DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This book taught me how to make bread. There are dozens of great recipes in the book, and a thorough introduction to using preferments (biga, poolish) to build bread in stages.

This book remains one of my favorites because it leads the reader on a bread tour of France, Germany, and Italy, demonstrating many wonderful variations of wheat and rye breads.

The main sourdough recipe uses a firm levain, in the French style, and I believe this is much more difficult than using a wetter, barm-style starter. However, this is a quibble; I’ve had great success with most of the recipes.

A word of caution for new bakers (as opposed to, ahem, “Master Bakers”) — this book is written from the perspective of a professional baker, and tends to rely on having various starters and old doughs at hand. While it’s true that great bread requires such integredients, new bakers might feel less intimidated by Crust & Crumb.

My favorite recipes from this book:

1. Berkeley Sourdough (p. 195), one of the more sour recipes I’ve found.
2. Pain sur Poolish (p. 80) — the best one-day baguette recipe I’ve tried. I had committed this recipe to memory, in my youth. It’s easy, reliable, and make a great loaf of bread.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (Paperback)

The subtitle of this book is “Master formulas for serious bread bakers.” If you are hungry for technique, not to mention great bread, this is a great book to own.

Chef Peter Reinhart gives detailed instructions on creating artisan-style loaves, building the bread in stages to allow the fullest flavor of the grain to come forth. He provides his award-winning “San Francisco” sourdough recipe, within a step-by-step guide to creating a viable wild-yeast starter from scratch that in my opinion is foolproof.

There are four recipes in Crust & Crumb that I rely on at least occasionally:

1. Sourdough Bagels (p. 84). I bake a huge batch of these every few months. The recipe is unbeatable.
2. Focaccia. I’ve been making focaccia from this recipe for five years, and every time it’s a big hit — worth, alone, the cost of the book.
3. San Francisco Sourdough (p. 76).
4. Pita Bread (p. 140)

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (Hardback)

This is the best science fiction novel I’ve read in years.

I had not read the original short story, so the plot was new to me. The novel tells the story of a 6-year old outcast who is selected and rigorously trained to lead Earth’s battle fleet in a war against an alien race. The boy is a genius, and at several points I wondered that the author may also be one, to construct such intelligent, glib dialog and fascinating situations.

The best thing I can say about this book is that I immediately purchased the sequel.

There are some wonderful reviews of the book at the Amazon links below.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (Paperback)
• Amazon (Hardback)

This book is a powerhouse — immensely satisfying, entertaining, and rewarding. It requires something of a commitment from the reader, to follow two groups of characters and two story lines as they converge over a distance of 50 years. At 900 pages this is not a light read, but the author’s detours are fascinating and often hilarious.

This book is rare in that the author clearly understands the science and technology he describes. Fans of hard science fiction, hacking, cryptography, and even historical (WWII) fiction will find something to like.

I wrote a bit more about the book in this piece about breakfast cereal.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)
• Amazon (Hardback)
• Book Site

I learned something important about LCD monitors today. I’m not sure I’m happy about it.

Before I go on I’ll make the disclaimer that I’ve experimented with exactly 1 LCD monitor, the Samsung 770 TFT. My experience is not universal, and my analysis may not be correct.

LCD monitors seem to have a “native” resolution, and any other signal is simply scaled to fit. This monitor’s native resolution is (AFAICS) 1280x1024. At that resolution, letterforms are crisp and sharp. At any smaller resolution, the image is scaled up to fit into 1280x1024 pixels, making letters smeary. This is more noticable (more annoying) in some fonts; probably I could tweak my font choices for a few weeks until I’m happy. But I’m tending to leave the monitor at its highest resolution, even though this makes text (at small point sizes) too small to read comfortably.

The monitor’s built-in menu allows me to disable scaling, but then the desktop floats in the middle of the screen; all the remaining pixels (to fill 1280x1024) are dark. This isn’t exactly what anyone used to a multisync CRT will expect.

All in all it’s not the miracle solution I was expecting it to be.

Also, Samsung’s support for MacOS simply sucks. The monitor works with my Mac — both have a standard VGA connector — but the CD of calibration software is Windows only. For that, I give Samsung my special Brainwashed by Wintel salute (hint: I only need one finger).