Sourdough

I used to think that bread was beyond me.  Several years ago, one of you got me "The Bread Baker's Apprentice" for Christmas.  Seth and I tried some loaves using commercial yeast, but the results were kinda bland.  Not terrible, but not worth making with access to a real bakery.  I don't know what changed, maybe brewing beer has made me less intimidated by fermentation, but recently I decided to take a stab at cultivating my own sourdough starter.  It was a really good decision.

I have two wildly different books that I've been using for reference.  The first is "The Bread Baker's Apprentice" (thanks again to whoever got it for me!!!).  It's an extremely technical, detailed book, and has a wealth of information, written by a guy who's won international bread awards.  It's also a lot of information for a complete beginner, and I found it kinda intimidating.  As a wonderful counterbalance, I borrowed a book called "Wild Fermentation" from a friend, which is written by a couple of young punk kids.  Their instructions went something like this: put flour and water in a jar- yeast will come live in it!  It really has been about that simple, and as I work with my starter and experiment with my baking techniques I'm able to integrate and understand more and more of the great information in "Apprentice."  

Healthy, bubbly starter

It only took a day before my starter had started to bubble, the sign that yeast are alive and kickin' in your floury soup.  I "feed" it about every other day by using half of the starter and replacing it with fresh flour and water.  For those of you not super familiar with how bread is made, there are traditionally only a few ingredients: flour, water, yeast, salt, and sometimes oil.  Yeast is everywhere, floating around in the air- you just have to create a friendly environment and they'll come inhabit it.  Because the yeast that you can naturally attract from the environment is more varied and complex than those little packets you can buy, the bread you make with this yeast has more complexity too.  To make bread all you have to do is mix some starter (yeast) with more flour and water, and a little bit of salt and oil.  Let it rise, knock it down, then let it rise again, put it in the oven.   Voila! 

My first loaf, fresh out of the oven.

If I hadn't been surprised enough by the ease of getting my own starter going, I found online instructions for a no-knead bread, meaning that with less than 5 minutes of work a day we get fresh baked delicious loaves.  As the yeast mixes with the fresh flour, it gets really rowdy bouncing around eating up the fresh sugars in the wheat.  This kind of kneads the bread dough while it rises, creating air pockets and a nice crumb, though this type of loaf is still definitely denser than a traditionally kneaded loaf.  I bake it in a pre-heated, covered cast iron.  The cover traps moisture, making a nice steamy environment, which is essential for a crisp, flaky crust.  

Easier than pie!  But I am looking forward to making it more complicated for myself, trying different methods and types of breads.  My next goal:  a really airy, traditional French style (think Parisian Baguette).

Sliced and toasted for breakfast!

Thailand: South

After our time in Chaing Mai, the plan was to head south to the more tropical end of Thailand, where we were going to visit a small coastal town know to be a climbing destination, surrounded by limestone cliffs.  Getting there was one of the most dissapointing and disheartening things ever.  The town, cut off from the mainland by those lovely cliffs, had been developed in the worst of ways.  There weren't huge resorts, but all the small cheapo places there had been slapped up with little regard for the overall aesthetics of what was clearly a much more beautiful place before drunken tourists and entreprenuial locals got to it.  In addition to the construction debris, there seemed to be a general refuse disposal problem (ie it was easier and cheaper to pile it up in empty lots than to pay for a boat to haul it away).  We felt pretty crappy being there, and with warnings of aggressive monkeys posted everywhere, so it seemed best to hightail it out of there more or less immediately.

Luckily the second destination we had in mind was lovely.

Sarah playing her uke in one of the little gazebos on the beach

Playing dominos with Ett, who owns the bar and cabanas, and taking a break from the surf in the shade.  The area that we were in was one of the hardest hit by the tsunami.  Ett told us that he had grown up going to the beach there with his family, but that absolutely everything had been demolished by the tsunami.  He and a friend began to rebuild a few years later, and now jointly run the cabanas and restaurant.  Ett lives there in his own cabana, and employs a kind of rag-tag bunch of teenage guys who mostly seem to live on site as well.  We didn't talk a whole lot about it expressly, but I got the sense that many of the people we met there had lost some family, and it was great to see someone our age taking some younger guys under his wing.  Ett cooked up huge, delicious meals everyday, and the young guys were in charge of cooking a huge pot of rice everyday and cleaning up dishes.

Seth with Paco and Nik, Spanish and French (respectively) diving instructors who stayed the duration of our time there.  It was crazy to hear the two of them talking with Ett, always in English- we were lucky; it was universal language of travelers in Thailand- even for Nik and Paco they both knew more English than either of them spoke of the others' language.

Surfboards stacked next to the bar.  You can also see the seating area for the restaurant on the right.  We were there at the very tail end of the season, and the restaurant was already closed.  But Ett and the guys were really generous with their own food, and also took us into town to the market to buy groceries and let us use the restaurant kitchen.

Seth (on the right) and me (on the left) catching the same wave.

Same wave, but a photo where I turned up the brightness just a little so that you can see us better.

Ett out on the beach at sunset with his pack of strays... this ragtag bunch of dogs looked like they were out of a disney movie.  They hung around the cabanas, ate everyone's leftovers, and looked out for snakes.

One day a herd of water buffalo ambled down to the beach by our cabanas.  They were an especially funny sight with the resort across the creek as a backdrop.

This guy had upside down horns!

...and then we spent one more night in Bangkok before coming home.  We didn't feel compelled to spend much time there (overwhelming, dirty, and with scammy cab drivers- probably about how New York seems to foreigners).  But that was almost a year ago now!  One of these days I will get better at updating this thing in a timely fashion.  I have been using my camera for note-taking for my projects, and with it on hand perhaps I'll be better about uploading photos.  More on my (more current) life soon!