First thing I did on getting back from hols was to wake the sleeping sourdough and then set to. I was determined to produce a better loaf, despite the heat: over 30℃ in the kitchen by day, and nowhere else much cooler. Step one was to find a stronger flour. I’d always used Barilla 00, which is about...
A friend in London picked up a link I posted and riffed on it, which included this little aside that he’d read recently, and felt worthy of a lecturer he had known.
A professor told her class that an assignments would be due on the given date and no excuses would be accepted short of a family...
I’m pretty certain about this one, but not absolutely. Lots of beaches, lots of walks, surely on one of them the moon was shining. Maybe the time I watched turtles coming ashore to nest? Or the penguins doing their regular-as-clockwork parade at Phillips Island. Not a huge amount of walking, but s...
Although I promised to, I never did deal with the baking session that produced, as a byproduct, the Best. Pancakes. Evah. Probably because it was too awful to revisit. The dough -- supposedly 65% hydration -- had absolutely no structure.
Really, only a vague dread of wasting food persuaded me...
I know I’m late to the party, 1 but I have only now watched Gordon Brown’s surprise talk at Ted Global in Oxford. It was a magnificent performance, but that’s all it was: a performance. He started with a harrowing set of images, from the napalmed child in Vietnam via the vulture waiting for a Su...
