Friday, 4 July 2008

Dereel

Photos for 4 July 2008

Mail from Thomas Maynard today regarding my comments on pizza:

There's a very helpful website devoted to helping folks walk the delicate line between “artisanal” and “easy”—with minimal compromise in flavor. That site is http://www.breadtopia.com.

Besides bread—and I've baked their recipes with excellent results—they also cover pizza. The specific pizza page is here: http://www.breadtopia.com/pizza-dough-recipe. Also note the grilled pizza on the same page.

While your notion of what is “proper” may differ, I can guarantee that if you follow their direction you will achieve a satisfactory result (but perhaps not “ideal” . depending on your preconceptions). At any rate, they will put you at an excellent jumping-off place for your own experimentation and optimization.

The site's definitely interesting, and I've done a bit of looking around. But somehow it left me dissatisfied. The link to pizza baking says “Use a quality baking stone and give it time to reach full heat saturation. By ‘a quality baking stone’, I mean a thick stone with good heat retention and heat transfer qualities”. And that's all it says; it doesn't say what “quality” means, nor how thick a “thick stone” is. Does my stone fit the bill? No way to guess.

It then goes on to mention the use of a “pizza peel”, a term I had never heard before. It's apparently a generic term for a baker's shovel, and it states that you need one if you're using a pizza stone. That's possible, but I can still see myself making quite a mess trying to slide pizzas off the peel onto the stone, as I mentioned in part 4 of my discussion.

Finally the dough recipe uses “instant yeast”, whatever that is. That's a cultural thing, of course; presumably it's available on every street corner in the USA. But it doesn't go into the details of how to mix it; possibly that's in the accompanying video, but I think that it should be in the written documentation as well, here as in any other kind of instructions.

More work spreading mulch today. One thing that I hadn't expected was that the mulch would start to decompose; it got quite warm, and if we're not careful we'll end up with compost instead of mulch:

Spread some more mulch around. Gradually things are looking tidier.

Chris along for dinner in the evening—cassoulet, and despite all precautions, it still didn't have enough beans.

Saturday, 5 July 2008

Dereel

Photos for 5 July 2008

In view of the biological activity in our pile of mulch, set to today spreading mulch in the garden, not overly helped by the wind. Got about 20% done before giving up for the while. It's amazing how much difference even a little mulch makes, as a comparison of the area in the middle right of last week's and today's exterior photos shows:

In the afternoon over to Chris to do the final touches to the web site migration. It looks as if we're finished now. Hopefully the new site will prove to be stable enough.

Back home, and Yvonne wanted to continue mulching, while I tried out the new backpack spray unit that I bought last week. The instructions were typical: a single piece of paper, normally enough for this kind of unit. But the means of attachment of the back straps was completely non-intuitive, and the instructions barely mentioned them (“place container on back securely using belt system”). It probably wouldn't have helped anyway: the low-resolution drawing that accompanied it appears to show a different kind of hook. The photographer who took the photo on the box must have been confused too, because he left them off altogether. Clipped them together as best I could, put the thing on my back—not the easiest thing at the best of times—and made it about 10 metres before both straps came apart, dumping the thing on the ground:

Fortunately no damage was done, but I still couldn't work out how to attach the things, so I ended up tying the ends together, which worked.

On the other hand, the unit works well, and it came with a whole lot of undocumented accessories, including a number of O rings (always good), three alternative spray heads (one of them double) and some other accessories of dubious purpose:

I wonder what the parts at the bottom of the first photo are for.