perfidy

For the last two years or so, I have been carefully feeding and nurturing a collection of wild yeasts and bacteria that I call "Herman" and that other people can more comfortably call my sourdough starter. Kept in the refrigerator and taken out for occasional feedings, he's strong, hard-working and makes delicious bread. And writing about Herman in this way suddenly makes me feel like a bit of a creep.

Anyway. Any manservantish strangeness aside, I have developed a recipe for whole-wheat sourdough that I'm very fond of, and that's well suited for people who are new to working with sourdough cultures and the stickier doughs they create.

Johno's Miche

This large loaf is deeply flavored and rich with sweet, grainy and sour notes, and keeps for about a week at room temperature. It is modeled on French country loaves of past centuries, which would of course have been made with a nearly whole-grain flour and natural leavening. If you have trouble wrangling a 4-lb loaf, you can divide into two or three smaller loaves (reducing the baking time accordingly).

The recipe is based loosely on the famous pain Poilane of Lionel Poilane as adapted by baker Peter Reinhardt. Enjoy!!

Firm starter:

7 oz. well-fed and active barm (loose sourdough starter)
4.5 oz bread flour
4.5 oz whole-wheat flour OR 2.5 oz whole-wheat flour plus 2 oz medium rye flour
4 oz water, room temperature

Mix together and knead 2 to 3 minutes until all ingredients are well incorporated. Let rise about 4 hours at room temperature in bowl covered with plastic wrap and then put in refrigerator for up to 24 hours. This time in the fridge has two effects - to let enzymes in the flour go to work breaking out complex sugars from the starches, which gives immense depths of flavor, and to promote the growth of acetic-acid producing bacteria in the starter, which will tend to give a sharper sour flavor to the finished loaf. A full discussion of sourdough cultures and how to manipulate them will have to wait for another time - for now just do as I say and everything will be juuuuust fine.

Main dough:
16 oz bread flour
16 oz whole-wheat flour OR 12 oz whole-wheat flour and 4 oz medium rye flour
3 1/4 tsp (.8) oz salt
about 2 1/2 cups water (20-22 oz), lukewarm (about 90 degrees)

Cut the starter into about 10 chunks and let come to room temperature covered with oiled plastic wrap, about 1 hour. Combine flours and salt in a large bowl and combine thoroughly. Add starter chunks one by one and coat with the flour mix. Add 20 oz of water. Mix well in the bowl, then turn out onto a counter and knead for about 15 minutes until dough is tacky and supple and more or less passes the windowpane test*. This is not a sticky dough, but it at first should be decidedly clingy; adjust water and flour if necessary to achieve the desired texture. Your target dough temperature is 77-81 degrees.

If you have a large and powerful stand mixer at home, you can also use this to mix the dough. Begin with the paddle attachment, and switch to the dough hook just as all the ingredients come together roughly. I say again -a large and powerful stand mixer: one of six quart capacity and a big engine that won't burn up under the strain. I have a KitchenAid Professional 600, and it's up to the task though not without some thrilling engine noises.

Transfer dough to a lightly oiled large bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise 3-4 hours or until about 1.5 times its original size. Wild yeasts work much more slowly than commercial yeast, but the extra time results in much more flavor in the finished product.

When dough is fully risen, remove to a lightly floured counter, press down lightly on it with your flattened hands to de-gas it a bit, and shape it into a large boule (round loaf). This is a great time to work on your shaping skills, with a loaf that is large but forgiving.

Line a large mixing bowl with linen or flour-sack towel. Sprinkle liberally with flour. Place the boule in this bowl, bottom side up. Cover bowl with plastic wrap or another bowl and let rise for 2-3 hours or until nearly doubled.

Preheat oven to 475 degrees for at least 45 minutes. For a gas oven, put one rack in the lower half of the oven, and place a pizza stone on it. Remove the other rack; it'll be in the way. For an electric oven, place the racks on the two lowest levels, placing the pizza stone on the upper rack. Heat an old cast iron skillet or cake pan you never plan to use again on the floor of the oven, or on the lowest rack if using an electric oven.

When dough is ready, turn out carefully onto a full sized half-sheet pan (measuring about 18x13 inches, not a little cookie sheet) lined with parchment paper or a silicone liner. Let stand 5 minutes as you heat 1 1/4 cups water on the stove. Slash the dough in any pattern you want; the traditional way is a box cut - four slashes in a square, almost at the edges of the loaf. (Use a sharp knife, and make confident cuts that go about 1/4 inch deep into the dough - no more.)

