GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • Bread, 09 March 2021

    I’m still using the toaster oven with a cast iron Lodge pan, but I’ve made a couple tweaks from my previous bread post that has made the process even easier and provided more consistent results.

    Poolish
    40g starter from the previous dough
    60g water
    60g flour
    Dough
    200g water
    120g bread flour
    120g whole wheat flour
    4g salt

    As you can see, I’ve added a step to make a poolish, which adds about four hours to the process. You can mix a full loaf with the starter, but I’ve been getting more consistent results by cranking up the starter with fresh ingredients before mixing the main dough.

    I also lowered the hydration a little, and I’m back to regularly using whole wheat flour. I’ve always preferred including a little whole wheat flour in my bread (20%), but I’m comfortable pushing it up to to 40% with the help of the King Arthur Bread Flour, which I absolutely adore. These percentages would work with my wet-grind method, so I might start doing that after we use up our whole wheat flour.

    The final tweak is that I now pull the starter for the next loaf while it is still in the proofing bowl. It seems minor, but I found that the loaf will deflate quite a bit if you pull the starter after its been poured into the pan. It’s nothing time can’t fix, as long as your dough isn’t already on the verge of overproofing.

    As for the poolish starter, you can keep it on the counter for a few hours to ripen up before mixing the the poolish, or you can throw it in the fridge until you’re ready for the next loaf (just be prepared for a 36 hour process, which could be accelerated with warm water, or as we head into summer).

    Of course, none of this is foolproof. I forgot to add salt to a recent loaf and the darn thing came out quite flat. I was quite disappointed that night, but half of it was gone after breakfast. The best part of this hobby is that you can eat your mistakes, even if I prefer the next day’s success!

  • Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, 1972

    Invisible Cities and Labyrinths have been close at hand ever since my Berkeley days, including a couple trips to China. But the dirty secret is that I’ve never completely read either book. I hadn’t gotten around to the non-fiction essays of Labyrinths, and my attempted read of Invisible Cities was waylaid by the deep sleep deprivation of studio. As a privileged knowledge worker comfortably hunkering down during the pandemic, I was fortunate to rectify both omissions over the past year.

    I’m happy I did. I suspect the book endures as a classic because it is a lovely collection of prose poems that is perfectly suited for random sampling. Which is a fine practice, but such a habit misses the structure of this book.

    The algorithm is nominally obvious from looking at the table of contents. Then again, reading a book by the TOC is knowing a City via its subway map. Calvino starts in Marco and Kublai’s dream world, slowly introduces anachronisms, bringing the reader into the present day (now delightfully patinaed from the vantage point of the 21st century), toys with darker themes, and leaves on a wistful note.

    The flow is as rich as the individual pieces. The book is carefully ordered arrangement, and the reader is well served going covered to cover. My copy still sits next to the bed; unlike many of its compatriots who quickly return to the shelves, this one ain’t going nowhere.

  • Doctrine of the Mean and The Great Learning, (Robert Eno translator) 2016

    I’ve written fondly about wisdom literature, however I’m not fond of books that just focus on the idea of “wisdom”.

    These two books are more poetic than the Wisdom of Solomon, but all three are thin paeans to the concept of wisdom.

    The Chinese books sell wisdom for the sake of a well ordered empire and emphasize balance and relationships.

    This sales pitch is more appetizing than Solomon’s heavy handed appeal to a monotheistic god presenting naive choices between right and wrong.

    But it’s all thin gruel.

    Gotcha.

    Wisdom good.

    Where do go from here?

    ䷾䷛

    Even so, a book that has survived the test of time to enter the canon of a great empire is most likely worth a download and quick read. Maybe you’ll catch something I missed.

  • Sorting the Unread Library

    In 2020, I started a system for my personal reading. I took five books to become my current reading list, put them next to the bed, and stashed the rest out sight.

