My (Possibly Optimal) Bread Process

As I'm home for the holidays now, I lack photos of most of the process described here.  When I next bake bread, I'll take some pictures.


AKA, How to make good bread as easily as possible.

Like any geek, I enjoy a good optimization problem.  I especially enjoy those that involve routine kitchen tasks.  One thing that I've added to my list in the last few months is baking bread.  While in Europe this year I learned a German recipe for a whole wheat spelt loaf, and since I got back to the States in August I've been making it weekly, trying to perfect it.  My criteria to optimize are as follows:

• All flour must be fermented for several hours with a sourdough starter ¹
• It must be primarily whole wheat spelt
• It must have a good, hearty crust
• It doesn't have to be as light as a loaf of white bread, but it must not be super dense and gummy
• While satisfying the above, it must be as easy to make as possible

The  recipe I learned in Europe was super-simple already; it involved only two mixings of ingredients, no kneading, and the most time-consuming part of it was greasing the bread tins. But it still seemed, well . . . sub-optimal.

The first change I made was to mix all of the ingredients in at the beginning.  This is a good idea not just to make it easier, but so that all of the flour in the recipe has a chance to undergo a long fermentation, something that I consider essential to producing truly healthy bread.  I may be missing a nuance in the final product by skipping a step, but it still makes a good loaf.

The second change I made was to measure by weight instead of volume.  Apart from being much more accurate, measuring by weight is just easier and creates fewer dishes.  I put a large mixing bowl onto my scale, pour in flour until it reads the correct weight, then zero the scale.  I move the whole thing to my sink, turn on the faucet and watch the scale.  When the water is done, I pour on the salt, again watching the scale.  The one thing I don't measure is my starter. I don't think the amount of starter makes much of a difference with such a long fermentation.

The final change I made was to simplify the greasing of the bread tins.  Instead of using butter or oil spread around with a finger, I found out that you can use a spray bottle filled with a mix of oil and water ².  Then I put some flour in a small metal strainer and shake it over the tin to evenly distribute it.

Bragg's makes a spray bottle for soy sauce that's perfect for greasing tins.

I've made this bread about once a week for the last four months, and I think it's about as good as it can get.  I could probably put in some more effort to get a slightly better product, but I don't think it would be worth it.  So enough introduction, here's the recipe!

Ingredients (makes one loaf):

• 500 g whole wheat flour ³
• 500 g water
• 10 g salt
• sourdough starter

1. Mix all of the above together in a bowl, then ferment at room temperature, covered with a cloth, for 12 hours or so.  You might need to add a bit of water to the dough; you want it wet enough that you couldn't knead it, but not watery (otherwise it'll take forever to bake).
2. Put some of the dough back into your sourdough starter container.  It's too easy to forget this.
3. Grease a 9x5 bread tin.
4. Stir the dough to collapse large air bubbles, then ladle into the tin.  Cover the pan with a cloth or spritz it with oil to keep the top from drying out.
5. After 30 minutes, start preheating your oven to 450 F.
6. After another 30 minutes, check on the loaf.  Keep checking every 15 minutes until it has risen enough that if you poke it it makes a depression which holds its shape.
7. Place the loaf in the oven and set a timer for 30 minutes.
8. After 30 minutes, the crust of the loaf should be set.  Open the oven door and place a probe thermometer into the center of it.  Set the timer to go off at 200 degrees Fahrenheit (I do 195 in Arizona at 7000 ft of elevation).
9. When the thermometer goes off, take the bread out of the oven, run a knife along the side of the tin, and then invert it to drop the loaf out.  Let it rest on a cooling rack ⁴ for several hours before cutting open (I think it's best to wait an entire day).

 Footnotes:

1. I haven't been able to find conclusive evidence that soaking improves bread's digestibility.  However, there's plenty of evidence that sourdough fermentation is a healthy thing.  I personally think that the rise in rates of gluten intolerance in developed countries may have something to do with an overall decrease in bread fermentation times. Just a hypothesis.
2. If you read the post I linked to, you'll note the concern about sanitation.  It's always good to be safe, but in this particular case I don't worry too much.  The botulism toxin is destroyed by 5 minutes at 190 degrees Fahrenheit, which is easily reached on the outside of my bread during baking.
3. I prefer spelt flour, but you can use rye or whole wheat.  I haven't gotten a satisfactory rye loaf yet from this recipe, but I also haven't experimented enough with it.  If you decide to use  white flour, you'll need to reduce the water drastically (probably to 60% of the flour weight).
4. A collapsible steamer basket is a nice cooling rack substitute.

