Breaking Bread: The dark and white flours of ideology | Hacker News Reader

Breaking Bread: The dark and white flours of ideology

cabinetmagazine.org

68 pointslermontov36 comments

As someone who is enjoy eating a lot of bread (part of my Balkan culture), I'm baffled to see so much hesitation toward bread when I go abroad. I'd frequently get plenty of food in restaurants, but not so much bread with it. Even if I get it, either it is something old or "too much white" for my taste (this means there is nothing in it useful for the body).

Although we have plenty of bakeries with fresh bread 24/7, I recently started to make my own with bread maker I got as present few years ago (some Moulinex). It was sitting in a box and I decided to try it before sell it or give someone.

I can say, this ended up pretty well. I always liked chemistry (mixing and weighting stuff, calculating compounds) and this happens to be essential part of bread making. After few failed attempts, my bread finally started to get desired shape and taste; my family started to like it as well.

The best part is that I know what I'm putting in (I'm not so much fond of general food industry) and as a geek, I introduced some geekish stuff as well. Although bread maker automates lot of things, I'm using Emacs and ledger-cli [1] to track compounds I'm adding, including comments about finished bread. This way I can always pull what worked the best, what not and total amount of compounds I spent in a week or month. TBH, this article [2] was inspiration for tracking with Emacs.

Still tons of stuff to learn, but "the project" ended up funny and very enjoyful.

[1] https://www.ledger-cli.org/

[2] https://bofh.org.uk/2019/02/25/baking-with-emacs/

Very nice :) As a fellow bread baker/chemist/geek, I wrote this little command-line tool in Haskell that helps me scale recipes. I've used it to develop/store/print out recipes and routinely for dinner breads like tortillas and rotis ("OK so I just dumped 113 g of durum atta into a bowl; how much water, oil, and salt do I need?")

https://github.com/ramanshah/bread

Your next task should you choose to accept it is to develop an open source rival to Rotimatic

I'm still amazed how relatively easy it is to bake your own sourdough bread, and encourage everyone to at least give it a try. After a few practice rounds, the total time you need to put in for a loaf is about half an hour (<5 mins work, 8–12 hours waiting, 20 mins work, 2 hours waiting, 5 mins work, 5–7 hours waiting, <5 mins work, 30 mins baking, done). I'm following this recipe [1]. Just yesterday I made this one [2], I think my 10th try.

[1] https://www.hobbshousebakery.co.uk/blogs/recipes/140081991-s...

[2] https://pub.hrmnn.net/25/847d8c01/DSCF6085.jpeg

Do you also account for cleaning? I bake two loafs of bread once a week since 3 years and I can't relate for the work. Most goes into cleaning up (much of the machinery can't get into a dishwasher).

What machinery do you use? I find I need to clean very little when I bake bread. Usually most of the work gets done in a single tub.

I don't think I use any machinery. All the equipment that needs any cleaning that I use is a bowl, spoon, silicon spatula, dough cutter, and a silicon baking pad.

My roommate bakes bread and it’s messy. Flour everywhere, steam pan, the bread spatula tray, multiple utensils for various steps, all the paper and plastic wraps. I mean the bread is nice, but if you’re not very careful and cleaning as you go it’s a lot. Definitely not 30 minutes of work, more like 1.5 hours with all the cleaning.

I also bake sourdough. In my case, I took a class for it a few years ago which helped me a lot to nail down the basics.

I wouldn't say it's easy to get right. It requires a fair amount of trial and error to get your equipment, setup and recipes dialed in. One factor that confounds me a lot is the temperature during bulk ferment and proofing. It's like temperature is an ingredient. My house as a lot of variation in temperature... I think I need to get a proofing chamber.

My favorite resource is https://www.theperfectloaf.com/. He's a software engineer in his day job, but he has a beautiful blog where he gives somewhat obsessively detailed recipes for sourdough. The recipes are practical and achievable by a home baker.

One beautiful thing with baking sourdough is that even if you don't get it right, it will still be very good bread.

I think people tend to be discouraged by how difficult it might be but fail to realise even "failing" is still producing something edible and tasteful.

The one thing -- in my experience -- that you absolutely should not forget to add is salt. Bread with no salt just tastes off.

The good news is that the amount of salt isn't all that critical, anywhere from a pinch to a spoonful will result in something at least vaguely edible.

Sure, not as easy as making an omelette, but considering there is a whole traditional profession devoted to making bread, which can feel intimidating, I would still consider it relatively easy.

OK, "relatively" easy compared to other hobbies, I agree.

The challenge comes when you see what artisan bakers can achieve. It's one of those things where your taste can utterly outgrow your skills.

This is definitely a "forever" hobby where one can always find ways to improve and find new dimensions to explore.

By "throw a cup of water into the bottom of the oven", is he being literal? as in literally pour the water onto the oven floor? Is that safe? Or is it "throw in" in the colloquial sense of "put it in"

You can poor the water into a baking tray.

Regarding safety, just be careful not to burn yourself

It’s best to buy a cheap cast pan, fill it with chain or bolts, and through it on that. If you want to get fancy you can get a metal colander and fill it with ice and put it above that.

