The Fugue

Once upon a time, I blogged about the Shangri La "diet". I suppose I owe it to all 4 of my readers to summarize my experience. So here's the summary: it worked and I have no idea if it was placebo effect.

Look at this graph:

The period between about 6/5 and 8/2 is when I was following the procedure, with about 80% fidelity. I lost 10 pounds in short order. I was less hungry. My wife got mad because I ate less than her almost all the time.

Then I got lazy and stopped taking my swigs. You do get used to swigging olive oil, but it's never actually fun. The second time around I saw the same results as before, but I was even less faithful. If I ever got organized enough to do it 100% I might lose even more weight.

I noticed that even after stopping I naturally ate less for quite some time. I still eat less than I used to, though not as much less as last August and September.

Now, was it the placebo effect? No clue. But if it is, is there anything so wrong with harmlessly tricking your body and mind into eating more healthily? Is it a failure? No, I think it was a success for me. I just didn't give it enough priority to continue in the face of vacations and so on. Would I go back to it? Sure, I'd rather drink a little olive oil between meals than do almost any other diet.

But really it was mostly an experiment. I know as well as you that just losing weight is almost absurd. Being fit is more important than how much I weigh, and I'm terrible at being fit. So that's where I need to focus my efforts.

Being honest with myself, here are the obstacles to being fit, in decreasing order: time, effort, and a love of swimming.

Time is one of the things I most treasure. Giving up 200-300 perfectly good hours a year to some mindless excercise is frankly apalling. I need to convince myself that it would be worth it, or make it something I want to do.

It takes effort to get up and excercise, and I won't deny that it's easier to sit there programming or researching. My mind is already in shape and it's much easier to work my mind than my body.

Now love of swimming might seem like a silly factor, but it's at least partially true. I love to swim, and I hate to run/walk/etc. If I'm going to excercise you better believe I'm going to be swimming, not running/walking/etc. But getting to the pool is more than just effort, it's logistics. Money, car, parking, being all wet, chlorine... It's not an insurmountable obstacle, it will just take some planning.

I mention all that because soon you will see a post about how my new swimming habit is going. I got a book that promises to make lap swimming enjoyable, and from what I've read I believe them. The pool is closed this week but I've got all the plane laid out on how to adjust my routine, and next wednesday I'll start my new life. I'll reset my graph in the sidebar and we'll see how swimming compares to swigging olive oil.

I recently watched the Pop Culture (transcript) episode of Good Eats. I'm generally an AB fanboy, but sometimes I disagree, and I had to disagree with AB's equipment choice.

I know AB doesn't like unitaskers, and I don't either. But my Stir Crazy is an exception. I don't feel the least bit of shame for having and recommending a unitasker, and I know AB himself has done so on occasion too.

AB said,

[looks at a popper with a rotating bar on a flat pan] Oh, now that’s just silly. Even if all the kernels popped, steam condenses on the dome and runs back on the corn. Even if it worked perfectly, who’d want such a gigantic unitasker hanging around the kitchen? Well, not me.

I'll agree it looks silly, but it does work. Not all the kernels pop, but almost all of them do. (Have you ever seen all the kernels pop? Even an air popper has some duds.) I don't know where he's coming up with this steam theory, but it doesn't compute. There are steam holes in the top, which allow the steam to escape, and we've never had the least bit of problem with wet popcorn in all these years. What's more, I'm willing to bet that steam is more likely to condense on his tin foil hat and drip on the corn than on the plastic dome.

Back before my family got a Stir Crazy, we used to pop popcorn in a pan over the stove, just like he does on the show (except he uses tongs where we used a hotpad. I'd use my welding gloves today, and I'm surprised he doesn't suggest that because he's the one that told us to get welding gloves in the first place). We didn't use a bowl and take advantage of the concentration of oil in the narrow bottom, but otherwise it was the same. Regardless of whether you use a pan or a bowl, it's a royal pain. It's long, boring, tiring, hot, and no fun at all, and you get a lot of unpopped kernels. The Stir Crazy involves putting corn and oil in during a commercial break (and putting some butter in the microwave to melt), and unplugging it when the popping stops. No babysitting. No tedious shaking. No problem. Yes, it's bulky but it's worth every inch if you like popcorn.

Incidentally I tried adding salt to the unpopped kernels and oil, and it doesn't work with the Stir Crazy. It picked up ever so little of the salt, but not enough and it left a lot on the bottom of the popper. Maybe it works in his steel bowl contraption, I don't know.