Fat Washing Jar Lids

Reduce, reuse, recycle, right?  Many of us strive to do things in that order, and one of the best things to reuse is glass jars.  You can buy things in bulk with them, ferment things in them, store leftovers, make yogurt, etc.  Glass is totally non-reactive, doesn't hold odors, and lasts forever.

However, as good as glass jars are, their lids can absorb odors from food, especially from things canned in them.  Pickle and salsa jar lids have particularly strong odors.  These flavors will assert themselves into whatever food you put in them - trust me.  These jars tend to be great shapes for re-using, which makes this all the more frustrating.  After a couple recent rounds of pickle-flavored yogurt, I abandoned hope that repeated batches would rid the lid of it's flavor, and started researching ways to solve the problem.

I found my answer in the book Cooking For Geeks by Jeff Potter.  He has a section on "Fat Washing".  He was talking about fat washing alcohols, to either remove unwanted flavors, or to infuse flavors from fat into alcohol (think "hot butter rum" or bacon whiskey).  I knew from reading other cooking books that many flavors (and vitamins, for that matter) are fat or alcohol soluble, and don't dissolve into water.

So I did a little experiment.  I put some lard into a pickle lid, put it on a rack on top of the wood stove, and kept it there for two days.  Then I wiped the excess off and washed the lid clean.  And guess what?  It totally worked!  There was no noticeable pickle smell remaining.  And no lard smell either.  I've since used this technique for salsa lids as well, with the same result.

Lard melting in a lid on the wood stove.

I'm not sure if the warming step is necessary for other oils - lard has to be warm to stay liquid, but it may be that if you used an unsaturated vegetable oil, you could do this at room temperature.  It stands to reason that hotter oil could absorb more flavor, however.  I also don't know if it really needs two days for it to work.  And I'd like to try alcohol-washing, using vodka or everclear instead of fat.

What I do know is that now I can reuse my glass jars without fear of creating pickle-yogurt.  Or salsa-raisins.  Or...you get the picture.

Onward Bound

The numbers weren't on our side today - 1000 meters up and down.  But the trail wasn't going to weave up and down like yesterday, and we had the benefit of knowing what was coming.  We were starting from Totora, at 3600 meters, heading up to Yanama pass, at 4600 meters (around 15,000 feet) and back down to Yanama village, also at 3600.  And all this with full packs.

Speaking of which, after the first 5 minutes, my pack felt like it weighed 60 pounds instead of 30.  My legs were sore and my thighs ached with every step.  But I kept going slow and steady, never running out of breath, and I soon felt better.  Or at least, my legs got numb to the pain.  I took breaks only when nature called, and took off my pack only once, to change some layerage.  Before I knew it we were in the final stretch:

I was setting a personal altitude record with every step, and soon enough we were at the top.  It was cold and windy, so we headed down immediately, took a break for lunch, and then descended the rest of the 1000 meters down to Yanama.

Once there we procured another cheap floor and began the search for donkeys.  We were pretty beat up, and from what we'd heard a day's use of donkeys would be about half as expensive as buying a day's food from a village.  Unfortunately, at this point we were pretty much down to dollars, and it's pretty tough to pay with dollars when the nearest money-changer is 2 days away.  But the kids at the house we were staying (maybe 15 years old?) agreed to take us to Meizcal, a 4-hour walk.  20 dollars seemed pretty steep, so we negotiated to include some snacks in the deal as well.

It was looking like we might make it.  It would be really, really tough, but certainly possible.  We'll never know, though, whether we could've made it, because fate intervened that night.  David woke up with a fever, and that morning said that he felt weaker than he'd ever felt in his entire life.  From Meizcal it would be 2 tough days in either direction to get to civilization, and we didn't know where this illness was going to lead.  So we convinced the boys to take our packs to the top of the pass instead, and returned to Totora.

Despite not carrying packs, the way back seemed much harder than the first time.  We arrived in Totora midday, got in our sleeping bags and promptly slept for about 15 hours, only taking a short break to cook up some ramen for dinner.  The next day we took the road instead of the trail, encountered a bus after a couple of hours, and by nightfall were in Aguas Calientes.

The next day we took the train to Ollataytambo (yes, the train that we had taken pains to avoid the first time), and then took a colectivo to Cusco, on which a girl both drew a picture and wrote a recipe (for peanut milk) in my notebook.

Were we disappointed that we ended the trek?  For sure.  But I think to continue would've been unsafe.  And I got some of the best experiences (and pictures) of the entire trip, so I think it was still worthwhile.