    Each of the five books satisfied a category:

    1. Non-Fiction
    2. Fiction
    3. Spirituality
    4. Self Help
    5. Art

    When I wrote the first draft of this post, the books on deck were:

    • Mythologies, Roland Barthes
    • Farewell My Lovely, Raymond Chandler
    • Collected Writings of Epicurus
    • Zen of Seeing by Fredrick Franck
    • Jazz, Henri Matisse

    The only book I haven’t completed is Epicurus.

    In a world where there is so much information, it is important to simplify what is immediately available. Once resolved, you are free to just read within the preselected menu. If I lose interest in a book, I can either throw it off out of the favored circle (as I did with Epicurus) which frees you up to read other books within the category (I’ve read quite a few wisdom texts over the past couple months. Alternately, I can let a book marinate while I dive into other topics. If so, at least I’m avoiding other books within the same genre, which makes it easier to return to the lagging book.

    This system makes it evident if I’ve been heavily pursuing one category over the others. I may or may not counteract against such a trend, but either way, it is good to be clear what is top of one’s mental interests.

    This system has turned out to be a well rounded way to wrangle all the good books around me – unread, re-read, library loans, and newly purchased. I’d recommend giving it a shot if your “to read” pile has become intimidatingly tall.

  • Natto, 2020

    Over the past year, I’ve started making natto, the sticky, pungent soybean fermentation. The process is extended but fairly simple:

    • Soak the beans for twelve or more hours
    • Steam it in the Instapot with high pressure for 4 hours
    • Inoculate the beans with with a spoonful of older beans
    • Incubate it for 24 hours in a toaster oven set on warm (at around 100 degrees Farenheit).

    I started with a commercial natto product and have been backslopping it for multiple generations. However, I’ve hit a couple weak batches.

    These modern industrial mono-culture products are not considered particularly resilient, so maybe it’s time to start anew. However, I may also have been at fault. After an extended good run, I might have gotten sloppy and pushed my luck, using a smaller inoculating batch or not being vigilant during this process.

    Even though my general philosophy has always been to push for “good enough”, there are still limits on how lackadaisical I can treat the process, since natto is not as forgiving as sourdough.

    A sour batch (while still edible) invariably feels like a soul crushing disappointment, but I need to remind myself that I learn more from failure. One doesn’t find the limits via easy success. Boundaries are discovered by going awry.

  • Flight Volume 2, Kazu Kibuishi (editor), 2007

    I bought this book so long ago, I checked the copyright to see if I had bought it before leaving California. From the date, it was published a couple years after my wife and I had started dating, so it seems that my memory of buying it in a comic shop in Texas might be accurate.

    Last week, I noticed it in the garage on top of my big row of boxed up books, waiting for a permanent home with bookshelves. My daughter saw me flipping through it and wanted to read it.

    It was time. I wrapped it up and gave it to her as a birthday present last week.

    The girl went so quickly from being a concept, through infancy and toddlerhood, and is now blasting through books and graphic novels with abandon.

    It goes fast. Even her prehistory can’t keep up with her.

  • Aging Well, George E. Valliant, 2002

    Last night I had a dream. I led some folks around on a wild foot chase around the neighborhood and then snuck into the office, pretending nothing had happened. To my chagrin, a police officer walked in soon after. Even though I didn’t hurt anyone, someone had slipped and broke their ribs during the run around.

    For goodness sake, what’s a more certain sign of aging than having your subconscious punish you for second order effects from your dream-state actions? Maybe its a budding sign of a grown up wisdom?

    The book itself is a pretty easy read. It’s a more or less heartwarming collection of stories. Even though your start isn’t as important as it may seem, there are definitely good and bad outcomes at the end.

    The main takeaways are to avoid alcohol and smoking, practice good mental acceptance techniques, and create a good network around you. Honestly, this isn’t much different from what everyone tells their kids. Even so, it’s nice to have a few longitudinal studies to lend common sense the authority of science.

    Other Takeaways

    There were three other key takeaways that I think are worth lifting straight out of the book.