I liked the rest of the show, especially his disendorsement of air poppers. I'm going to have to try out some of those gourmet varieties. I think I'll leave the insipid caramel corn to CrackerJack though, and I'll stick with the good gooey caramel corn that my family has made for years.

Put down that diet soda and read this article. Yes, you.

Drinking soda regularly (1+ cans a day) is not exactly the smartest thing you can do for your body, whether or not it's diet. </soapbox>

Redbeard's post about Beans and Rice used leftover cooked rice, but it got me thinking that I could blog about how the Latin Americans cook their rice. My information comes from little old abuelitas that were kind enough to show me how they cooked things, and a Brazilian missionary roommate.

Latinos cook rice differently than most Americans. I'm not talking about that "spanish rice" stuff that the Mexicans make. I'm talking plain white rice which prevails in every other Latin American country. The islanders also have this yellow stuff which is pretty good, but that's another show.

There are many variations, as is always the case with rice, but it seems to me that the basics are simple enough. First, sweat some garlic, onions, and salt. To be really cool, smash the garlic in a mortar and pestle using the salt as an abrasive agent. Or you can be lazy and use a garlic press. You'll have to come to terms with how much garlic and onion to use, but for a standard saucepan worth try a clove and half a small yellow onion. As for salt, your instincts probably tell you to use too little. Don't skimp - garlic and onion without salt is not good eats.

Second, put the rice in and stir occasionally (or constantly if you're the nervous type). Do this for awhile, until you see most of the rice change. I don't remember if it gets translucent or more opaque or what, but you'll notice the change.

Third, add water. Americans would add two parts water, but the Latinos added one part or one and a half parts. I think most that added one part would add some in the middle, so you might as well go with 1.5. If you're a coward, go ahead and put two parts in, but you'll miss out on the pegado.

Bring to a boil and if necessary let it boil down to where there's just half an inch or so of water above the rice. This of course depends on the size and shape of your vessel, but it's a good rule of thumb. Now, cover loosely and reduce heat. But don't reduce it to almost nothing like we Americans do. We're not simply steaming the rice here, we're also cooking it.

Let the rice cook, checking when you think it might be done. Depending on how hot and how much water you had you may have to add a little, that's ok. When it's done, it's ready to eat with black beans or whatever.

The end result is some of the most delicious rice you've ever tasted, and if you're lucky there will be rice stuck to the bottom and/or sides of the pan. This is the pegado, and it's delicious (if you didn't burn it). If you've never had this, befriend a latino that isn't from Mexico and stop in for dinner. You probably won't get it right the first time, but if you know what it's supposed to taste like you can probably use the scientific method to bridge the gap. A few rules of thumb: don't skimp on the oil or the salt, and be sure to fry the rice long enough.

¡Buena Suerte!

Over at r.f.s people have been experimenting with making bread with minimal kneading. This is right up my alley, I thought, so I gave it a few tries. It works astonishingly well.

The basic idea is that gluten development is a hydration process. When you knead a dough, you are working in the water and possibly creating little air bubbles. If you leave a ball of dough long enough, the water will work itself in. I know you don't believe me, but it's the truth. In my experience the loaves I make are plenty fluffy - more fluffy than when I knead - so I don't think the air bubbles part is an issue. You be the judge.

So the goal is to let water do the hard work over time. With normal bread, this poses a challenge in that you can't leave the yeasted dough a few more hours without ruining things. With normal bread, people do things with part of the flour and water beforehand and then mix in the rest and the yeast later, etc. etc. I'm no expert on what they do, and frankly it's too complicated. We don't have that problem because sourdough is naturally slower and gives us sufficient time.

Here's what I do. Let's say I want to bake on Saturday morning, and I plan on getting 6-8 hours of sleep. 6-8 hours is a nice rise time for chilled sourdough so I prep the starter so it's nice and active when I get home from work, then I mix up the dough and put it in the fridge. I take it out of the fridge after a few hours, just before bed, and form it into a loaf. I place it under a plastic container (I call it the greenhouse, because that's basically what it does: keep in moisture and heat) and go to bed. In the morning, unless something has gone drastically wrong, it's ready to pop in the oven and bake.