Heading back to Yanama to grab my forgotten sandals, I snapped this photo, one of my favorites of the trip.

The trail back up to the pass.

Obstacles on the way.

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Shall We Stay Or Shall We Go

We woke up, had breakfast, and considered our problem: we didn't have enough money!  Of course, we had plenty in the bank, but ATMs were a distant dream now.  Between us we had about 100 soles and 20 dollars.  After the 36-sole each entry fee to Choquequirao, that left barely enough to cover our time in Totora, and nothing for any more rest days that we might need.  This wouldn't be a problem, except that the next several days looked even harder than what we just did, and we were pretty beat up.

After a couple of hours of agonizing debate, we decided that any decision was better than none, and that forward progress was surely an improvement.  So we decided to screw the entrance fee - if they didn't let us in, then oh well.  We'd had an amazing, one of a kind experience at Macchu Picchu, so our need to see a lesser known ruin was not as great.  After making the decision, everything seemed better.  David got out the guitar and we sat on the porch playing songs and watching the animals.  He taught me a bit about finger-picking, and I shot the best video I will ever take:

And as if to bless our plans, just before dinner we got a rare wet-season glimpse of Salkantay, a mountain of over 6000 meters.  We would see it only once more on the trek.  Had we known that we'd see it again, however, we might've been a little less gleeful.  For Totora was the only spot on the trek from which a view was possible at all.

The mighty mountain herself

Afterwards, we went in to say hello, and wound up watching them make dinner.  Seeing how a traditional Quechua kitchen works was one of the highlights of my entire time in Peru.  Life was centered around the fire, the focal point of food and of warmth.   Above it lay two rails, upon which were always 3 pots, for a main dish, for rice, and for tea.  Below it was a warm cavity in which the cuyes (guinea pigs) would sleep.  And after the day's cooking, they would set the next day's wood atop the coals to dry out.  When food was cut, the trimmings were dropped on the ground, for the cuyes to eat, and thus little was wasted.  Suddenly one peruvian delicacy made a lot more sense.

One last surprise awaited us that night.  As we were eating dinner, the family revealed that their little girl had her birthday tomorrow!  We gave her some chocolate, but the real birthday meal was the next day, when she was going to get an entire cuy for herself!  I didn't ask if she got to pick out which one to eat, but I sure wanted to.

Dinner that night was Lomo Saltado, one of my favorite peruvian meals.  It's sort of a stir-fry with french fries in it.  I got their recipe in my notebook, which may be my most treasured souvenir from the trip.  I'll give the recipe, but first, here's a photo and another video:

The kitchen.  Note the thatched roof for ventilation.

The cuyes in the kitchen, munching on some supplementary hay.

And now, the recipe!

Lomo Saltado (with bonus recipe for Salsa Criolle) from the village Totora:

Ingredients:

• Meat, cut into stir-fry sized strips
• Onions.  Lots of onions.  Julienned.
• Potatoes, cut into fries.  They peeled the potatoes, but seeing as I don't have a team of cuyes to eat my peels I'd probably leave them on for this application.
• Tomatoes
• Oil
• Mushrooms (or so they told me, I didn't see them used or notice them in the dish)
• Garlic Powder
• Ground Cumin
• Ground Red Pepper (I imagine cayenne would do nicely)
• Salt and Pepper

Procedure:

• Cook the potatoes in some oil (they didn't use enough to cover, but you could surely deep-fry them too).
• In another pot, cook the onions in some oil.  They cooked them for quite a long time, maybe 10 minutes.
• Add the spices to the onions and you have salsa criolle, which is a great side to lots of foods.  Especially great with papa rellena, which is another favorite of mine.  I really, really like this stuff.  Some recipes call for vinegar, but this one didn't.  I'd probably add it.
• Add a little water to the onions and stir.  I think this was to make a sauce.  It seemed like lots of water at the time, but come a-plating it didn't seem too bad.  I think it got thickened with potato starch.
• Add the potatoes and the cooked meat and you're done!

You may have noticed that I didn't say how to cook the meat.  That's because, in all the hubbub of salsa criolle, I completely missed it.  But hey, it's meat - you can figure it out.

Lluvia de Muerte

We left Aguas Calientes with high spirits.  We had just had an incredibly lucky day, spending some time alone in one of the most populated ruins in the world.  We walked the tracks back to the hydroelectric plant with a skip in our step, feeling that nothing could stop us.  When we arrived at the plant, there was one combi (small bus), in the process of leaving.  And although it was completely full, the driver stopped when he saw us coming and got out.  He yelled arriba, arriba! (up, up!) and gesticulated wildly into the air.  This could only mean one thing - we were going to ride on top of the bus.  Five minutes later, we were wedged comfortably between our backpacks and sacks of potatoes, with sweet cool air rushing by.  As our road weaved by the raging Andean river to our left, I thought to myself: this is why I came to Peru.