When the water is boiling, transfer to a pyrex or plastic measuring cup and don your oven mitt.

Place the sheet pan on the stone, and pour the boiling water into the waiting pan. Be careful! - steam burns are bad news. The steam this produces will keep the starches in the crust from gelatinizing (hardening) while the loaf rises in the intense heat of the oven. If you are afraid of pouring water into your oven, you can use a few ice cubes instead, placing them in the pan when the loaf goes in, though this does rob the oven of heat. You can also use a spray bottle to mist the dough with water prior to going in the oven, and then spray the oven walls quickly with water at two-minute intervals for the first eight minutes or so of baking. This method also leads to great heat loss, so tack a few more minutes of baking time on the end.

Close the oven door and immediately reduce heat to 450, unless using the spray-bottle technique, in which you turn the oven down immediately after the last spraying. Start a 25-minute timer when the bread goes in the oven.

After 25 minutes, rotate the loaf 180 degrees. Reduce heat to 425 and bake another 30-40 minutes. If the bottom is browning too much, put an upside-down sheet pan underneath. If the top is getting too brown, tent some aluminum foil over top.

Remove from oven and cool on a rack. Do not cut for three hours.

This bread is phenomenal. The crumb is a bit dense and chewy, and full of subtle flavors that change in the mouth and linger for a good half hour after eating. Better yet, the flavor changes day by day, so week-old miche, which will still be fresh if stored properly at room temperature (NEVER refrigerated), will taste discernibly different from its first-day counterpart.

* The windowpane test: with relatively clean hands, cut off a walnut-sized chunk of dough from the main mass, and form it into a disc with your fingers. Then, holding the edges of the disc, pull it apart so that the center becomes thinner and thinner as the surface area increases. If you can achieve an unbroken membrane that's translucent all the way across, your dough passes the windowpane test, and for most recipes can be considered sufficiently kneaded. For this recipe, you'll have trouble getting a perfect windowpane. This is because the bran in the whole wheat flour and the optional rye flour tends to cut the strands of gluten that hold the dough together, sabotaging your nice windowpane. Don't worry about it - close to a windowpane is perfectly sufficient. This a rough, ugly country loaf, not a refined effete persnickety bourgeois baguette dough we're making here!

Welcome to the 79th edition of the Carnival of the Recipes, hosted by your friends and eventual overlords here at the Ministry of Minor Perfidy.

This Carnival is a bit of a departure for us. For more than thirty centuries, the Ministry has been the leading institution for Eschatology (end-times studies) worldwide. We have been monitoring man's inhumanity to man and measuring the potential for pan-species disaster - especially the threats posed by zombie invasion and giant fighting space robots - since before Hammurabi was in short pants. We spend our days in the John of Patmos Memorial Library and Gift Shop staring into the chthonian depths of human depravity, and our nights in the Carl Sagan Observatory scanning the heavens for the sinister telltale glint of diffuse starlight on titanium skin.

All this gloom and doom does tend to wear on the soul. It is easy to lose perspective. As they say, when one stares into the abyss, the abyss looks into you. This is actually literally true, by the way; when one is involved in tendentious cross-dimensional profit repatriation negotiations with elder powers, you don't have much time for pizza and beer. When Dread Chthulu is your opponent's lead counsel these things don't seem to matter as much as girding your psyche against gibbering madness from beyond.

However, it is important to remind ourselves that to most people things like pizza, beer, and volleyball do matter. When the apocalypse comes and the select few among you who we allow to take shelter in our Catastratorium, the nerve center of our global operations, need to eat, it is crucial that we have more than protein pills and MREs for you.

To that end, I have been leading a task force dedicated to perfecting the art of eating well under duress. Ancient crafts like brewing, baking, cheesemaking and animal husbandry are being adapted for long-term viability in underground caverns. Our best gnostic chirurgeons have teamed with our most elite scientists to make stunning advances in vat-grown meat and high-yield hydroponic farming. I think you will be well impressed, those among you who survive, when you are sipping a fine Dortmunder-style lager as the atomic bombs pound the surface far above.

