When baking, I find stretching and folding to be crucial—it gives you a smooth, uniform dough, whether you knead or not. Last night I mixed no-knead bread dough and took pics each time I folded—30, 60, 90, 120 minutes after mixing:
See how the dough goes from a shaggy mess to a nice ball? Here’s my folding move, btw. (This is a kneaded dough, but a similar approach works with stirred, no-knead dough. You just want to fold the bottom to the top.)
Here’s that no-knead dough after 14 hours at room temp. What a happy little fluffo!
Our current home setup is, @antichrista handles school in the morning, I do all the meals. Here’s a look into what our kitchen is like. This morning I woke up at 6:30 and, for breakfast, I toasted bagels I’d made yesterday…
I then took the bread dough I’d mixed last night (overnight, room-temp proof) and moved it to a banneton (a proofing basket). Then I fired up our outdoor smoker and put salmon in it; I had brined it two days ago, fridge-dried it overnight…
About an hour before lunch, I preheated the oven and sliced up bacon I’d made in the smoker a few weeks ago. I sliced mushrooms and shallots and sautéed them for mushroom gravy. In between these, I started setting up the table…
Quick story of parental pride: after the kids were in bed, I put on a Fritz Lang flick, ‘Ministry of Fear’ (1944). Olive walked in; couldn’t sleep. I thought she’d just fall asleep with me, watching this old b&w film, but instead… she stayed up to watch.
It's a deeply weird, moody spy-noir, with an unpredictable plot and bizarre characters—just what you expect from Lang! It's also slow and moody. This is the first time she watched an "old movie" of this sort, I believe. And she was definitely taking it in!
An one point, the cops have surrounded this one Nazi spy. Rather than get caught, he commits suicide by stabbing himself *in the heart* with *scissors*. To help Olive process this, I said “whoa, that’s pretty intense.” After a few seconds, she goes, “Well, that’s one less Nazi."
I see Apple has updated the TestFlight icon again! Here's the one in the current iOS 14 betas. Even though I don't use TF much anymore, I keep an eye on the icon because I designed the original one…
I designed the TestFlight icon ten years ago, when it was an independent service (and a pretty amazing one, compared to how iOS app-testing was supposed to be done at the time.) Here's my blog post on it from 2010… mrgan.tumblr.com/post/103735374…
This is the icon I designed for it. It followed Apple's "blueprint" idea for dev tools, with the added grainy vibe of a garage inventor designing their first airplane on paper. Why six blades, btw? It balanced the design, and it looked friendlier to me—like a flower…
On our neighborhood walk this morning, Zel almost stepped on a snail a few blocks from our house. To make it up, he declared it was the snail’s birthday. First, he made a card…
We then made the snail a birthday cake to go with the card… (“I ❤️ you Snaily. Dear Snaily, I’m sorry I squashed you…”)
Next, we brought a present: a snail house. (Each trip here takes about six minutes each way…)
Pizza! We made four pies tonight. (The kids are getting into it slowly.) Stay tuned and I’ll tell you a bit about baking steels, preheating, and temperature… But first! This one has spinach cream (heavy cream blended with cooked spinach), smoked Sulguni cheese, and chicken skin
This is tomato-butter sauce, Provolone, fresh mozz, pickled Serrano peppers, shaved onion, and homemade fennel sausage. Classic combo!
Zel topped this one: sliced provolone, sauce, fresh mozz. And salt, don’t forget the salt! So, these were baked at Hi Broil for 4-5 mins each, 6” from the burner, on a baking steel. It was preheated at a 550° bake. For how long?