She's Got Balls

Oh, Detroit. Cold and grey and ghetto. Home, home, home.  The place my recipe for French-style Lemon Cake actually works.

I've been working on making consistent baguettes. Ha! God, my life is so hard! Really, though. If the slashes are a bit too flat, the rise of the baguette is super weird and twisty making it look like a piece of driftwood. If the slashes are too shallow they vanish in the rise. Not to mention I still haven't decided on a baguette recipe and I can only make 14" loaves due to my stupid stone. Hm.

I've tried to keep better records off and on, but I'm realizing that I work so much better, happier, and faster if I let myself have a laissez-faire relationship with recipes. Just a few notes on when and how instead of a big worksheet of temperatures and weights... I think it's best.

Taught Colleen how to make Lemon Cake and Vegan Chocolate Cake.

I have been seriously lax in keeping my baking journal. NOT GOOD. Standardization and refining is what is needed right now, dude! I have a loaf of sourdough proofing in the fridge, my third shot at it. We'll see if this one rises any more than the others, though I forgot the autolyse again. Shit! Sourdough. Still a mystery (i almost typed 'a misery') and a puzzle to me. Pieces are coming together, though. I heard of a woman over the mountain who has a 150 year old sourdough starter that I want a pinch of. I'm trying to read more and more about the science and history of sourdough to get a better grasp on it, but I gave my copy of On Food and Science (the best kitchen book ever, for true know it alls) to a friend of mine who left town today. The season here is really coming to an end, a strange and slightly frightening thought for someone like me whose life is then on hold for a few months.  In February, I plan on returning with a case of refined recipes and a renewed sense of purpose. And the boy I gave the book to will lend his hand to helping me build a wood fired oven in return. An investment with high dividends, then.

Instead of being more vigilant in my breadmaking recordkeeping, I've been drawing logos and playing with names, fantasizing and planning while cooking at the grill. I've taken a look at the cottage laws in Utah, and just as Josh said, they were changed last month in favor of home operators: no need for a commercial kitchen! This is the one thing that may have completely derailed all my ambition, and for it to have just changed is like a door swinging open at my approach. Can I fail to walk though it? My life, fucked as it is, feels like the barrels inside of a lock cylinder all spinning and then, finally, matching up. It's intoxicating, in all the many good and bad senses of the word.

Mmmm. I just pulled a loaf of sourdough out of the oven and it looks so pretty. I've got a little lame pattern that I'm razoring into the tops. It browned a lot, probably just from being too close the the heating element. The inner temp only clocked in at 160 after 25 minutes. I'm not sure if I should put it in covered or lower in the oven or what... Hm. I'm not going to put it back in and risk an underdone loaf, merely because I've never gotten a loaf to register the 190-200 degrees recommended. I wonder why not? It's a puzzle.

Looking at planners over at buyolympia gets me to thinking that maybe I should just design a bread journal for myself and print it out. A project for January when I'll be curled in my Detroit home.

Delivered a dozen bagels to Dennis, my New Yorker. They were too small for my taste, and still fucking wrinkly even using bread flour. I think that the only way commercial bakeries get them so smooth is conveyor belts. Or maybe I over proof them? I need to start using a timer for proofing. Keep me alert and honest. He was very kind about them, and terribly enthusiastic over having a bakery and a brewery. Cakes and ale. Bread and beer. It was so strengthening to hear someone almost unconditionally supportive and positive. He invited me and my friend Kelly to his carpentry shop to see this stunning Nakashima-inspired table he's working on and told me I could make a cutting board there with his help. Oh, there is still so much to do here it's obscene.

Hahaha, I finally cut into the dark sourdough loaf and... it was wet! Well, now I know. Taste and crumb-wise, it's bitching. Let's put two more loaves on the horizon. Two of Godfather, too. And pumpkin bread tomorrow when I get eggs. For now I have no less than five cookbooks to page through right now and pull recipe ideas from.

All praises be to Allah, the Godfather bread is good.

So fucking good, in fact. A total triumph of breadmaking: crisp, shiny, gorgeous crust and a warm interior with big bubbles and great taste. It's gonna be my standard loaf for now. Jesus, it's good. And more than good, it's pretty. A showpiece. Fucking right!

The premature sourdough is cute, with uneven ovenspring that makes it look like it has an erection. I haven't cut it yet, but the crust feels pretty rough. I shoved a thermometer into it's bowels and only got it up to 190 F. Hopefully it is done all the way and looks pretty as well. I'm happy that it rose, showing the health of the Joe starter. Next adventure is seeing how it tastes and develops. I should have put the loaf in a dutch oven or covered pot to improve the crust. Next time!

