Scaling up

 A new national loaf

Scaling up: A new national loaf is a essay I wrote about bread, efficiency and the revolution.

Using a piece of scrap 6mm steel, some bricks and mud, I was able to build a very simple and capable oven. I used metal sheet because i wanted a cooking surface as well as a furn style oven compartment. This oven is suitable for no more than 4kg of bread dough and is pretty crude, but the bricks that built the mansions of the capitalists could build a far larger, more beautiful oven.

If the grid collapsed and infrastructure failed, how would you feed the masses? Concentrated communities run on concentrated collaboration. How could you organise to semi-mass produce the most staple of staple foods?

TLDR: Waterwheels.

A HTML version can be found, hidden on the XMDV Radio site: here.

Ciabatta: Now in maple

Introduction 

Based on a vague sentence from The Sourdough School by Vanessa Kimbell that basically ended with "you'd need a whole book to describe this so I'm not even going to try", I decided to try smoking bread.

Kimbell mentions that there are two ways of going about doing this:

1. Smoke the grains before you mill them
2. Smoke the loaf whole

The first apparently imbues the entire loaf with the smokey flavor, with the second mostly affecting the crust.

Method

I had some maple lying around, picked up as scrap from a local violin repair shop and intended to be used to make a couple sets of straight razor scales (long story). I whittled it down and collected the shavings, 

ending up with a couple grams of maple chip.

My smoker was 2 foil turkey roasting trays i got from Lidl, the bottom one with a couple holes stabbed in it, sitting on one of my baking steels on top of the hob.

Results

The smoke lasted only a couple of minutes, before all the wood was burned and the bread started to cook further. It would be better to have a proper setup to cold smoke them as it left the crusts thick and the bottom charred.

It tasted disappointing at first, but after being left to cool, the flavor really came out. It tasted like I was eating it with smoked cheese and bacon fat.

Definitely a choice flavor, paired with a slow-fermented rye mite I think it would be amazing, but it definitely jars with a plain white yeasted bread.

When back at home, there is an apple tree nearby that needs to be chopped down, if I take some fresh trimmings and weld up a crude smoke-box, I should be able to make some really nice Christmas breads.