For this, you see, is my stock in trade. My compatriots are stockpiling arms and radiation medication as we speak. And though I certainly have made sure I know where my 12 gauge, .45 revolver, and Louisville Slugger are, I also feel it is crucial to remember the finer things that buff the rough edges off a painful existence. If we met on the Serengeti, I would be the man in the impeccable linen suit with a camp table and a shaker of ice-cold gin. If we met in deepest space, we would dine in fine casual luxury on pizza margherita preserved indefinitely in hard vacuum and baked in the intense heat of fusion engine exhaust. And when the zombies roam or the robots maraud at will, when humankind must stand side by side with our greatest allies, the dolphin and octopus, to fight a proxy war against the menace that threatens to end us all, you (some of you, at least) will take some solace in the small homely comforts we provide.

For to live on in the face of disaster is merely animal. To live well, with panache and élan in the face of the grimmest apocalypse, well, that is human!

So come! Cross the threshold of the great double doors of the Catastratorium!

Come! Don a grey guest tunic and take a seat at the polished obsidian slab in the main cavern!

Come! See what elite guests have gathered for stimulating conversation and nonpariel apres-doom cuisine!

Come! Admire the unique and curious artifacts we have collected over three millennia! But don't touch that! It would be better if that statute of Yog-Soth-Oth didn't instantly cast your mind into insanity , don't you think?

Come! Taste what toothsome delights our kichen staff have concocted, marvel at the astonishing variety of potluck the guests have brought!

Come! Raise your glass and toast the indomitable spirit of humankind!

To the future!

Now... what have we to eat??

Amuse gueles, hors d'oeuvres and lighter fare:

Marsha Hudnall of A Weight Lifted brings us a sort of Napoleon, a stacked dish of foccaccia, grilled vegetables and scrambled eggs that they call Veggie Egg Foccaccia.

Jacqueline Passey sends along a Costa Rican recipe, Gallo Pinto, which is a rice-and-bean based dish good for breakfast, side dish, or hangover cure. Salud!

Accompaniments and sidekicks of the primarily taterific variety:

The BBQ General gives us his first submission ever to the Carnival, with The General's Home Fries, an exacting and detailed recipe for delicious-sounding fried potatoes full of sound advice and culinary information. Moreover, the General seems a resourceful and detail-oriented type, the sort who would do well in a secret underground lair. Lucky for him, it is easy to maintain oil at a steady 375 degrees Fahrenheit when your heat source is a small fusion generator.

The Blog d'Elisson sends a dinner postmortem run-down that includes a recipe for oven-fried potato wedges. In my youth in Ohio, we called these jo-jo potatoes, only G-d knows why. You may call them anything you want, as long as you call them delectable.

From the Glittering Eye we get a recipe for the great French classic pommes Anna. I can offer some advice for aspirants to this culinary height: wait. Having wrestled with this recipe a few times, I have learned that the most important thing you can do is go read a book and wait, wait, wait for the timer to go off. Trust your skills. Trust your stove. Pommes Anna takes time and patience, and both are rewarded. À votre santé!

The Course Where We Get Down To Business and Dispose Of the Quisling Spy Among Us (Main Dishes)

Once our servants have cleaned up the mess (our apologies...), sit back and enjoy a dish of Ad-Lib Indian Lentil Stew from Allan at AllanThinks. It's simple, it's cheap, it's easy. And, knowing lentils like I do, I know for a fact that this recipe is infinitely extensible. Kale; tomatoes; cinnamon, cardamon, turmeric, and cumin; peas. Whatever, really, you like. Apki Lambi Umar Ke Liye!

The Technogypsy gets back to his rural roots with Bambi Loaf and Bambi Stew, two great-sounding venison dishes. You kill it, you eat it; Dick Cheney nearly feasted on long pig.

Shawn Lea of Everything and Nothing proffer a very quick, simple, and tasty Mexican chicken soup. Salud otra vez!

The Physics Geek increases the thermal energy underneath a kettle of continental bean soup. Physics Geek gets it; soups and stews are perfect candidates for fusion-exhaust cooking. After the meal, please follow the green line on the floor to your new assignment. I trust you will find it... amenable.

Triticale, the Wheat/Rye guy, gives us a bifurcating recipe which is first a simple chicken breast in salsa, and can be turned into the spectacularly delicious Thai soup, Tom Kha Kai. Asian food is the key to happiness; I know this to be true.

Ever the resourceful sort, Minister Buckethead has found a number of recipes made with the contents of US Military standard-issue MREs (Meals Ready to Eat). Here is Pizza, several desserts, a number of fairly involved recipes, an old post from Blackfive, the paratrooper of love on this topic, and this page on survivalist food in general. The McIlhenney company has a book for sale of MRE recipes using the little bottle of Tabasco Sauce that comes in some versions. To be honest, we at the Ministry aspire for greater things than this, but we acknowledge that sometimes keeping body and soul together means doing what you must.

