Recreating Milk Bread in the Bread Maker

John’s favorite bakery is closing and I’m trying to replicate their Japanese Honey Milk bread. I found this recipe designed for the Zojirushi bread maker (which I found for six dollars at Goodwill):

https://kimchimari.com/milk-bread-bread-machine-recipe/

The only modification I made was to bake the dough in a pullman pan rather than the bread maker pan in order to avoid holes in the bottom of the loaf.

Lessons Learned:

50 minutes was too long to bake.
Resting a pullman pan directly on the burner may have led to burnt edges.
The crumb was too dense.

To try next time:
Bake in oven instead of bread maker.
Find recipe closer to brioche.
Reduce kneading and proofing times.

December 19, 2023 bread food

Learnings from Latest Bread Experiments

I’ve continued work with the roughly 30/30/30 seed/flour/grain recipe. The latest iteration used 5 oz of hemp/flax/pumpkin/sunflower seeds, 5 oz of windmill ground rye, and 4 oz cracked rye.

Because the windmill rye was quite coarse, more like meal than flour, I added about a half cup of wheat flour as well, a local red fife, as well as 1/2 cup vital wheat gluten.

My process has also changed. I now do an overnight soak of the seeds/cracked grain in cold water. Cold water seems to be the ticket for non-gummy rye grains.

This time I added yeast to the preferment and then again when I mixed all the ingredients together. I finally got a great rise in the pan but the loaf slowly sank as it baked. I’m still quite happy with the end product. The texture is dense which means it slices nice and thin.

I need to do some more reading about rye and rising. Next time I will increase the proportion of seeds and try 40%. I also want to do a slower, cooler bake like I might for a Westphalian rye.

July 11, 2023 bread food low carb

White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada

This book explores four different tropes found in Canadian literature:

The Loyalist fratricide,
The Scottish orphan who makes good,
The muscular Christian,
The maturing colonial son.

Coleman discusses how these characters both illustrate and shape Canadian’s beliefs about their nation’s (white British) origin. Prior knowledge of Canadian history and literature is not required and a new student of the country will come out of this book with many additions to their reading list.

March 20, 2023 Media Book Microreview

Hayden White: The Historical Imagination

Herman Paul’s book provides an overview of Hayden White’s thinking about historiography over the years. The book begins with White’s trip to Italy to write his thesis on the papal schism of 1130 and follows his publications and lectures chronologically, including plenty of details about who White was working with and likely inspired by.

Paul’s thesis seems to be that White was a liberation historiographer motivated by humanist and existential ideals more than the postmodern and structuralist movements he is often associated with. The author suggests that White’s central, enduring question is “how to live a morally responsible life in a thoroughly historical world?”

It’s a very interesting thing to read a history about someone who spent his life exploring how the ways an author shares historical information shapes the information. Paul does a good job proving his point but White has made me hypersensitive. There is no substitute for reading White’s work and this book helped me identify the things I want to read first.

March 1, 2023 Media Book Microreview

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans in Comedy

Like the best comedians, the author’s timing is impeccable, with seamless transitions between stories from Native American comedians trying to make a name for themselves today to stars like Will Rogers and Charlie Hill who came before. He knows just when to add a bit of historical context and leaves readers with a long list of new performers to add to our watch lists.

January 17, 2023 Media Book Microreview

Microreview: The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in A Small American Town by Brian Alexander

As an independent hospital in the small town of Bryan, Ohio fights to survive, so do the people who live there. A lack of adequate insurance and the time and money needed to stay on top of chronic conditions costs lives. The author’s focus is broader than the title suggests and the book provides a history of hospitals in the United States while it shows the dire effects of manufacturing jobs leaving Ohio.