Can whole wheat bread have a good crust?

I sent this photograph of my whole wheat French bread to a friend, and he said it made his teeth hurt just looking at the pictures. To my taste, however, the crust was excellent and not tough at all.

For some time, I’d been planning to do the research and development necessary to upgrade the abbey’s rustic loaves to something with a more exciting crust. The gold standard for bread crust, of course, is French bread. On a recent trip to Asheville, I bought a perforated French bread pan made by Chicago Metallic. That was the first step. The second step was to do some research on how to shape French bread loaves and get the crust right.

Though I knead my bread dough in unbleached flour, I use 100 percent whole wheat flour (King Arthur), to make the dough. The dough for my rustic loaves is really just the same as classic French bread — nothing but flour, water, yeast, a bit of sugar to feed the yeast, and salt. No change was needed in the dough. To get a proper French bread crust, I made these changes in my bread-making process:

— I don’t use a coating of oil to keep the dough from drying out while rising. Instead, I let the dough sit on a dusting of flour in a well-covered bowl.

— I give the bread two risings rather than rushing it with only one.

— From Googling and YouTube videos, I figured out the technique for shaping and slashing the loaves.

— I use a spray bottle to mist the loaves with water before they rise and again before I put them in the oven.

— I throw a little water in the oven to create steam for the first 10 minutes of baking.

These methods are simple. It’s easy, really, to make French bread in the home kitchen. The crust was delicious. The perforated bread pans really do work, and the bread did not stick to the pan, even though I used no oil. Though all the dough recipes I came across mix quite a lot of unbleached flour into whole wheat loaves, I’m not tempted to do that.

These French loaves will become the new version of the everyday abbey bread.

Rain…

There was good rain in early September, followed by another dry spell. A nice rainy front is blowing up from the Gulf of Mexico this week.

Some of the wild animals seem to enjoy the end of dry spells. This wren was taking a bath in the water dripping off the roof.

As the world turns


Steve Jobs’ high school photo


Arrested at the Wall Street protests


Old people can be so dumb.

Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement, 2005:

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Back in May when I wrote the “Got a revolution” post, I was in almost a state of despair at the passivity and invisibility of today’s young people as our democracy and our economy are stolen out from under us by our political and corporate elite. How could they — for a timely example — be flocking to Apple stores and building entire lifestyles around their technology, while failing to grasp the message that Steve Jobs, a heretic and a visionary, was trying to put across to them. Could today’s young Americans really be as stupid and deluded by propaganda as today’s older Americans (see Medicare sign, above).

How ironic, that Steve Jobs, one of the greatest free spirits of our time, the son of an Arab father, a rabble rouser, became CEO of the biggest corporation in America. Does that change my views of corporations? No. It just reminds us what corporations ought to be, and what corporations ought to do: Bring good things to people at prices they can afford, don’t prey on your customers, beat your competitors by being better rather than seeking a monopoly like Microsoft, and leave government to the people.

Steve Jobs was a philosopher. He was a Martin Luther. He was a Martin Luther King. I hope he is remembered for a long, long time.

And finally, as the Wall Street protests show, our young people are waking up. They know who is eating their lunch. They know who is lying to them.

They also are wired.

The stage is set, I’m afraid, for unfolding events to slowly work out an extremely important historical question. Will technology enslave the people — top down, through surveillance, snooping, the commoditization of personal information, and 24/7 propaganda? Or will technology liberate the people, bottom up?

Our young people will decide. As of today, with young people in the streets, I am optimistic.

I’m also reminded of words by my friend Rob Morse, in his column in the San Francisco Examiner, on the death of Herb Caen, the venerable columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle whose death left San Franciscans almost traumatized.

“We’re on our own now,” Morse wrote.

Good news for Texas?


The red dot at the top left indicates that the severe drought in Texas this summer was an outlier event — not a trend. [John Nielsen-Gammon]

One of the things that made this past summer so scary was the extraordinary drought in Texas. This part of the Southeast is not all that far from Texas, and many of the same climate patterns apply. For example, La Niña is known to be related to droughts here in North Carolina, and the same is true in Texas.

