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“These vegan cookies suck!”

Pictured is a cross-section of the best bread I’ve made in a year. I hit a perfect combination of dough hydration, timing, and oven technique.

I baked 25 loaves like this last year, and seven so far this year. Yesterday’s two were superior: crunchy crusts with nice Maillard coloring, chewy crumbs with fully gelatinized starches, distinct but not overpowering sour flavor.

The recipe is always the same, or nearly so — my own multigrain sourdough. Yesterday I made three changes from the usual procedure:

1. I used no whole-wheat flour in the dough (although I did use it to refresh the starter). Because the finished dough contains such a high percentage of non-gluten grains (spelt and rye) and flax seeds, the finished bread is usually somewhat dense. This time, I used high-protein organic bread flour (Guisto’s Ultimate Performer, about 14% protein) exclusively to compensate for the other grains and seeds’ lack of gluten. This made for a somewhat lighter loaf and a significantly more open crumb.
2. I used 33% more starter, adjusting flour and water in the final mix to compensate. Using a higher percentage of starter in the dough can bring more flavor, at the possible risk of accelerating yeast growth to the point where the dough rises too quickly, the yeast cells die off, and the loaf gets acidic and nasty.
3. I cooked the hell out of the breads. I was going for what bakers euphamistically call a “European bake,” which is what you get when you pull the bread out about a minute before the crust turns black. I pushed these about as hard as I could; in fact I was pretty sure I’d burned one of them, because when I thwacked it it sounded like an empty shell.

The dough turned out wetter than usual. This means it both rises faster (less resistance to gas pressure from the wild yeast) and needs to be baked earlier (so the yeast still has a kick when the dough starts to spread in the oven). The higher-than-usual percentage of strong flour lent the crumb some structural assistance. And the deep baking ensured a thorough gelatinization of starches, as evidenced by the shiny translucence of the thin walls around air pockets in the crumb. This is the science behind great bread — for more, read Reinhart or even McGee.)

We served the bread with a recreation of the spread we’d liked so much at Millennium, “truffled sun-dried tomato butter.” I had no recipe, so I dumped arbitrary amounts of each of the ingredients named in the title into the Cuisinart and whizzed it into a pink paste. It was awesome, although I felt oddly guilty for slathering the goo over my perfect crumb, not that that kept me from eating about a pint of the stuff.

Hanging around San Diego Airport after Etech, surrounded by approximately 3 million people whose flights were delayed for one reason or another, I thought this sign seemed especially cold. The gate area was packed with bodies and luggage and clusters of people standing uncomfortably, shifting from one foot to another, wanting nothing more than to get the hell out of there to wherever they were ultimately going. But in the interim, they’d all be subjected to numerous invasive questions, accusatory looks, explosive-residue swabs, X-rays, and searches.

Think about what you sacrifice when you fly. While you’re thinking about it, take off your shoes and belt and put them into this basket. Empty your pockets. Raise your arms and turn around. Don’t worry; your laptop will still be there on the conveyor when we’re through, although we’re not liable for it, and in the meantime we’re going to shoot this big ray-gun at it and maybe open the lid and fondle it for a moment. Say, you didn’t have any film in that carry-on, did you? And don’t mind me while I grab your crank.

In line, I always hear nervous jokes like “What’s next, a cavity search?” (although, to be fair, it’s usually me who’s making them). While I can’t imagine that ever happening, I wouldn’t be surprised if some ladder-climbing TSA executive had proposed it in earnest. In any case, I’m sure the invasions will get worse before they get better.

Apple’s iLife ‘05 is a surprisingly good deal. The combination of iMovie and iDVD gives users the ability to create impressive, professional DVDs. Maternity wards should give one of these free to new parents, instead of that cheesy gift bag of disposable diapers.

There is one catch: iDVD doesn’t recognize 3rd-party DVD burners. It can only burn discs using an internal Apple “SuperDrive.” (SuperDrive is Apple’s marketing word for a combination CD writer and DVD writer.)

This is apparently an improvement over previous versions of iDVD, which wouldn’t even run if no SuperDrive was present. (!)

We have an external CD/DVD burner. It connects via FireWire. I’ve used it for four years to burn hundreds of CDs and a handful of DVDs, and it has worked on four different Macs.

But iDVD refuses to acknowledge its existence: the “Burn” menu item is grayed out.

Fortunately, there is a workaround: create a disk image and write it to the DVD using a third-party application:

1. In iDVD, select File->Save As Disk Image.
2. Use Toast (or any other DVD-burning application) to burn the resulting image to the DVD. Be sure the app recognizes that it’s burning a DVD, rather than a data disk with a DVD disk-image file on it.

When my mom was in town a couple weeks back, I offered to take her to the band’s studio so she could see where I spend my Thursday nights. Later that evening, after we’d returned home, I admitted that the place is kind of a shithole. She laughed out loud.

She tends be understated, so besides the explosive laughter she said only “I think calling it a studio is a bit generous.”

In its defense, she saw it before Norm trapped the rats.

I think the full complement of rehearsal-studio artifacts can be easily found — empty food wrappers, empty beer bottles, strewn arrangement notes on random pieces of paper, carpets with unusual stains, dust, dirt, grime, half-assed soundproofing. I keep meaning to clean the place up, but then I figure the rats need a place to live, too. Besides, this way I can jot set lists in the dust on the bass drum.

The picture above is from a recent demo recording session. Sound quality took a distant second place to simply getting the thing done. So, I only set up three mics — two overheads and one inside the kick drum. I connected all three to my Mackie board, where I created a simple stereo mix (unity gain x 3, kick center, OH panned hard L/R) and bussed it to an outboard compressor. I squashed the mix pretty hard, then fed it into the recording rig (a standalone hard-disk unit) in the next room via some 50' speaker cables that we normally use for our monitors.

The result was cymbal-heavy, which is not surprising considering the position of the overheads. Next time I might try positioning the two mics out front, as rooms mics rather than overheads, where they’ll have a better chance of picking up the toms.

I’ll post a clip of the drums if there’s anything worth listening to.