Breads, the Love Of My Life

Sun Comprehending Glass has a great-sounding recipe for honey wheat rolls made with sourdough starter. After the robots come, all bread will be naturally leavened. She will do well to perfect this recipe.

third world country submits a bread machine recipe that is both hearty and delicious. I am reminded of Ezekiel bread, but without all the hectoring righteousness.

I myself submit a recipe for miche, a rough country French sourdough loaf of impressive size. It is based on the famous bread of Lionel Poilane, but I like to add a little rye flour for extra dimension. Get used to this one. It will one day be your daily bread.

Degustational denouments:

Annamaria of Bunny? submits a recipe for Cherry Cobbler Upside-Down (or How To Take Care Of Sick Husbands) that apparently has curative powers. Impressive... she will do well on our team of chirurgeons.

Mensa Barbie has a Rum and Berry Danish Tart. The Danes really do know their stuff.

From The Headmistress at The Common Room comes a wheat-free egg-free orange and chocolate chip pound cake for the wheat allergic among us. There are many fine people in this land advancing the cause of alternative cuisine. Whether motivated by celiac disease, veganism, or Biblical mandate, they are making great strides in perfecting toothsome recipes that, though they lack what we commonly understand to be the necessary culinary requirements, are just as (if not more) nutritous) as the originals and display an amazing ingenuity. Support your local organic farmers, craft brewers, bakers, and cheesemakes, and your local homeschool association! When the zombies come, they will be the foundation on which we all stand.

In The Headlights has one of my favorite simple desserts, a French country confection called clafoutis. She makes it with cherry, which is the classic choice. It is also wonderful with blueberries, apricots, peaches, and (seriously now...) stewed prunes.

KeeWee's Corner has brought a perfect capper to the evening: Bailey's Irish Cream Cake. I am not normally a fan of boxed baked goods mixes, but they do definitely have their place. One of these places is liquor-soaked bundt cakes. Slainte!

Next week, things get a bit brighter as Sun Comprehending Glass hosts the next edition of the Carnival of the Recipes. Send your submissions to recipe.carnival@gmail.com by noon Saturday for inclusion. If you wish to host a future edition of the Carnival of the Recipes, send an email to the same address with the word "host" in the subject line.

As the meal comes to an end and you, our esteemed guests nibble on nuts and sip digestifs, it is time to reflect on what we have accomplished. You are reading this thanks to a stupendously complicated set of cooperating technologies nearly inconceivable twenty years ago. Yet, no matter how much our world changes in superficial ways, some things abide. Lentils are still cheap, fried potatoes are still delicious, and all of us put on our pants one leg at a time. Except our dolphin readers; they don't wear pants.

Thank you all for coming; I do regret to inform you that you cannot leave. The areas not converted to radioactive glass by the robot's first attack are crawling with brain-eating zombies. There is no escape, but there is hope. Through that door you will find your new quarters, and Ministers GeekLethal and Buckethead are waiting to show you to them. Later, Minister Patton will give you your new assignments. Life is simple here; pitch in or feed the zombies. When Minister Ross returns from the surface, we will have a better idea just how long we are going to be here.

Our problems are all behind us. It is now up to us to fight the future.

Did anyone bring a guitar?

From my Mom, another Dick joke:

Children are born with a keen talent for professional landscaping, but lose it within the first few hours.

I had the day off from work today. It was a beautiful day, sunny and in the sixties. I was not able to enjoy it. I have discovered a new malady, whose physical symtoms present and uncanny resemblence to having ingested a few ounces of molten lead and and being repeatedly punched in the nuts by Mike Tyson over a period of hours. Not to venture too far into the realm of oversharing, there was blood where there is not supposed to be blood. I feel mildy better now, as witness my ability to sit at a computer for long enough to type this.

I shall name this disease Dick Cheney Syndrome, because Dick Cheney's thumb-fingered gun handling and media reticence is all the pinheaded lackwits on the news were talking about whilst I lay curled in a fetal position praying that God would tell Mike Tyson to cut it out with the nutpunching, already.

I would have named it Senator Reid Syndrome, because he pissed me off with some sadly typical asinine remarks. But no one will ever say, "Sen. Reid never goes hunting. He goes killing."

Despite our catchy moniker (Moniker... that's also how my Bay State neighors pronounce the name of GeekLethal's wife...), the Ministry of Minor Perfidy doesn't report much on actual acts of minor perfidy. That is because we are much busier behind the scenes actually perpetrating such, and preventing others, but the details of that we shall save for another time.