Baking tray with lava rocks is a better option, but the simplest option is just to bake in a dutch oven with a lid on. There's enough moisture in the dough to create required amount of steam. 20 min with lid, 20 min without gets the job done very nicely.

yes but that doesn't work if it's not a boule

ok that makes more sense to me

Depending on the oven, the literal interpretation will reduce its lifetime, or may cause immediate failure.

Some failure modes of some ovens are quite dangerous. So, yes, it depends. Most modern gas ovens are safe, most electrical ovens are safe. Old gas ovens are usually dangerous in more ways than this.

When in doubt, you can always put a container with water there.

It is far from safe. People have accidentally gotten water on the glass window of the oven door and had it shatter on them.

Many people, myself included, use a Dutch oven like the Lodge combo cooker. The bread bakes in a small enclosed space and the water given off during the bake is sufficient to steam the space within. That and you get a very even heat from all directions.

If your bread has side cracks, it didnt have enough steam.

Agreed. The book Flour Water Salt Yeast is also excellent. It's the best sourdough I've ever had, and it's coming out of my oven.

[1] https://kensartisan.com/flour-water-salt-yeast/

I recommend "Tartine Bread" as a supplement to that, specifically for making breads with wild yeast. The method in Flour Water Salt Yeast for starting and maintaining the culture seemed really finicky and intimidating when I first skimmed it. Reading the Tartine Bread book both gave me a better understanding of how it works, and is also a lot more relaxed about the process. Flour Water Salt Yeast is better for general breadmaking technique though.

Question for native German speakers: Are abendbrot and brotzeit regional terms? I know that when I took German I was taught abendessen and imbiss respectively.

Abendbrot is probably not regional, though Abendessen (evening meal) may be more standard use, especially when going out or having a small family meal is not implied.

Brotzeit is regional for a mid-day meal (10am-5pm?), with Imbiss and Vesper other alternatives. Those three can also be "taken with you" ("eine Brotzeit/einen Imbiss/eine Vesper mitnehmen") when leaving your house to be consumed during (e.g.) a day trip.

Brotzeit [1] is Bavarian, and when used here in north Germany usually implies a Bavarian-style meal, not just that it's bread-based.

I don't think Abendbrot is regional, it's an evening meal where bread with toppings/fillings is probably the main component, whereas Abendessen is probably something hot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotzeit

I can only agree with the other responses.

In my personal usage, I would say Abendessen and Snack.

Abendbrot sounds like something a 60+ year old would call it.

I haven't heard it called Brotzeit since I was in elementary school in Bavaria, so that overlaps with the sibling responses.

Personally, when I hear "Imbiss", a kiosk that sells food is the primary thing that comes to mind. As in, you can get a hot dog with fries there.

Agreed, an Imbiss is the kiosk where you get food, not the food itself; at least I never heard the word used for the food in my 40+ years as a German ;)

I'm only 45 and use Abendbrot, so does my daughter.

Regarding Imbiss, it could be that my teacher learned it incorrectly, or it could be that I'm remembering incorrectly. Or, of course, it could be technically correct, but not actually used in daily speech. :)

It's a 100% reasonable to teach it. The German Wikipedia result right now is a disambiguation page between the snack and the place to buy the snack ("Imbiss" always being short for Imbissbude, Imbissstand etc.).

I wouldn't say Abendbrot is something only old folks use. It simply implies that your Abendessen involves bread and butter with a topping. When you say you're having Abendbrot you literally mean that you are eating bread, otherwise you say Abendessen.

It's not unusual for some German families to eat their main meal late in the afternoon or evening, when everyone is home. So they might prefer to call it Abendessen since they're not just having bread and toppings but a proper hot meal.

I've heard "Brotzeit" only in Bavaria or relating to a Bavarian style meal.

As a German I didn't realize the bad rep white bread has in Germany originated in Nazi propaganda. But I'm not surprised because a lot of urban myths in Germany do unfortunately. White bread isn't less healthy than any other bread by the way, so the author's uncriticial view of German bread myths - and her inevitable spread by repeating them - is a bit disappointing.

If you really want to eat healthy bread, don't look at the color but look at the ingredients. If there's added sugar or syrup then it's probably less healthy. Except if you take into consideration that the added sugars somehow prevent the bread from getting moldy, since eating moldy bread isn't healthy.

When it comes to ingredients bread really is as simple as it gets, there's not much that can go wrong healthwise (except the aforementioned sugars and syrups). It's astonishing how much variety you can achieve with these smallest number of ingredients by simply changing slightly the way it is prepared and baked.

And another myth is that industrially produced bread is less healthy or of lower quality than the one from the bakery or home baked. The one you bake at home using the off the shelf yeast probably will taste the same if not worse than the ones you can buy pre-packeged in the same store. Of course I can only attest this to German mass-baked bread, maybe it's of high quality anyway.

Baking bread is an art. Of course, if you master it you can make bread that tastes like no other but the best tasting bread will always be the one that's fresh out of the oven, still slightly warm.

White bread isn't less healthy than any other bread by the way

That's simply not true. Whole wheat bread retains the bran (fiber) and germ (vitamins), while the endosperm in white bread is mainly starch.

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