    George Valliant identifies six adult life tasks:

    1. Identity: Finding a sense of one’s self, values, etc., separate from your parents.
    2. Intimacy: Finding a life partner.
    3. Career Consolidation: More than a job, this is one’s work.
    4. Generativity: Guiding the next generation, community building.
    5. Keeper of Meaning: Conservation and preservation of the culture and institution, beyond individuals.
    6. Integrity: Facing death and life at the end.

    Valliant also lists key “adaptive coping mechanisms” that will help you navigate the vagaries of life. Maladaptive ones are projection, passive aggression, dissociation, acting out and fantasy. There are also mature defenses:

    Such virtues include doing as one would be done by (altruism); artistic creation to resolve conflict and spinning straw into gold (sublimation); a stiff upper lip (suppression); and the ability not to take oneself too seriously (humor).

    page 64

    And finally, Valliant closes his book with a quote from E. B. White, via a valedictory address by Timothy Coggeshall.

    Be a true friend.

    Do the right thing.

    Enjoy the glory of everything.

    page 325

  • Ubongo!, Grzegorz Rejchtman, 2003

    Yeah, yeah, its a great game. It’s something that even our 6 year old plays well. It doesn’t surprise me that this game has sold 5 million copies.

    My one quibble with the game is the scoring system. Clearly it’s an issue because the publisher changed it between the original release to the copy we just bought.

    The original scoring system with the jockeying pawns looks a bit fussy, so I suspect that randomly pulling scoring gems from a bag is a better fit for the light filler mood of this game.

    But better doesn’t mean correct.

    I’m not the only one who is uncertain about the new scoring system. Otherwise the rules wouldn’t have included a variant where one merely earns set points for each place you finish.

    I get the conundrum. Some puzzles are just harder than others. So there is already some randomness backed into the game, even if skill matters in the aggregate.

    Which brings up the interesting design question, does adding randomness on top of randomness improve the game? Is it better to stack unfairness upon unfairness?

    I don’t know, but I suspect we’re heading into philosophical territory about life, the universe, and everything.

    I’ll give it 42 stars.

  • Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges, 1962

    I was originally introduced to Borges via his short stories while in college. Twenty years later I finally got around to reading the essays and parables.

    Wow. Just as with his stories, these pieces are tight, dense, and well worth reading. Then again, that was pretty obvious – all the adulation that could be written has already been written. Hell, I couldn’t write a collection of hosannas more effusive than the introduction at the start of this anthology.

    So let’s talk about the librarian and the Librarian.

    One is lionized as a god from South America, the blind protagonist in the rose. And the other is a teacher who makes my daughter excited to live with books. In this time of distance learning in pandemic, where I am an ever present spectator of my girl’s education, I now know why my daughter loves her school librarian.

    Ms. Douglas brings the heat. She can control a room even over a video call, with an infectious generous energy every Friday afternoon wrangling first graders for an hour. It is a mundane display of exceptional skill.

    As in my profession, there are the great and the Great.

    The masters of our universe are revered in legend, but we ought to praise the vast cohort who have quietly mastered their craft, spreading the love to the next generation.

  • Bread, 27 Jan 2021

    Today’s loaf was a case of failing upwards.

    I overproofed my dough in the toaster oven. Maybe because I set the warming function too high and prematurely killed my leaven. The loaf collapsed in the bake.

    No matter, I was still hungry for a midnight snack.

    Which is when I found out that I forgot to add salt to the dough when I mixed it this morning.

    But all’s well that ends well.

    I pulled out my fig butter (which I had fermented with too much salt) and slathered it on a slice.

    I can’t say it was delectable, but it was tasty.

    One of my favorite aspects of being a home baker of sourdough bread is that you get to eat your failures.

    Occasionally those failures will be interesting. And I’d say that a bland gummy slice of sourdough bread with a heavily salted fig butter topping makes for a singularly unique snack.