So let's review:

• mix
• rest
• bake

And now some more ramblings about the boring details. You do need to mix it to get the water distributed, and maybe there's some air bubble action going on there too. But you don't have to use your hard-to-clean mixer or get your hands dirty. Mix all the ingredients, including salt.

If you want to deflate or knead or stretch and fold during the rest phase, by all means have at it. Remember that even with sourdough you can only rest so long before the yeast eats all its food. Chilling retards this.

For those of you who like recipes:

No-knead Sourdough Bread (small loaf)

  - 200 g    active 100% hydration starter
  - 125 ml   water
  - 174 g    flour
  -   1 tsp  salt
  -   1 Tbsp oil
  -   1 Tbsp honey

Mix well. Let rest for 1.5 hours at room temperature, or up to 24 hours in
the fridge. Deflate/work it mildly and halfheartedly, then form into a loaf
and rise in a humid (and preferably warm) environment until ready to bake
(use the finger test). Bake in a cold-start oven at 400 degrees for 20
minutes, then at 350 degrees until internal temperature reaches the boiling
point. (You do have a probe thermometer, don't you?) Turn off the heat and
let it bake another 5 minutes and then take it out of the oven and let it
cool thoroughly for best flavor. If you can't hold off the ravening butter
slatherers, don't blame me.

Yesterday I felt like baking bread. Whenever I get this urge, my wife exhibits two simultaneous reactions. First, she starts salivating, then she remembers how the kitchen ended up last time and she rebels. I can't blame her, I don't like to clean up either, especially after slaving over the bread that we both enjoy.

As the cliché goes, necessity is the mother of invention. Yesterday all the neurons in my little brain lined up just right and invented the one-bowl bread solution. I made a fine loaf of bread and only got one bowl dirty. One bowl to clean, and it wasn't even hard to clean. I don't expect to win a Nobel prize here, it should be pretty easy for just about anybody to figure out once he has the idea in his head.

The first step in eliminating the mess is to figure out what the mess is. To do this, I used something called imagination, combined with memory. When I make bread, I make a mess of the mixer, a bowl, measuring stuff, the counter, and a bread pan. So I methodically started eliminating as many of those dishes as possible.

The mixer was easy: knead by hand.

The measuring stuff wasn't too hard to eliminate, since I have a scale. I put the bowl on the scale, dumped in 500g of flour, and poured in 350g of water (the cup used for this doesn't count as a dirty dish!). The yeast, oil, salt, and a bit of herbs thrown in just for kicks were estimated, not measured. If you aren't confident in your estimations, go ahead and use measuring spoons this time - measure it out into the spoon then pour it into your hand or something to give you an idea of how "big" the measure is without a container. For my part, I think I used too little yeast this time around, but next time I'll do better. If you don't have a scale, you could estimate the flour and add water until the dough is the desired consistency. But you really want a scale if you want to be a serious bread baker.

I skim the rec.food.sourdough newsgroup, and I had heard rumors there of a kneading technique called "stretch and fold." Whenever they bring it up they negligently leave out the details of just what this is, and so my first attempt at doing it was completely off. Still, my mistake remains to this day one of my favorite kneading techniques. I understand I'm not the first to think of it, so I guess I won't win any prizes for that either. Although it's not the same "stretch and fold" technique that is in vogue, it will serve our purposes. Here's what you do: dig into the flour/water mess and make it into a dough. No spoon allowed, remember. Once it's dough and can be lifted from the bowl, take it in your hands and stretch it. Now bring your hands together, thus folding it. Rotate 90° and repeat ad nauseum. This works as well or better than kneading on the counter, but it is a bit more of a workout on your hands. Don't worry, they could use a good workout. It will stick to your hands. Don't fret it. When it's kneaded, or you're pooped, throw it back in the bowl and wash your hands. Let it rise.

All we have left is the bread pan. You know, the non-stick one that sticks every time. The key here is to have parchment paper and a baking stone. If you don't have those, maybe you want to settle for two-dish bread instead. If you do, you probably know what to do.

When you use fewer dishes, you not only have less mess to clean up, but you have less things to fiddle with. You get closer to the bread, and the whole process goes faster (if not at first, in the end). Bread-making will seem less of a hassle and more fun. So go do it, and enjoy that bread!

So I wrote a little command-line sourdough calculator because I like the command line better than a web form or spreadsheet.

• sourdough calculator 0.1
• Samartha's web-based sourdough calculator
• What google has to say about "sourdough calculator"