So I have kept a fearful eye on Texas, desperate to know whether the Texas drought is an ugly new trend or an outlier event that will reverse.

John Nielsen-Gammon has crunched some numbers on this. He acknowledges that his crunching of the meteorological data is crude and preliminary, but it’s the best data we’ve got so far. His concludes that the 2011 drought in Texas is an outlier event and that thus it is highly likely that it will reverse.

Nielsen-Gammon also sheds light on a question that has puzzled me. Why do droughts tend to last for years? We know that La Niña causes short-term droughts that last a season or two or three. But what causes an entire decade of droughts?

Nielsen-Gammon says that the data shows that long-term droughts are related to long-term oscillations of surface water temperatures in both the Atlantic and Pacific.

Bottom line: If Nielsen-Gammon is right, then there is cause for hope that these clusters of hot, dry summers will give way to clusters of cooler, wetter summers.

Green pepper bumper crop

So far in September, six inches of rain have fallen here. That has made a huge difference in the cool-weather crops. The peppers, which merely survived during the hot, dry, summer, have become very productive and are even still blooming. The turnips, mustard and kale also are doing extremely well.

I couldn’t ask for better soil. It’s all about water.

Those classic speakers can be repaired


Two of my Rodgers FR1.7 speaker cabinets, with the 8-inch drivers newly restored

Until three or four years ago, I didn’t know that those classic speakers that appear to be blown out can be repaired. The problem isn’t as ugly as it looks. To keep an airtight seal between the front and back of the speaker, the outside of the speaker has a plastic foam “surround.” These surrounds have a life of 10 to 20 years before they must be replaced.

When speakers have blown-out surrounds, it doesn’t mean that they’ve been abused. It’s just that the foam gradually decomposes from exposure to the air.

The repair job involves carefully removing the old surrounds, cleaning the glue and foam residue off the surfaces, and gluing a new surround onto the speaker. Surrounds can be bought on-line. I bought my from Parts Express.

If you want to undertake the restoration of a speaker, you have some research to do. First you need to determine the correct surrounds to order. And though the restoration kits come with instructions, it’s a good idea to watch some YouTube videos of the process.

The abbey’s new organ, a Rodgers Cambridge 730 built in 1992, came with eight Rodgers FR1.7 speaker cabinets like the those in the photo above, plus two very large subwoofers to support the low pedal stops. Four of the FR1.7 speakers needed repair, a job that I’ve finally finished. Now as soon as I assemble some more speaker cables I’ll have the full complement of 10 speaker cabinets. That’s 500 pounds of speakers, almost equal to the weight of the organ console. That’s a heck of an audio system for a heck of an organ. I used to hesitate to call myself an audiophile, but I think I’ve earned the title, considering how much excellent (but vintage) audio equipment I have in the house. And now that I’ve been through the rite of passage of repairing speakers.

I was pleased to see that the 8-inch speakers in the FR1.7 cabinets are Peerless speakers, made in Denmark. It made me realize how few Danish imports most Americans have. I love Denmark, having been there on two business trips. So I’m proud of the Danish speakers in my Rodgers organ. Rodgers organs, by the way, are made in Oregon. They are sometimes referred to as the Rolls-Royce of electronic organs. They use digitally sampled pipe sounds. When Rodgers organs are installed and adjusted properly, even organists think they’re listening to a pipe organ.


An 8-inch speaker with a blown-out surround


What the new surround looks like before it’s glued in place


A restored 8-inch speaker

Y'all just help yourselves…

There was a once-upon-a-time when the chickens and groundhogs were wary of each other. Now they have daily grazing parties in the orchard.

I wish I had some idea what my groundhog population is. I’m pretty sure I have two separate families. The fence that keeps the chickens out of the garden also keeps the groundhogs out. Mostly the groundhogs seem to want my grass, and I’m fine with that. So I leave them alone. It’s the voles that do most of the damage, but the voles feed the foxes.

