Thought Bloggles

Butter is important in American baking, but not in the way you may think.  I've been doing all these low carb versions of various things, and have hit upon the Butter Brioche Batter Bread from the Fannie Farmer cookbook as a simple, delicious, and more balanced bread. It's essentially one-third flower, one-third butter, one-third eggs. When getting ready to bake another one of this quite delicious recipe, I pondered the weight of these ingredients, and the weight of the butter is 227g, which is rather an odd number.  For those of you who have not been unfortunate enough to have to deal with American measurements, 1 cup is 8 fluid ounces (fl. oz.), 1 fl. oz. is 2 tablespoons (tbsp), and 1 tbsp is 3 teaspoons (tsp). Yes, it's that confusing, and that's even leaving out the two other kinds of ounces. With an American wife and the American centric internet, we've had to do conversions so much that we got little fridge magnets with the factors. Only today did I realize t...

My recent bread-making has been plagued by a series of disasters, punctuated by not-quite-disasters, but hardly ever anything great like my original 1:1 bread . I read up on various aspects of baking, tried adding less liquid, using warmer water, adding more flour, and various other tweaks, all to no avail. The pattern was that the first rise would be fine, the second rise so-so, but then instead of a great oven spring, the bread would actually deflate in the oven. A very sad experience. Today I looked back at the old recipe, and noticed that it had used flax-seed flour instead of sunflower seed flour ("sunflour"). I changed to the latter because I found the taste of the flax seed flour to be a bit more savory than what I was shooting for. However, looking at my flour tests , I realized the sunflour seed hadn't risen nearly as well as the flax-seed flour. So that could well be my problem! Before going back to the flax-seed flour, I tried one last trick that I had seen i...

I needed a new workbench. One where my printer could live, where tools and spare parts could be organized, but also where the work surface wouldn't get cluttered or take too much of the space in my room. I started looking around at secretaries and similar, which have the right concept, but never the right size. Eventually I realized I had to do it myself. These are my notes. I used an IKEA Hemnes side table, two Hemnes night stands, and the top part of the two-part Hemnes writing desk. The two night stands on top of the side table, and the writing desk part on top of them, like the cross slab of a megalith, done in wood plank furniture. That part was simple enough, except I didn't want the gaps under the night stands, so I cut a bit of the logs, but cut too much, so now I need to fill some gaps. I'll probably print something eventually. But here's the basic setup: Hemnes, Hemnes everywhere. But they are clearly not designed to go together like these, the sizes don...

Despite taking a minor in mathematics, I never really grokked matrices. I didn't even realize why it's called linear algebra (or at least I forgot quickly). These blog posts do a good job of making them more intuitive to me: The basics of matrices: https://dhruvp.netlify.com/2018/12/31/matrices / Eigenvectors: https://dhruvp.netlify.com/2018/12/31/matrices /

Yoghurt with müsli is a fixed part of my breakfast since I was a kid. A morning just isn't right without it. Unfortunately, the müsli makers are not exactly trying to make low-carb müslis in general - mostly they combine cereals with sugars and call it healthy because there's a smidge of fiber in there. A few high-protein müslis have started to appear, mostly based on soy protein, and so far universally boring in taste and texture. So, following the lead of my mother, I have started making my own, adding things for texture and protein as I feel fit. According to my calculations, this has a 2.27:1 carb:protein balance, 1.83:1 if you count fibers as negative carbs ("effective carbs"). That is already a lot better than the typical 6:1 or 7:1 of standard müslis. Effectively Carb-Balanced Müsli 100g coarse oats 100g fine oats 100g raisins 100g hazelnuts, whole 100g sunflower seeds 50g flax seeds 50g corn flakes With ingredients from our local grocery store, thi...

My recent breads have been of a good structure and have risen nicely, but have almost invariably fallen again when baked. I tried some variations in flour combination and amount of kneading, but to no avail. Then I thought, maybe there's just not enough there  to keep up the holes made by (mostly) steaming water. After all, while I use 500g of flour with 350g of water, I also thereto add about 150g of mostly water in the form of eggs, plus up to 50ml of oil, and some water in the soaked seeds. That adds up. So for this bread, I decided to use less water and add more flour, to see if the dough would form up more and stand up better while rising. I used 50g gluten, 150g wheat flour (type 550), 150g whole-wheat flour, and 150g sunflower seed flour, a scant tablespoon salt, 50g soaked seed mix, 50g walnuts, 300ml warm water, 20g yeast cake, 3 large eggs, and 20ml oil. Then while kneading, I added another 250g of the type 550 flour, getting the dough from super-sticky to only somewhat...

This year's Sotahuuto has some really good strategists. This is one example where the outcome particularly surprised me. See the video here: https://youtu.be/T1I22U5nEbY?t=3032 There are two sides in this battle, but each side is split in two starting points. The side I was on has (among many others) Imperiumii Etelan in black and purple as well as Gobliniit in off-green. The other side most notable has Mahekainen in blue and white with a red blazon. The field is roughly rectangular and has a small dense forest off-center, and the half of our army I was in started in the corner farthest from the forest, while the other half was behind the forest, with the opposing armies in the other two corners. At the start of the video, you see the opposing forces that were on our right when looking into the middle. Our strategy was (roughly) to move as fast as at all possible across to the forest, presumably (I wasn't there for the strategizing) to meet the other half. The opponents...