Category: Notes

I’ve been playing around with making crackers as a healthier alternative to all the other awesome snacks that are out in the market trying to addict me to their engineered flavors.

After initial some attempts over the past couple weeks, I sat down and converted Mark Bittman’s recipe to grams. Using his numbers and experimented with a batch and I think I’ve finally come with a good ratio – 1:2:7:0.2

10g cheese
20g water
70g all purpose flour (generic target organic brand)
2g salt

The result was a nice dry dough that I could run through the pasta roller (I ran it to thinness 6 out of 8). The pasta roller saved me a ton of time over rolling by hand and resulted in consistent, even bakes in the toaster oven.

By using the pasta roller, I unintentionally recreated the “water crackers” that I used to enjoy at art openings. So as a bonus I understand the origin of their name, since I had never realized that water and cream crackers were an oppositional pair.

For further experiments, I’d like to come up with an alternate version using sourdough starter, since these crackers did come out a little flat. I’d also like to try my hand at cream crackers, using milk instead of water.

However, the biggest thing is finding simple ratio for a dough that works in the pasta roller, because I now have a good home base for future experiments.

After trying a really high hydration bread that went well enough but not spectacularly, I came back to my standard 75 hydration. I wanted to use up some oil/water from a jar of marinated artichokes and some cheap flour that my father-in-law bought.

350g all purpose flour (Gold Medal)
50g buckwheat flour
100g starter
225g water
75g marinated artichoke water

The dough was a bit slow in rising, so I took it outside, and it quickly exploded such that I was on the verge of overproofing it. Then I overbaked it, which is why it came out a bit dark.

I pulled it out of the oven at 10pm. Just in time for a late snack – a couple slices with butter, and one more with olive oil and salt.

Even with the cheap flour and the mismanaged process, it was an amazing tasting loaf fresh out of the oven.

I know that my lackadaisical approach may be resulting in a ceiling to limit how great my bread might become, however the floor for these loaves are so high that I’ll take the tradeoff. This was not a spectacular loaf, but these three slices were better than anything I’ve ever bought from a store.

Baking bread can be an adventure, you just have to be ready to enjoy the journey.

In a recent Costco purchase, we got boxes of sunchips and popchips packaged into little snack bags.

Both of these products fall into the category of crispy premasticated snack. This fine lineage starts with the the old mexican tortilla chip, leading to Pringles, and then to these fellows.

The texture of Sunchips harkens to the tortilla, with a whole-grain texture to signal their (questionable) healthiness. Meanwhile, Popchips follow in the footsteps of Pringles, reveling in their artificiality in their pockmarked crunchy puffed texture.

The corrugated square pattern of the Sunchips reminds one of an old country shack with metal siding. The perfect circles in Popchips stand as a platonic ideal.

The flavors of the Sunchips are your classic “french onion” and “salsa”, while Popchips hit ya’ with bold flavors like “buffalo ranch sauce”.

Ultimately, I imagine one would be better served slicing up a couple potatoes on a mandolin, coating them in olive oil and salt in a stainless steel bowl, and then blasting the chips in the air fryer.

Such an process feels more natural than these two modern offerings, but only by degree.

At least you don’t waste a little plastic bag each time.

A few mornings ago, I weighed myself found myself at 155.2, exactly 19 pounds lower than my recorded high of 174.2 from November 8, 2019. My highest weight was almost certainly during the holiday season, but I had stopped recording my weight over that time.

My standard weight during my twenties and early thirties had hovered around 155, climbing into the 160’s with extended forays into the 170’s over the last couple years. Over the past half year I worked my way back down to 155 is due to the simple principle of “a little more exercise and a little less calories over a long period of time”, both greatly aided by the pandemic shut down.

Exercise is the easiest to explain. Working from home saves me an hour of commute every day. Twenty of those minutes were purposely turned into a walk. The other forty minutes have been spent chasing the children around. Playing with kids and a leisurely walk (my pace hovers around a 23 minute mile) is not much, but still a massive improvement over operating a vehicle and an otherwise sedentary life.

As for calories, the change was facilitated by cutting out restaurants beginning in late January and an improvement in snack options after we stopped leaving the house. We live with my in-laws, whose age makes us a high risk household so we’ve been particularly withdrawn from society after the pandemic spread to America.

I’m an inveterate snacks, which hasn’t changed, but staying at home has morphed my goodies into nuts and fruit. I suspect it is due the psychology of online purchase instead of shopping in person. It was no big deal to pick up a bag of chips at the supermarket, but it feels very different to make the same decision via your web browser, especially knowing that everything will have to go through a decontamination process after its delivered. Just this little extra friction has made a big difference … and missing out on four months of donuts at the office.

As for cutting out restaurants, there were three types of benefits — less food, healthier courses, and lighter ingredients.

In normal times, I’ll eat out about five times a week. Even though I won’t gratuitously stuff myself, I am a dude who clears the plate. If a restaurant gives me a significant overage, I get a doggy bag, but it feels odd to ask for a container for one last bite. At home, minimal leftovers are split between multiple people or becoming an appetizer for the next meal. At work, every little extra was ending up in my gut.

Helping the quantity improvements is are the reduced options for high calorie dishes when you’re making it yourself. We just made hamburgers for the first time in a week ago. I’ve had one can of sweetened soda once this entire lock down. I love fried food, but like snacks, I’m not addicted enough to deep fry my own fare. So I haven’t eaten french fries in four months.

Finally, each of our meals are just inherently more healthy. To satisfy their patrons, a restaurant needs to hedge their flavor with salt and fat. I’ll do the same when I’m cooking, but I am also much more cognizant of the long term consequences to me when I add each “extra”. Also, due to news of meat shortages, we ate way less meat during the first couple months for a couple months. I don’t have a stance in the carbs versus proteins debate, but we substituted the decreased proteins with increased vegetables instead of starches, which I presume it was an absolute win all around.

In all, I’m pretty pleased that I’ve been able to get back into my size 32 pants. Assuming that I lost these 19 pounds since the end of January, that calculates to just two ounces a day, which seems to be a pretty moderate pace.

Hopefully this new lifestyle will stay steady when things start to crawl back to normal.