It makes me think of George Bernard Shaw’s preface to his play about Joan of Arc:

The saints and prophets, though they may be accidentally in this or that official position or rank, are always really self-selected, like Joan. And since neither Church nor State, by the secular necessities of its constitution, can guarantee even the recognition of such self-chosen missions, there is nothing for us but to make it a point of honor to privilege heresy to the last bearable degree on the simple ground that all evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct. In short, though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance, or the recognition of the fact that the law of evolution is Ibsen’s law of change.

And so it is, I think, with Mother Nature, and groundhogs, and voles. I try to tolerate them to the last bearable degree.

In Ireland, it's cool to be a farmer again


The Irish Times

There are two dangers in not owning a farm: the belief that heat comes from the furnace and food comes from the supermarket. — Aldo Leopold

The Irish Times started a three-part series today on how family farms are making a comeback in Ireland’s depressed economy. In fact, farming is one of the most promising areas of the economy. Young people now see farming as an option. This, of course, is relocalization — a return to the land after people saw what the globalization of the economy got them.

What puzzles me is why that doesn’t seem to be happening here. Compare the story from the Irish Times with the link I posted yesterday to a New Yorker story about economic deterioration in Surry County, North Carolina, the county just to the west of Stokes County, where I live. Young people continue to move away, both in Surry and Stokes, while many old family farms sit more or less intact, but fallow. All too many family farms, however, have been chopped up into subdivisions during the past few decades, if they were near a population center or a main road.

I am speculating, because I don’t have nearly enough information to make such a judgment, but it is as though most people here are at an earlier stage in a process. They have perceived the downsides of the boom and bust and waste brought to us by globalization. But they’re not yet thinking much about what they could do, largely by themselves, with the resources that are close around them. I don’t know if it’s the truth or an urban legend, but one regularly hears that some children don’t know that French fries comes from potatoes. If that’s true, then the cultural connection to the land has been completely severed. Not to mention that education has failed. Maybe things never went that far in Ireland.

The New Yorker in Mayberry


Snappy Lunch in downtown Mount Airy

It isn’t often that urbane institutions such as the New Yorker find themselves in places like Mount Airy, North Carolina. In the September 12 issue of the New Yorker, George Packer has a must-read piece on how the United States has deteriorated — in almost every way — since the events of Sept. 11, 2001. The article is “Coming Apart: After 9/11 transfixed America, the country’s problems were left to rot.”

This piece is available on the New Yorker’s web site to non-subscribers, here.

This article is not in any way condescending toward Mount Airy. It’s hard to nail down the gist of an article this long and thoughtful, but these two paragraphs come pretty close:

While the media were riveted by the spectacle of celebrity wealth, large areas of the country were—like Surry County—left to rot. The boom had been built on sand: housing speculation, overvalued stocks, reckless deregulation, irresponsible deficits. When the foundation started to crumble with the first wave of mortgage defaults, in 2007, the scale of the destruction became the latest of the decade’s surprises. Hardly anyone foresaw how far the economy would fall; hardly anyone imagined how many people it would take on the way down. Even the economic advisers of the next Administration badly misjudged the crisis. The trillions of dollars spent and, often, misspent on wars and domestic bureaucracies were no longer available to fill the hole left by the implosion of the private economy. Reborn champions of austerity pointed to the deficits in order to make the case that the country couldn’t afford to spend its way back to health. And, like the attacks that were supposed to change everything, the recession—which was given the epithet “Great” and was constantly compared with the Depression of the nineteen-thirties—inspired very little change in economic policy. Without effective leadership, the country blindly reverted to the status quo ante, with the same few people making a lot of money, if a little less than before, and the same people doing badly, if a little worse.

This malignant persistence since September 11th is the biggest surprise of all. In previous decades, sneak attacks, stock-market crashes, and other great crises became hinges on which American history swung in dramatically new directions. But events on the same scale, or nearly so, no longer seem to have that power; moneyed interests may have become too entrenched, élites too self-seeking, institutions too feeble, and the public too polarized and passive for the country to be shocked into fundamental change.