Batch No.702

At the start of the first lockdown, when shopping was tricky and people were stockpiling staples, I moved from Waitrose white bread flour to Wright's white bread flour, more or less by chance, as noticed at reference 2. Starting with their Alto flour, said to be good for both pizza and bread. And continuing with Waitrose's wholemeal flour as part of the mix.

My method involves two rises, and the timing of the second rise was becoming tricky: too little and you got rather flat bread, too much and you either got big surface bubbles, or big surface bubbles and collapse, this last resulting in even flatter bread. The trickiness being that the window for getting it right was narrow and needed more careful watching than it was getting.

Then for some reason, at the end of last year, I moved from Wright's Alto flour to their Royalty flour. Same price, but different bag. This seemed to solve the problem. Bubbles were largely a phenomenon of the past.

Then with batch No.702 they were back. With the cold weather and our central heating not on that high, the second rise was taking too long and I moved the proving bin from the front room - which is supposed to be sunny and warm in the morning - to the window sill on top of the radiator in the dining room, turned on for the purpose. Which did the trick. The wooden proving bin was big and solid enough to provide a buffer against the rising heat.

Until this week, when it didn't. With it being even colder, the radiator was even hotter, and the second rise speeded up, catching me unawares, and the lower loaf in the bin was showing signs of bubble when the two loaves were moved into the oven. With the lower loaf turning out as snapped above. It the first snap, it can be seen how the bubble has sucked the rise out of the right hand side of the loaf.

It looks worse than it in fact is, with there being quite a reasonable rise and the crumb has a good flavour. Nevertheless, there is a hint of the taste and chewiness I associate with bread made with rye flour. The way it cuts is a bit like that too. We shall see how it stands in the days to come.

Bit more care with the timing next time around.

Better news on the back garden front, where the Autumn leaf clearance is progressing well and with about a dozen barrow loads dumped on the big compost heap behind the copper beech trees in the last couple of days. One more day should see the first pass completed. For equipment, I used an 'original garden broom' bought from some people called QVC, on the back of an advert from the RHS, back in 2021, a builder's shovel and the wheelbarrow. A combination which seems to suit.

The only catch being that this broom, which does not damage the lawn as much as a rake and which was, as I recall, vaguely tropical in origin, is no longer on the QVC catalogue. But there is hope yet. The business end looks very like that of the corn broom snapped above, and there seem to be plenty of those about.

So we should not be stuck next time around.

In the margins of dumping leaves, I also buried a few more books, after the fashion noticed at reference 4, albeit a rather shallower burial. With the spots chosen having been undisturbed for long enough for what looked like fibrous roots from the neighbouring beech trees to have grown up into them, slightly impeding the digging of graves. Books dating from my excursion with the psycho-analysts, maybe thirty years ago now. I might say that I have retained something of a soft spot for the way in which they try to describe the goings on inside brains, even if I do not try to read their books any more, and continue to believe that their descriptions of those goings on, the entities, structures and processes that they use to build those descriptions with, are pitched at a useful level, even if some of those descriptions have not stood the test of time. The recent success of large language models with their seeming absence of accessible intermediate entities and so forth notwithstanding.

PS: the frost did not clear from the corner of the extension roof under the shelter of the leylandii hedge today. The first time this year. While the frost on the back part of the back lawn was pretty much all gone by 11:00.

References

Reference 1: https://www.wrightsflour.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-wonders-of-ebay.html.

Reference 3: https://www.qvcuk.com/.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/huxley.html.