peeled about 30 pounds of onions and cut them into wedges. I put them in the crock and covered them with brine made from Celtic sea salt (about 3 tablespoons of salt per quart of water). In about three weeks we’ll see how they taste.

These are sweet and mild Georgia-style onions, and they’re organic, like everything grown at the abbey. To my surprise, peeling them and cutting them didn’t even provoke any onion tears.

Smart car: A one-year re-review

I’ve had my 2013 Smart car for just over a year. It has exceeded all my expectations, and I stand by my original review from July 2012. There are a few things I can add after a year with the car.

As I expected, the Smart car’s gas mileage has gradually increased as the engine has gotten broken in. I now average about 51.5 miles per gallon. My mileage is greater than the Smart car’s EPA rating, and it’s greater than what most Smart car owners report. In fact, I hold the gas mileage record of all the 2013 Smart cars listed at Fuelly.com. I believe this is because I do a minimum of city driving (though a tank of gas will always include a couple of trips to shop in Winston-Salem); my lifestyle doesn’t require that I drive on freeways at criminal, gas-guzzling speeds; I have learned how to use (and like) the odd transmission in the Smart car; and I know how to drive.

When the time came for the 1-year service, I was afraid the cost would be high, since the Smart car is made by Mercedes. But actually the 1-year service cost only $220, about half of what I feared. Also, I find Mercedes dealerships much easier to deal with than other car dealerships, because there is much less of a sleaze factor. The salesmen and service managers seem to be overqualified, overeducated guys who ended up at a car dealership in a rotten economy.

In the last year, I have had no problems with the Smart car. I’ve had some fuel problems, but that’s not the car’s fault. Nothing on the car has broken. There was not a single thing, even a little thing, that needed to be fixed at the 1-year service.

About the fuel problem. It first occurred after I’d had the car for a few weeks. Shortly after I started it up one morning, the car started misfiring, and eventually the check-engine light came on. I drove straight to the Mercedes dealership. They could find no problem with the car, but diagnostics saved by the car’s computer was consistent, they said, with water in the fuel. The checked my fuel tank and filter and found no water. The problem cleared up on its own. I assume this is because the water had settled in the bottom of the fuel tank, and the car had ingested it all. This has happened about three more times in the last year.

My belief is that water in gasoline is more common than we think. Larger engines probably aren’t much affected by small amounts of water, but the Smart car’s engine is small and sensitive. The ethanol alcohol that is added to gasoline attracts water from the atmosphere. The Smart car’s fuel tank, like the fuel tanks on all modern cars, is designed to prevent this. But it probably happens at the service station, from condensation in the underground storage tanks. I have learned to never buy gas from country gas stations and to always go to the busiest, most modern service station available. The longer gasoline is stored, the longer it has a chance to attract water.

The anti-lock brakes have engaged only once in the last year, when a deer ran out in front of me. I wrote about that in a previous post. The stability control system has engaged only once. That was a couple of weeks ago, when I hit some standing water in the roadway at about 50 m.p.h. The stability control system indicator flashed for a couple of seconds, but I felt nothing, and the car kept going straight ahead, feeling perfectly under control.

I love this little car, and it’s actually highly convenient to drive a car that is no bigger than necessary. I just wish that more Americans could appreciate the sensible concepts and excellent German engineering that went into it.

Grrr…


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I thought my day lilies weren’t looking as lush this year as they ought to look. This afternoon, I caught this doe eating the blooms right off the stalk like they were popcorn.

2 major TV appearances by Ken

Ken has two major television appearances coming up in the next week. On Thursday, June 20, he’ll be on CBS This Morning. On Monday, June 24, he’ll be on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The scheduling of the Tonight Show appearance may change because of the NBA playoffs, so check the Tonight Show web site if need be. He’ll be talking, of course, about his new book, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road From Debt to Freedom. Ken wrote this book here at Acorn Abbey, and I helped with the editing.

Needless to say, I am very proud of Ken and very excited about the career push he’ll get from this. I’m also proud of his connection with Acorn Abbey and the interesting work that has gotten done here — much to my surprise, really, because I never imagined that my retirement would be so busy and so rich.

If you enjoy Ken’s television appearances, you’ll get some idea of how much I enjoy Ken’s conversation at breakfast and dinner each day.


Ken Ilgunas

More bread portraits


75% whole wheat, 25 percent unbleached bread flour

The sourdough testing continues, using the Tartine method described by Michael Pollan in his book Cooked. I have been very excited by the results and continue to try to refine my sourdough boule technique.

Another virtue of sourdough bread: It keeps longer. Yeast bread normally molds on the third day. I have three-day-old sourdough bread with no sign of mold. I suppose this has to do with the lactic acid in sourdough bread, acting as a natural preserve.


50% whole wheat, 50% unbleached bread flour

Whose hobbit hole is this?

Today while mowing the grass, I found the home of a new neighbor. The burrow is only about 20 feet from the side door of the abbey, in a steep bank above a newly planted deciduous magnolia tree. It looks just like a rabbit hole. But my understanding is that the eastern cottontail rabbit, which is the common rabbit here, does not burrow. Rather, they commonly live in brush piles or other homes that they find rather than build themselves.

I’ve seen many groundhog holes, but this hole is too small for groundhogs. So now I am puzzled. I don’t know if there are burrowing rabbits in these parts. There are rabbits here, that’s for sure, because I see them in the yard every day. But I’ve always assumed that they’re cottontail rabbits that live in the brush pile down in the thicket.

Whoever made the hole is very tidy. The landing is very neat, and they’ve spread dry glass on the floor into the burrow.