Author: nickw

Quick sourdough…

I spent most of the day yesterday making a good sourdough loaf.  Gave it plenty of time for the gluten to develop nicely, multiple foldings in the final stages – a lot of work, but it is worth it.

Jar of sourdough starter and the baking mold after filling with excess starter…

But this morning, since the sourdough starter is going a bit mad, I decided to use some.  (Admittedly, I could put the starter in the fridge, but I sort of like watching it grow so rapidly.)

I have a silicone “seashell” sort of shaped baking mold – not sure what it was intended for.  Possibly choux pastry?  Or maybe as a chocolate mold.

But I mixed a bit of the live starter with a bit of salt, and put it straight into the molds.  I only let it sit for about 15 minutes, while the oven got hot.

Several have been turned over so you can see the sharply delineated shapes of of the seashell!

And they are dilightful!  The bottom of each have the pale shapes like a seashell.  The tops are more normal bread crust texture.  And they have each got a hollow spot in the middle!  Slit it open, slide in butter or cheese – and all ready to eat!

Overall effort?  Hardly any, so I’ll remember this one for the future…

Camping and kites…

We took our caravan up to the Bowentown Motor Camp for two nights last weekend.  Averil spent time fishing, I got to fly some kites.

Finally, a good chance to see the blue parafoil at its best.  Friday’s winds were a bit erratic, but I got both the purple and the blue parafoils flying well.  Never easy to take good photos of kites in the air, as once you get them up high enough, they are just specks on the photo, anyway.  And given it was just a cellphone camera, the kites were generally out of focus (if you click on the image to the right, you will get a better version of it…)

Both kites had substantial amounts of tail, to counteract the gusty wind.  First time I’ve flown the blue parafoil with both the long tail but also the drogue at the end of that.  It looked pretty good!

When I went down to the beach on Saturday ( a 3 minute walk from the caravan) I forgot to take the bag with the tails – so flew the blue parafoil without any tail.  Light but steady wind meant it flew very well, though very sluggish when I raised the camera with it.

The blue parafoil was amazingly responsive – I could let it drop down to not far above the path to the beach.  Then, just pulling in a few metres of line, I could get it to climb rapidly up to nearly overhead.  I think the shallow aerofoil shape has given it this responsiveness – much more than any of the other parafoils I’ve made.

Beetroot flavoured dried starter…

I posted about this once before, I think.  The concept is that each time you ‘feed’ the sourdough starter, you first throw away some of it, so there will be room in the container.  

In this case, it was a specially made starter, made from cooked beetroot (from our garden), flour and water.  I let it work for several days before smearing it out on the surface of a silicone pad.

Liberal sprinkling of salt and pepper – and then just put it into the top of the hot water cylinder to dry.  That only takes a few days, since it is so thinly spread out.

When dry, it is flakey – and can be blended up to make a powder/flakes that taste great sprinkled on just about anything.  Last night, we had it as a topping on poached eggs – which were themselves sitting on fresh slices of sourdough bread!

It’s alive…

Well, several days ago my sourdough starter decided to enter a phase of extreme activity!

I had been feeding it a bit of flour and water each day, and it had a nice bit of bubbling and pleasant smell.  Then, over a few hours, it massively took off, bubbled up and slightly overflowed the container!  That’s what I want to see!  I’ve now refrigerated the starter, after knocking it back in volume by taking away more than half of it.

And the half I took away?  I smeared it across a sheet of silicone, added salt, pepper and some spicy smoked paprika, even though I know there are people who don’t care for the smoked flavour…

I put it up in the cabinet above the hot water cylinder, and in only a day or so, it had dried completely.  I was able to put it into a grinder device and reduce it to powder/flakes.  A very nice flavouring agent from what otherwise would have been thrown out…

Finally, a breeze…

Kite is powering, pulling strongly, as it moves to the upper left of the screen. Note the fins at the bottom, both left and right, billowing out…

After taking various kites on the bike with me to town, I finally got a day with at least the beginnings of a kite-flying wind yesterday.

I put the purple parafoil up, since it hasn’t had any flying for awhile.

The kite is a scaled up version of the first parafoil I ever made, and has quite a deep aerofoil.  That gives it a bit more drag overall – the newer blue parafoil has a much slimmer aerofoil.

