DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Mount Shasta, Siskiyou County, California, as seen from I-5.

Wired covers TV “superchef” Alton Brown in The Thermochemical Joy of Cooking. The subtitle sums up Brown’s appeal: “Food Network superchef Alton Brown is part MacGyver, part mad scientist. Welcome to his lab.”

On the topic of kitchen science, the article relates an odd story from the history of oven design:

In the late 1700s, Benjamin Thompson, aka Count Rumford, repurposed tombstones from a Long Island graveyard to build an enclosed camp stove. His invention had the dubious distinction of producing bread crusts that bore the names of the deceased.

Ashland, OR is just north of the California border. It’s about a six-hour drive from the SF Bay Area, and a neat place for a weekend retreat. We weren’t retreating this time, but rather passing through en route to elsewhere. But we’ve retreated here before.

The town is famous as the home for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, an annual event that has been expanded to run for a solid eight months per year. I have not personally attended a Shakespeare event here; I had enough Shakespeare in high school to last me a looong time. Also, there are enough cheesy Shakespeare references in the downtown shopping area to tide me over until, basically, my next life. Examples: The Bard’s Inn, CD or Not CD, and if I had to guess, Henry IV’s Septic Pump, The Merchant of Venicecream, Seven-11 Ages of Man, Burger King Lear, etc.

The downtown area is a mecca of interesting shops and appealing restaurants. Most of the shops seem to be closed a lot of the time, despite the fact that foot traffic is relatively heavy until late in the evening. But I enjoyed the creative signage — in addition to the typical “Closed” signs, I saw several that said “Nope” and one, my favorite, that announced simply “Shut”.

Should you go to Ashland, make time for dinner at the Standing Stone Brewing Company. The food is consistently great. The beers are, too. Note the big wood-fired pizza oven in the kitchen; it turns out excellent breads and sourdough-crust pizzas. If this restaurant were local, I’d eat there every weekend.

According to the RayOVac FAQ:

How and where can I recycle my batteries?
Answer: No general household battery recycling system exists in the USA.

This is false. Here’s a general household battery recycling program: http://www.batteryrecycling.com/

Furthermore, many large grocery and hardware store chains offer community battery recycling programs. If you call the three biggest chain grocery or drugstores near you, you’ll almost certainly find one that accepts used household batteries in bulk.

Even rechargeable batteries can be recycled easily. There’s a great resource at the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation — find a battery recycling location near you. The list contains US and Canadian collection points. Kudos to the RBRC.

(This is part 2 of a 4-part series on world-class focaccia. Just to confuse you, it’s “day 1”, unless it took you 24 hours to read the introduction.)

Great focaccia starts two days back in time, with a bucket of slop called poolish.

Reinhart’s official recipe for poolish calls for a 50/50 mix of water to flour, by volume. That is, it calls for 4 cups of flour and 4 cups of water. It has been my repeated experience that a poolish made this thin will separate and look nasty by the time I need it, the next day. For this reason I often leave 1/4 of the water out. This gives me more control over timing, and results in a poolish less likely to separate.

The thicker poolish will take longer to ferment, so if you do this, allow additional fermentation time. I have successfully left this thicker poolish at room temperature for 6-8 hours (overnight), rather than the 3 indicated in the recipe, prior to retarding. (The retarding step is still necessary; the most important ingredient in this or any great bread is time.)

Then, before mixing the dough, stir the ‘missing’ water into the poolish to get it to the hydration rate assumed by the recipe.

If you’ve never made focaccia before, I would encourage you to follow the poolish recipe as written, at least the first time. Your focaccia will turn out even if the poolish separates.

To help prevent separation, mix the poolish well — a few simple turns with a spoon won’t be sufficient. If you have an electric hand mixer, use it.