Upon arrival to Santa Teresa, we asked the driver if there were any colectivos (shared taxis) to our starting village of La Playa.  He said no, but that he could take us for 50 soles.  More than our normal price, but seeing as it was Christmas Eve and he'd probably have no passengers for the return journey, it seemed fair.  We agreed and, after driving us to a house where we could buy some ridiculously fresh and cheap bread (20 sandwich rolls for 4 soles, about $1.50), he proceeded to round up his entire extended family to go along for the ride.  As we left town, he turned to me and said "Para peso" ("for weight") - apparently the road was steep and he needed more traction.  Suddenly 50 soles seemed like even more of a deal.

The family appeared delighted to take the journe, and gave our Spanish a test as we headed up the valley.  They also liked us quite a bit, it seemed, seeing as they tried to hook David up with not one but two of the sisters.  An hour or so later we reached La Playa, said our goodbyes, and found somewhere we could camp for free.  After a nice dinner, we used our trekking poles and our combined knowledge of knots to set up a freestanding tarp.  It was a pretty neat structure, kept us dry that night, and I'm quite proud of it.

We fell fast asleep under our plastic shield, and, apart from a dog insistent on getting in, had a restful night under rainy skies.  We awoke to dry weather, but our luck was soon to change.  After a frustrating encounter with a store-owner who didn't seem to get the concept of toll-free phone cards, we decided to hit the trail rather than wait for a combi, which might not even run on Christmas day.

There are two routes out of La Playa - the road and the trail, on opposite sides of the river.  Choosing to take the trail was the biggest mistake we made in Peru.  The village of Totora, our destination for the day, was already about 1400 meters higher than La Playa, and the trail didn't make that any easier as it weaved continuously up and down to avoid cliffs and other obstacles, adding hundreds of meters to our climb for the day.  I recall this being the worst walking of my entire life.  It was raining, I was hungry, and our trail couldn't seem to keep itself level for more than a couple of feet.  To make matters worse, we had frequent views of the gently climbing road across the river.  When we finally did stop for lunch, though, I had what I can confidently say were the best PB&Js I have ever eaten.

David walking on probably the flatest part of the trail.  As you can see, he's wearing his rain pants with no shirt - a style that we both adopted for this day, and a very comfortable one for rainy days that are too warm for a rain jacket.  Even better would've been to wear my rain pants with no shorts underneath, which I did on every other day of the hike.

Shortly thereafter we made it to the confluence of the rivers Santa Teresa and Totora.  After crossing the river we walked up a ways until we encountered this:

I walked up to the edge and looked down, of course, and this is what I saw:

Yup.  100 feet straight down to the raging River of Death (RoD).  Looking back, we saw an alternate path, clearly very new.  Though slippery with mud and very exposed, it led up the hillside to the village of Ccolcopampa, from which we could continue the trail.  With Totora reportedly just two hours away, we headed out on what was one of the prettiest sections of the trek, with many waterfall crossings and sheer drops.  The rain even let out for us, putting a nice end to a rough trek.

Upon arrival in Totora, we found a family that would let us sleep on their floor for 2 soles, and eat meals for 8.  We decided to stay there the next day to recover, and since we didn't have enough soles on us to pay for every meal, we cooked up some ramen with tuna for the night.  After dinner we began to drink with the guys (it was Christmas after all) and found out they had a guitar.  David played a few songs, and I played Rocky Racoon (of course!) to mixed reviews.  We passed out in our sleeping bags on the floor and slept well into the morning, drifting briefly into consciousness for the call of the rooster.

Christmas Eve and Macchu Picchu

Step, inhale.  Step, exhale.  I'm hiking up a dimly lit trail at my cardivascular limit, hoping to be one of the first into Macchu Picchu today.  We awoke at 4 and started hiking at 4:30 - a late start, but we're making up for it by passing people left and right.  As usual, David is far ahead.  Step, inhale.  Step, exhale.

We arrived in Aguas Calientes (the city below the ruins) yesterday afternoon.  In order to avoid the expensive, comfortable, 3-hour train ride, we took a 9-dollar, 6-hour bus ride and two colectivos (shared taxis) to a hydroelectric plant, and then walked 2.5 hours on train tracks into town.  Saved us about 30 dollars each, and the bus ride was fastastic, riding along sheer cliffs through beautiful valleys. No pictures, though, because pictures from buses always suck.