I'm going to start a 3x poolish for more of the Godfather bread. Oh, it is so fucking good with jam. Life makes sense again.

So my first shot at bagels is... fucked. They have a  strange crackery crust and an almost dinner roll like crumb. I let them overproof for HOURS, since I went to a sweat lodge while the dough rose. No, really. Still, even with the overproofing I think that the recipe just sucks. It's the simplest one I found and perhaps that shows, the bagels don't taste right. Kyle actually got up at 2 in the morning because he heard I was baking and concluded, rightly, that the 'bagels' are actually soft pretzels in a transparent disguise.  I'm gonna try another with a longer recipe with overnight retarding, and maybe a sourdough recipe from La Brea Bakery. I'd really like to be able to get them right, since I promised Dennis (a local New Yorker and awesome Arts and Crafts carpenter and restorer) bagels just like home. What the fuck was I thinking!?

I've got my first trial loaf of sourdough retarding in the fridge from my Joe Starter (wild yeast). I don't think that the starter is quite ready being only a week or so old but I just couldn't resist. The poolish smelled good, and the dough is pleasantly wet and sticky so if it rises we'll be in business. I had to use whole wheat pastry flour since I ran out of regular. Jesus, what a half-assed baker I can be. Another loaf of 'Rustic Italian Peasant Bread' which I think I'm gonna start calling Godfather Bread (better than Guinea Bread, right?) is sitting on the counter and I think I'll bake that in the morning.  Fucking fingers crossed, for sure. I need a win after the bagels. God! Bagels! Fuckers!

So now I've got two starters, Joe and Josh. Joe is a week or so old and totally cool wild yeast. He smells like Romano cheese but hey, he's still young. Josh is of indeterminate age and is based upon old used commercial beer yeast, so he is pretty fake. A total poser, but frisky as hell and a pretty dark brown. Josh I have used to make Barm Breck with positive results (!), and that was before I even fed him or anything. I was considering starting another with grapes and naming it Jill but I ate the grapes and I can barely deal with feeding two cultures.

I've been reading the La Brea Bakery book a little and I got The Bread Builders in the mail the day before last and have been consuming it. Everyone who sees the Bread Builders falls in love with the hot young baker on the cover. Seriously, square jaw, cute hat, golden light, tattoo of what? a sheaf of wheat? on his forearm... Hot. Watched I Like To Kill Flies and was deeply inspired. I've gotta bake a double batch of triple chocolate scones for Brynn and Georgie and try to figure out what I could do for breakfast. Try to get Josh to build me a masonry wood fired oven. Try to get the fucking bagels right!

I'm going to remodel my old silkscreening website to have this silly new blog, I think. But for now...

I've lived in Boulder, Utah for 7 months now quite unexpectedly after only planning to be gone from Detroit for two weeks. And how great a contrast the two cities make! Boulder is remote, quiet, tiny, white, replete with stunning views of elephant skin slickrock and cliffs stretching all the way to the horizon... Detroit is immediate, loud, decaying, a relative Babel of different people and cultures all trying to make do in the strange abandoned industrial city that is my home. There's no way that I could privelege one over the other, though the more I consider tiny Boulder and sprawling Detroit, the more they seem binary opposites, repellent to each other as the poles of a magnet. In about 3 weeks I'll be back in Detroit for part of the winter, the bleakest and greyest time in the Rust Belt. There are things I'm looking forward to like friend and family, going to markets for ethnic spices and food instead of having to order food out of a catalog, Detroit's amazing art museums and pre-war architecture, walking on Belle Isle and watching the sheets of ice in the Detroit River break up off shore... Still, I'm nervous to be apart from the tiny insular community here in Boulder, where everyone knows everyone else's business and there is always someone to talk to, plan with, get into trouble with.

I'm returning to Boulder in March or earlier. I'm bringing my recipes and my hopes for a little bakery, for seeing the town kids I love grow a year older, for getting to explore the parts of this weird landscape I've missed this year, and to see all the people I've fallen in love with again. It is strange, it is unexpected, it is somehow comforting.

today: maybe a car?
tomorrow: maybe fucking fleeing town?

 Listening to Devendra Banhart at 3am, sleepy. How much do I love everyone? How much do I love being the loudest people in the room?

Someone help me. I have had this fucking song in my head for three days, constantly. I love the comments on the video, though: "Cette chanson me donne envie de cesser de vivre!"

Speaking of French shit, how much am I looking forward to seeing Diva at the DIA? A fair amount.

Oh, my god. I need my phone to have its texting fixed. So bad.