First off, 2000 words.

The complete story. With all the great help I've had at The Fresh Loaf, I managed a pretty good hot weather sourdough loaf last time. My notes then suggested giving the shaped loaves longer at room temperature and scoring more resolutely, and so at the first possible o...

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Motivation has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Sure money matters, but not too much. A few times I’ve been offered a job that I didn’t much want to do. Rather than saying no (What if they never ask me again?) I’d light on some random figure, usually two or three times the going rate, and gaily offer them that. If they did accept, which some did, the job was never any more satisfying.¹ And now I bloody well had to do it.

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Oh yes. Let me count. I think six times, but I’m probably blocking. The best, by far, was when I dislocated my knee and sprained my ankle while skiing in Nauders in Austria, and they brought me down in the blood wagon, having taken the precaution of giving me just a teeny hit of morphine. Now that w...

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Tunneling hither and yon through the internets I have been learning more and more about sourdough fermentation and why my bread hasn’t been too pretty of late. Advice suggested that I feed the starter with strong flour, reduce the amount of starter to 10% and slow the whole process down by using t...

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Start: 95.4 Last week: 90.5 This week: 89.5

All fine, all good; got to keep going.¹

I recently spent a fine vacation in the United States, a singularly pleasant experience except for the sickening “debate” on reform of health care. That, however, is not my main subject, except tangentially. Fat...

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