But it has recently come to our attention via Loyal Reader #0016, EDog, that Netflix are committing an actual act of petty betrayal. You see, they have structured their business so that their very best customers lose them money. When people use their service a lot, say returning 15 movies a month, the shipping costs eat up all the profit.

So Netflix did what any good perfidian would, and rigged the system. Now, heavy users are automatically bumped to the back of the line for access to the most popular titles, and the company will delay shipments in general for a day or few so as to put an involuntary cap on account activity.

That would be all well and good, I suppose, had the company put that in their policies from the start. But instead, people paying $18 a month for ostensibly unlimited rentals were getting in return shoddy service and prevarication if they liked the service too much. Although Neftlix now mentions this in their terms of use, I would have expected more (why? Because I'm stupid) from a company that has tried so hard to democratize and distribute their business model.

I guess we're all just lucky that Dick Cheney didn't have the rocket launcher or railgun power-up yet.

[wik] Ok. I'm done with the jokes now; Cheney has finally taken responsibility and apologized. Two days too late, but at least he did it. And, since we were all wondering, now we know exactly how drastic a situation has to be for a member of this administration to own up to something.

The Japanese have invented a transforming robot just like the ones you used to watch on afterschool cartoons, only smaller.

It is, of course, only a matter of time before this goes horribly awry.

I so, so desperately want one of these.

Multiple touch input, the wave of the future. The mouse is a relatively nifty means of input, in a backwards 70s sort of way. When you think about it, it is rather clumsy that I have to move my hand over here to effect changes on the screen over there. Having a large high definition screen that is also the primary means of input is a very cool thing.

If you haven't, watch the video now.

Okay? There are several very cool things in there. The part where the guy is moving pictures around and resizing them - does that not look completely intuitive and natural? Drag a picture, and it moves. Move your fingers apart, and it embiggens. Reverse, and it shrinks. Likewise, the scrolling on the map. And the manipulation of the three-d tinker toy.

Combine that with some clever combinations of taps, double taps, and gestures, and you've got a wicked powerful, completely natural interface.

I want, I want, I want.

Slashdot is reporting on a story about a group of British researchers who have created a robot piloted by a slime mold.

While our usual mode of robot reporting here at the Ministry is one of shock and alarm at the continued efforts of humanity to enslave itself under the titanium thumb of our own creations, this is actually kinda cute. For now.

A bright yellow slime mould that can grow to several metres in diameter has been put in charge of a scrabbling, six-legged robot.

The Physarum polycephalum slime, which naturally shies away from light, controls the robot's movement so that it too keeps out of light and seeks out dark places in which to hide itself.

. . . .

Physarum polycephalum is a large single-celled organism that responds to food sources, such as bacteria and fungi, by moving towards and engulfing it. It also moves away from light and favours humid, moist places to inhabit. The mould uses a network of tiny tubes filled with cytoplasm to both sense its environment and decide how to respond to it. Zauner's team decided to harness this simple control mechanism to direct a small six-legged (hexapod) walking bot.

. . . .

As the slime tried to get away from the light its movement was sensed by the circuit and used to control one of the robot's six legs. The robot then scrabbled away from bright lights as a mechanical embodiment of the mould.

The idea of a simple aggregate life form using its six claws to cower in darkened corners is touchingly cute, if ever so slightly macabre. But get this:

Eventually, this type of control could be incorporated into the bot itself rather than used remotely.

The thing to fear here is not that handi-capable slime molds will break free and begin marauding for stray humus to feed upon, but that the technology exists in the first place. Much like the jet-flying rat brains, the disembodied monkey-brain robot controllers and the robots that can recharge through eating, this technology is like placing a loaded gun in the hands of our future enemies.

Well, it's more like placing a loaded gun in a safe deposit box and putting the key and directions to the Ministry Catastratorium and Gift Shop in an envelope marked "To: Future Enemies" with delivery instructions for 2025, but I find that metaphor ultimately a bit encumbered, don't you?

When dealing with robots, it's not the present you need to be vigilant against. It's the future. Today slime molds, tomorrow, um, why not sharks? Sharks with six steel-clawed legs? Brilliant! I'm sure that cobras could use a hexapod platform too, the better to get around!

Note to Ministers: check the robot-shark-proofing around the Catastratorium's surface lagoon.

[wik] See a picture of the cute little terror behind the cut: