The Enlightened Baker

I have recently been fascinated by bread. While cooking is something I enjoy and happen to feel pretty confident in, I consider it to be merely mixing up flavors and developing textures. Baking, on the other hand, is a whole different branch of chemistry. The different ingredients react together, and unless you understand what is going on, it's usually best to follow the recipe so you don't screw something up. After spending hours in the kitchen, it really is a shame to have an inedible lump to show for your work.

I have a wonderful cookbook, "The Joy of Cooking," that is full of cool recipes. What I like best about this book, though, is that at the beginning of each section, the author explains the theory behind whatever kind of food he is discussing. For example, in the section about pies, he explains that a flaky crust is formed when the gluten forms bonds in the dough and is rolled out, The layers of gluten are separated by the fat in the dough (butter, shortening, lard, etc). Thus, it is important not to overwork your pie crust, or the gluten will form throughout and you will have stiff crust. Cool, huh? You'd be surprised how much theory there actually is in the recipes you use. What I like to know is which parts of the recipe are the important ones and which ones I can play around with.

Back to bread: Let me preface this by saying that I do not drive a Prius. No offense intended to those who do, but I don't want you to think that I have any agenda in what I'm about to tell you. I don't like for there to be things in my food that I don't understand. I don't really like for there to be anything but, well, food, in my food. If you look in my grocery cart, you are going to find mostly basic whole foods like milk, cheese, vegetables, rice, fruit, and root beer - you know, things that don't have a list of ingredients because they are the ingredient. I don't want you to feel like I'm missing out on good stuff, I just make my own good stuff. And if I can't, I'll just buy it, because I'm not trying to be healthy, per se, I just think food tastes better that way.

My wife, on the other hand, is trying to be healthy, so she takes this stuff a bit more seriously than I do. Thus, she wants to be able to make her own bread. She starts with wheat. We recently got a wheat grinder so that we could make flour. The problem is that most bread recipes don't work very well with whole wheat flour. The bread comes out all dense and crumbly. In discussing this problem (yes, all our conversations are this interesting) I remarked that a whole wheat roll recipe we have turns out marvelously soft and fluffy rolls. I wondered what the difference was between the bread recipes and the roll recipe. I considered making an excel spreadsheet listing all of the ingredients of the many different recipes, normalizing around something like flour content so that I could make direct comparisons (You were wondering when I was going to do something nerdy, weren't you?). It turned out to be much easier than that. Instead of figuring out what was wrong with all of the other recipes, my wife suggested that we just use the recipe that we know works - and make bread loaves instead of rolls.

It worked, too well. The dough didn't rise - it exploded! I went outside for two seconds and my bread got a big head.

No, it isn't supposed to get that big. If it does, it usually means that there is a big air pocket in the middle of your loaf and the top can fall off when you try to tip the thing out of your pan, like this:

Topless bread is slightly less useful than it's topful counterpart. The good news? Another loaf made it out of the pan with its head intact and the bread itself is wonderfully soft and light. Yay for beating the system! Yay for whole wheat bread! Yay for slathering the previously healthy bread with artery clogging butter!

Pi Day, Schmi Day

I feel so un-nerdful. I didn't do anything special for Pi Day. I didn't make a pie. I didn't recite pi to the 314th decimal place. I didn't even do anything irrational. I thought about celebrating, but making a pie is just so much work, and I had other not-so-nerdy things to do, like weed the rocks in the front yard so the HOA stops sending me nasty letters. In fact, at 1:59:26 this afternoon, I couldn't have cared less what the radius or circumference of the weeds were - I just wanted them out of my gravel.

I did, however, make this hamburger.

It is round. I put pickles on it. They are roundish. There are 3 slices of tomato on this burger. Can we round that to 3.14? I think we can. The tomato slices are also round. The bun? You betcha - round. The potato chips? Uh, huh. My belly afterward? Most assuredly.

Pi Day, consider yourself observed.

The Calculus of Food

I like to cook. It is my retreat from life. I shrink back and center my thoughts in my taste buds. It simplifies things and it makes me happy. It may not come as a surprise, though, when I tell you that I approach cooking a little differently than most people.

Let me explain.

When most people cook, they fix in their minds something that they have cooked or eaten before and have decided that they would like to make again. To do that, they will turn to a recipe - a step by step instruction list for re-creating a particular dish. I find this rather restrictive. That would mean that I am limited to things for which I have the instructions. What if I don't have the instructions for what I want to make? What if I've never actually had what I want to make? When I cook, I rarely have an already experienced end result in mind. Instead, I have an idea of the flavors and textures I would like in my dinner and I put ingredients together to create that.

This means that there aren't really neat labels for the foods I make. When I was growing up, we liked to eat spaghetti. When somebody requested spaghetti, everybody knew exactly what that meant - there was (and still is) only one way to make spaghetti at my family's house. When I make spaghetti now, it's not that I'm working towards any particular model of spaghetti, I've just decided that a certain blend of flavors and textures sounds good to me and the result fits under the heading of "spaghetti-like foods."

It helps that I have a very well established connection between my taste buds and my brain - or more precisely, between my taste buds and my memory. I can recall flavors very easily. I can also combine those flavors in my mind to create new and exciting possibilities. I can quite literally read a recipe and taste on my mind's tongue the final product. This can be quite helpful when I'm trying to find something that sounds good to make. It can also be a burden. Have you noticed that things you buy from the store have recipes on them? Most of those recipes don't really taste that great. How do I know? I've read and sampled them. Here's the million dollar piece of advice for the day: never make a recipe off of the mayonaise jar. Every time I accidently read a recipe for casserole off the rear of my Best Foods I gag.

Because it's Funny...

Speaking of the topics at hand, I thought these shirts were oh so appropriate:

"No really, look here, it's a number 4!"

It's never too early to start teaching binary.

To assist in the Jedi training...

Sith, the new strangers with candy.

Binary Around the Net

So, to show you that counting in binary is done by more than just nerds, (but mostly because my last two posts had no pictures) I bring you famous people counting in binary.

Condoleezza Rice wanted to let us all know how many book offers shes gotten in the last two months.

Joaquin Phoenix uses binary to let us all know what his chances of success as a pop musician are.

George Bush is flashing the secret service the sign to get him out of this boring convocation in 18 minutes.

Paula Abdul used to be able to count the number of judges on the panel, no wonder she's so upset about the addition.

Rod Blagojevich tells us how many faces he has.

And finally, the Hilton sisters flash their collective IQ.

Those numbers were 992, 0, 18, 3, 2, and 6.

I tried to find a picture of Tiger Woods calling "Four!" but the firewall at work is too good.

The Cure for Narcolepsy

I fall asleep really easily. This comes in handy at night. My wife will occasionally mention that it took her an hour or two to fall asleep at night. This always surprises me, since I'm regularly out soon after I hit the pillow. I just don't have much problem putting my nightly affairs in order and drifting off. I like this about me.

I fall asleep really easily at other times too. I fall asleep just about every week in church - sometimes in all three meetings! I also fall asleep at the temple, while reading, and any time my mother is teaching. It's really embarrassing at work, where I've fallen asleep in meetings, reading reports and watching tests. It's not so bad if you can point to a particular reason (new baby, late test the previous day, hard partying in Vegas over the weekend, etc), but it tends to happen to me more often than I can conveniently brush off. I just fall asleep really easily. I hate this about me.

You will be happy to hear, then, that I have come up with a staying awake aid. I count!

"But don't people count sheep when they want to fall asleep?" you ask.

Yep. That's why I count fingers - in binary.

In base ten, what we're used to, each digit can have one of ten values (0-9) and corresponds to a multiple of a power of ten. The powers of ten start at zero at the far right of the number and move up as we go to the left. Or, in the elementary school language in which it was taught to us: The far right is the "ones" place (10^0), with the "tens" place (10^1) next to that, followed by the "hundreds" place (10^2), the "thousands" place (10^3) and so on. Thus, 2465 is 2000 (2*10^3) plus 400 (4*10^2) plus 60 (6*10^1) plus 5 (5*10^0).

Binary works just the same in base two. Each digit can have one of two values (0,1) and corresponds to a multiple of a power of two. Instead of "ones," "tens," "hundreds," and "thousands," though, we get the powers of two "ones" (2^0), "twos" (2^1), "fours" (2^2), and "eights" (2^3). So, 10 in binary is (1*2^1) 2 plus (0*2^0) 0, or 2, leading us to a favorite pun of nerds: "There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't."

If it sounds complicated, don't worry. Only computers and nerds use binary and they only ever talk to each other, so it will probably never come up. The key, and the point of this whole story is that the two allowable digits in binary, 0 and 1, are easily represented by retracted and extended fingers. Let's count to 10 in binary and see how that would be represented by the fingers.

0 = 00000 - a fist
1 = 00001 - thumb extended
2 = 00010 - index finger extended
3 = 00011 - index finger and thumb extended
4 = 00100 - yup, the bird
5 = 00101 - middle finger and thumb extended
6 = 00110 - middle and index fingers extended
7 = 00111 - middle and index fingers and thumb extended
8 = 01000 - ring finger extended
9 = 01001 - ring finger and thumb extended
10=01010 - ring and index fingers extended

The point is that you have to think about it, making it much harder to fall asleep. And with 10 fingers, you can't count all the way to 2047! During a particularly drowsy patch, I even tried counting in base three on my fingers (I had to improvise a third state with my finger extended perpendicularly to my hand). I got to 243 before my fingers got too tired to go on.

Anyway, feel free to give it a shot at the next meeting you have to sit through. Just keep those fingers under the table, because nobody wants to explain to his boss that he wasn't flipping him off, he was just counting in binary to stay awake through his snooze-fest of a budget review.

On Email Chains

I'm often astounded by how uninformed people are on the information superhighway. It seems like they'll give an email account to just anybody these days... wait a minute....

I got a chain email today urging me to sign a petition to the FCC because somebody else had gotten together a petition with 287,000 names on it to shut down all religious broadcasting. Honestly? In engineering, we have what we call a sanity check. Sometimes, you can get so bogged down in calculations that by the time you get an answer, you've forgotten what it means in real world terms. So you do a sanity check. Does the answer you've come up with actually make sense? If you were designing a bath tub for an elephant and determined that the dimensions should be 2' x 3' x 1', then no, you did something wrong. It is likewise absurd that an agency of the US government would (officially) consider shutting down all religious broadcasting.

However, for the sake of the conspiracy theorists out there, let us don our tin foil hats and research the issue. Amazingly, the same internet that facilitates the transfer of nonsense also allows you to check on the truth of said nonsense. Snopes.com is a great source for determining the truth about urban legends and email chains. I like to go to Google.com, though, because I prefer to go straight to the source - in this case, the FCC. Here in all its glory is the official FCC denial of the supposed attempt to deny us the pleasure of televangelists.

I like to get the official word on things because I can then send the link back to the sender of the email as well as everybody on the distribution list. I find that a small amount of shame does wonders for de-cluttering my inbox.

Another thing that irritates me about chain emails is the blatant diregard for the eyesight of the recipient. Amongst all the the email addresses of the last 5000 people to forward the message on, it is next to impossible to figure out if it is Microsoft or AOL sponsoring the email beta test. I've come up with a solution for this, though. Do you know how much spammers pay for confirmed email adresses? As long as I have to be inconvenieced, I might as well be making a profit.

Train Your Jedi Young

You never know when a Sith might be waiting around the corner so it's a good idea to brush up on your lightsaber dueling skills. It's also important to protect your loved ones by teaching them how to wield a lightsaber. As you can see, it is never too early to start. As long as you pretend it is only 'play,' they'll never know you are preparing them for real danger. A word to the wise, though: wait until they are a bit older before teaching them back flips.

In this training video we learn striking, blocking, evasion, and the all important control of the high ground.



Note: Dropping your lightsaber is not a good way to control the high ground. Also, while it is appropriate in practice to return a blade to a fallen foe, never give a Sith his lightsaber back - it is a good way to get your head chopped off.