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!

Thailand: North

On the train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai.  Each cabin had four beds (a top and bottom bunk on each side) and since Seth and I each had to purchase our own (at all of $20), we often had the cabin to ourselves.  We boarded in the late evening and rode overnight, getting into Chiang Mai early afternoon (on something like a 6 hour delay).  None of us minded, the train was so nice and comfortable, especially compared to Amtrak!

As you can see from the clean plates, this vegetarian place was one of our favorites in Chiang Mai.   We're sitting upstairs in this photo, where there were tons of low tables and floor cushions, and thankfully fans too.  It was a neat little place, with a giant wall lined with books in many languages for sale.

We thought at first that this place that we stopped on the way to the homestay was old, but it was actually new construction, to be the home of a bathhouse taking advantage of the natural hotsprings there.  The construction was beautiful nonetheless and really interesting to walk through, though none of us could figure out why they weren't currently at work on it or when it would be an operational spa.

This is Seth and my cabana at the homestay; it was wonderfully cool inside, a nice respite from the temperatures the rest of the trip.

Our cabana from the other direction, Sarah in the doorway.

The porch on Sarah's cabana.  You can see I have an incredibly adorable, tiny dog in my lap: Jina, perhaps Thailand's friendliest resident.

This is the mountain slope as seen from the homestay.  After a couple of nights there we went on a jungle excursion with Winai, our host, and Jalay (who you'll see a photo of soon).  Jalay was a local villager who did a lot of jungle exploring and foraging (he brought the ant eggs that we were treated to our first morning there).  Despite our knowing his name, Winai continued to refer to him exclusively as "Jungle Man" during our stay.

Sarah, pleasantly muddied on our excursion into the jungle.

This is Jalay, our gracious jungle guide, and this, apparently, is a tree that he lit on fire.  We passed more than a few burning and smoldering areas as we trekked, and Winai explained to us that this is how logging is accomplished by the village there.  They light the base of a tree on fire, and once it has burnt through and fallen over, they come back to harvest the rest of the tree.  Sarah went to take a picture of this burning tree, and Jalay proudly jumped into the frame.

Jalay during a break on our hike.

Seth and Sarah hanging out in our lean to- when we got to where we were going to camp Winai and Jalay took out a bunch of bamboo and several banana trees to build this thing.  It was pretty impressive to see them put it together with nothing more than their machetes!

Tea brewing in bamboo stalks on the fire

Peeling garlic for dinner

Winai bringing me more veggies to cut up.  To the left you can see the bamboo cups and chopsticks that Jalay made for us after we got to camp.

Dinner!

Seth by the lean-to

Hiking back to Winai's the next day.  We had planned to stay two nights in the jungle, but Sarah and I were eaten alive by insects during the night.  That morning, Seth explained to Winai, "I think it would be better if we went back today, they are discovering that maybe they are not jungle women."  True.  Let me tell you, the jungle is a very different place than the forest; one, I think, that is not quite so comfortable for human habitation.

Pretty mountainy views on the hike back

On the walk back down from Winai's homestead.  The path (about a mile) from the road ran through a hilltribe village and their crops, all up the hillside.

After our stay at Limeleaf, we picked up one of the kids from the village on our way back into Chiang Mai, where Winai and his wife Noi were headed for the Songkran festival anyway.  Winai grew up in Chiang Mai, and when we got into town we went to a friend of his' bar, got drinks and waterguns and joined in the city-wide water fight.  He we are at the end of the day out front of our hotel.  Obviously we didn't get to take any photos in the wetness of it all, but people with better protected cameras did.  Here's a youtube video from Songkran in Chiang Mai last year: Songkran Video  We rode into town in the back of Winai's pickup, and like many people in this video got a head start on the fun as a result!

This giant plate of indian food and the sweet pancakes below are what $1.50 bought us (to share) at the street market the night that we had banking difficulties (an ATM at our card and Sarah's bank put a hold on her out of country transactions).   Thank god for street food!

Sarah enjoying some ice cream at the same street fair later that week, when our funds were replenished (thanks Dad/Western Union!)

The rooftop patio at our hotel

The outside of one of the more impressive Wats in Chiang Mai.  Although we visited several, I never took pictures inside of the Wats out of respect.  However many people (with better cameras) do.  Here's a link to some photos of wats in Chiang Mai.  

Sarah at one of the many open air cafes in Chiang Mai

View from the train station in Chiang Mai, waiting for our train south.  There were huge flowering trees all over Thailand in so many colors, but mostly this red-orange, yellows, and purples.

That's all for now; I'll have another post of the Southern part of our trip soon!