It's 5:30, and I'm at the top.  I find David and we take a seat on the entrance stairs.  30 minutes before opening time, and there's already as many tourists waiting.  5:45, and the first busloads arrive.  10 minutes later, there are at least 200 people waiting, and we begin to wonder whether it was worth it.  But then something amazing happens.  The guards tell everybody to form a line, and we stand up to realize that nobody else had taken a seat on the stairs.  A couple minutes later, the line is fully formed, and we are miraculously, incredulously, at the head of it.

And so we wandered into Macchu Picchu alone, the only sounds our footsteps and occasional words.  Temples and terraces arose and fell out of the morning fog as we stolled on by, experiencing not the detail-obsessed, scrutinized city of a guided tour, but an unassuming, humble pueblo that passed no judgement, nor required any grand significance.  It was what it was, and nothing less.

However, although we were keeping ahead of the other tourists through our naturally fast walking, we soon realized that we weren't, in face, the only visitors.  At first we saw two dogs, chasing eachother through the ruins.  Then something resembling a squirrel, some hummingbirds, and even a snail, crawling lazily up some ancient Incan stonework.  And it was the animals that gave me a true glimpse of the ruins at their most normal, as the city they once were.  Because dogs and birds don't know that they're living in a wonder of the ancient world - to them it's a city like any other.  They go to the bathroom, try to procreate, and hope for scraps of food from these curious ape-like creatures with cameras around their necks.  And, while I enjoyed Macchu Picchu for the wonder that it is, it seemed much more real when I viewed it from a more pedestrian angle.  For this reason, the animals were one of the coolest parts of the ruins - and one of the most photogenic.  I have more pictures, but here's 3 from the day:

A squirrel-like thing in a traditional Inca-shaped window.

Our companions strolling casually along a terrace.

Well, I had to get at least one picture of myself, didn't I?

Next time, the adventurous ride from Aguas Calientes to the first village of our proposed trek.

P.S. For those reading these in real time, note that they are several days behind.  We are now in Huaraz, in the northern andes.

A New Plan

It was our first morning in Cuzco.  We had fresh minds, freshly showered bodies, and a new plan.  We would find a tarp to replace our tent, ship the rest of the tent to Lima, and go backpacking anyway.  Our route?  Take a bus and two taxis to a hydroelectric plant near Macchu Picchu, hike in on the railway tracks, and backpack several days to another ruin, Choquequirao, and eventually end up in Abancay, 5 hours northwest by bus from Cuzco.  With no time to waste, we sprang into action.  After a delicious lunch of avocado sandwiches and french fries, we set out to find a South America Explorers office to buy a topographic map.  We accomplished this easily enough, and proceeded to what proved to be the most challenging part of the entire day:  buying a tarp.

You see, in Peru, you don't go to any old hardware store and buy a tarp.  Things are much more specialized here.  In Peru, you have to go to a Plastiqueria.  Not knowing this, we asked around with little luck, until we spotted a street vendor with a tarp over his goods.  We asked him where we could buy one, and he pointed us towards Mercado San Blas.  From here on out it was tarps, tarps, everywhere, but not a piece to buy.  We asked vendor after vendor, got conflicting directions, and finally made our way to Mercado Wancha.  There, amongst a maze of sandals and fruit, we found the plastiqueria.  I imagine it as a wonderous place, full of plastics of all shapes and sizes, but all I remember is one 3x3 meter piece of beautiful blue that we got, after all of the trouble of finding it, for about $4.

Tarp in hand, we gathered together our unnecessary baggage and headed to the post office.  Our tent, my juggling balls, and my steripen (no sense carrying two water purifiers) went into a box barely large enough for the tent alone.  After cramming it all in, our very helpful attendant proceeded to wrap it with about half of a roll of packing tape:

Now that all of the time-sensitive tasks were complete, we set about some relaxation.  We found some cord for the tarp and a rain cover for my pack (which proved to be absolutely essential), had dinner, stopped by the coca shop for some tea and a rather nice conversation with the lovely polyglot who runs the place, and, on a coca-induced spree, spent an hour in an internet cafe, writing collectively 12 emails and 3 blog posts.  We went back to the hostel, cut the tarp to size, and went to bed.  Not bad for a day in which we also bought groceries and medicine, went book shopping, spent 10 minutes on a see-saw, and petted a baby alpaca:

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