My main dislike of it is that the outside bottom fins are made so that rather than having three fins down the line, like the ones in the middle, the outside has a larger bottom fin that takes the place of two.  It seems to blow out somewhat in flight, and just doesn’t look as nice as the design of the blue kite.

But it flew well, and without any tail to compensate for errors – as a kitemaker, that is one of my ‘measures of success’ in making a parafoil.  You can, and generally do, have to have some sort of tail or drogue on parafoils.  But if they are made well, they can and should be able to fly without, I say!

Sourdough starter…

I began making this starter about 10 days ago.  There isn’t much to it: just flour and water.  I think I started with about 1/2 cup of each, stirred together in a stainless steel bowl.  Left it on the counter, covered with a loose fitting lid.  It only took a day or three before it had bubbles appearing on the surface.

Each day, feed it with some more flour and water.  I used mostly rye flour, as I read it is a particularly ‘lively’ food for the sourdough.

It has been sweet smelling from the start, but with an underlying hint of vinegar, too.

I used about half of the starter about a week after starting, and am now bulking it up again.

But yesterday, I got a glass container for its new home! Now I can watch it growing a bit better.

My first large loaf suffered after I didn’t make it ‘tight’ enough – the round ball of growing dough spread out too much, and got baked onto the stainless stell bowl I had it covered with in the oven.  That process, along with some water in a container at the bottom of the oven, allows the dough to stretch more effectively.

A bit of catch-up…

Well, if this WordPress set up is going to effective, I’ll have to get better at making postings!

Turns out the kite day was a bit of a fizzer – not really enough wind to do much with.

I took both kites and ebike to Wellington a few weeks back – Wellington famed for its wind (and beer!).  But the wind was either knockdown – literally, as we crossed the street above Oriental Parade – or cold, horizontal, heavy rain.  So no kites or ebike rides.

The bike odometer has now passed 4,000km – that was just on the one year mark.

And I’ve been doing some more baking, having made a sourdough starter to try something new!

OK – I promise I will make more frequent postings.  Yes…

Kite day coming…

Though I’ve not referred to it here much, there is a kite day this coming Sunday at Fergusson Park for Matariki.  I’m not usually much for kite days, as I’m not overly social (!) at the best of times.

There is a predominance of massive (nothing wrong with that…) ‘kites’ that hang from a pilot kite, rather than fly on their own and finally – made by other people.  I think I’m good evidence that you don’t need to know how to sew to make kites – just don’t look too close at the stitching!

But this will be the first I’ve been to when I’m only bringing soft kites.  No sticks (apart from several that are part of the kite messenger).

3 parafoils
4 panflutes
6 parasleds
9 reels of line
1 picavet rig with camera
1 static dropper rig
3 misc droppers
1 ferry with dropper bag
hammer and stakes
1 set of night lights

I’m not counting the silver flowform yet – it hasn’t flown properly.  And the one bit of wind that it could/should have used makes me think the aerofoil shape is not right – and I am in the process of putting some ‘darts’ into the foils near the leading edge, trying to give it more lift than it currently has.

No knead bread…

 

I’ve baked bread on and off, hobby and commercial, going back to the early 1970s – starting from The Tassahara Bread Book back in Austin.

I got a book from the library not long back – see http://breadin5.com for details.

Basically, it involves getting the yeast to really working and adding that to all the dry ingredients, barely mixing it together.  Just enough to take up the moisture.  Then, letting it rise until it falls, an unorthodox approach when viewed from my breadmaking background.

The messy dough can either be refrigerated at that point, or you can try to scrape out a 500gm chunk to make into bread.  Still no kneading, but a very quick forming into a round, pulling the dough from the front to the back, turning the ball as you go.  And a long rising again before baking.

The baking added one important touch – putting water in a pan with the baking bread to ensure a very steamy atmosphere for it to start baking in.  That gives it a real boost in growth…

I toasted some sunflower seeds, and ground them.  Added that to a soy milk wash before cutting some slashes in the top (so it wouldn’t split unevenly).  When it came out of the oven, it was very very hard in the crust.  When it was almost cooled, I covered it with an upside-down stainless bowl.  Crust is now approachable with a knife!

I’ll maybe someday post a recipe…