John Dale was right: once you start baking with sourdough, it’s hard to stop. This morning we celebrated Lisa for Stepmother’s Day with sourdough cinnamon rolls. 

I missed the COVID sourdough wave, but recent developments have welcomed me in, late to the party.

First, Dave Atkinson wrote, in his weekly email newsletter, about his sourdough revelation:

Modern bread is made with refined wheat. A good chunk of the grain has been discarded. And it’s made with instant yeast. That’s not how we made bread for the first 99.99% of its history. Before a hundred years ago, it you ate bread, it was the whole grain. More importantly, it was made through fermentation. It was made with sourdough.

It turns out, a lot of people with gluten insensitivity can eat sourdough bread. I had somehow not heard this. The act of slow fermenting changes the structure of gluten making it easier to digest.

Next, Jeremy Cherfas recalled the COVID sourdough wave, and linked to a helpful earlier post, with a lot of helpful comments, about sourdough starter.

Finally, as if the above was queuing me up for action, my sister-in-law Karen offered me some sourdough starter (née her chiropractor’s sourdough starter), which was enough to push me over the edge.

I started out slowly, making a couple of loaves of bread, graduated to pizza dough last week, and over the last 24 hours I made bagels. Bagels that, if I don’t say so myself, are rather amazing.

Here’s the process in photos.

I used this recipe, which called for 12 hours of letting the dough rise, so, after mixing everything together in a stand-up mixer with the dough hook, I left the dough in a metal bowl, covered, overnight. When I woke up this morning, it had doubled in size:

I divided the dough into eight pieces…

…and shaped the pieces into balls, and then poked a hole into each one, and shaped them into bagels:

I let the bagels rise, covered, for another hour:

After this second rise, I boiled the bagels, four at a time, two minutes per side:

After giving them a little time to cool down, I baked the bagels on parchment paper in a 425ºF oven for 25 minutes. The emerged golden brown:

Once the bagels had cooled, I sliced them up for lunch. They had a pleasantly chewy crust, and a pleasantly bagel-like interior:

Needless to say, we enjoyed sandwiches on bagels for lunch:

One of the items on the wall at the Victoria Schoolhouse that catches my eye, every week as we go there for acting class, is a list of all the teachers who taught at the school, over the 101 years from 1872 to 1973:

For no other reason that “somebody is going to be looking for this list at some point in the future,” I’ve transcribed the list, and I’m pasting it here for posterity.

(If you ever have a chance to pop into the school—it’s a community hall now, and home to the village office—it’s worth poking your head into the main hall to look at the collection of artifacts related to the school’s past.)

I’ve also produced a CSV of the same information, as well as another CSV that lists each teacher, sorted alphabetically, and the period(s) they served.

From a list of ten Instructions for Myself by James A. Reeves, No. 10 is:

Artificial intelligence cannot make cool shit, but it can help me learn how to make cool shit.

Brilliant.

I lied: there was one more print shop upgrade today. I installed my father’s Boston KS pencil sharpener. See also The Museum of Norm.

Our final print shop upgrade of the weekend: we hung a metal rack, inherited from architect Bill Chandler, and formerly used to display material samples, on the wall, with an eye to using it to displaying “tiny things that can be hung from pegs.”

Those in the photo are some tests.

I feel like I’ve become mid-level accomplished at drilling into concrete (key: patience).

Another studio update today: we hung a print by Martin Rutte on the wall behind the press. An excellent wellspring for creative inspiration.  

We made two nice updates to the print shop today.

First, we recycled a shelf that had outlived its usefulness at home to become printmaking ink storage. This required, among other things, drilling into concrete mortar (slow, dusty).

Second, we came up with a way of displaying our inventory of prints for a planned series of pop-up sales. We ended up using vinyl gutters for this, which was inexpensive ($22, all-in) and easy to install.

Stay tuned for announcements of our pop-ups, where you’ll get to see both in person.

Jon Udell, whose words I’ve been reading for years, back to his days at BYTE, writes about his personal connection to USAID:

The great adventure of my birth family was the fifteen months we lived in New Delhi, from June of 1961, on a USAID-sponsored educational mission. So the destruction of USAID feels personal. I’m only now realizing that we were there at the very beginning of USAID, during what Jackie Kennedy later mythologized as the Camelot era. On a tour of India, at a meet-and-greet in New Delhi, she appears in this family photo.

We must have been at the embassy, she’s surrounded by Americans. You can see a few South Asian faces in the background. The young boy at the center of the photo, gazing up at the queen of Camelot, is five-year-old me.

It could have been a Life Magazine cover: “A vision in white, Jackie represents America’s commitment to be of service to the world.” As corny as that sounds, though, the commitment was real. Our nation upheld it for sixty years and then, a few months ago, fed it to the wood chipper and set in motion a Holocaust-scale massacre.

See also Hundreds of Thousands Will Die, an interview of Atul Gawande by The New Yorker editor David Remnick, which finishes:

But this is not just an event. This is not just something that happened. This is a process, and its absence will make things worse and worse and have repercussions, including the loss of many, many, maybe countless, lives. Is it irreparable? Is this damage done and done forever?

This damage has created effects that will be forever. Let’s say they turned everything back on again, and said, “Whoops, I’m sorry.” I had a discussion with a minister of health just today, and he said, “I’ve never been treated so much like a second-class human being.” He was so grateful for what America did. “And for decades, America was there. I never imagined America could be indifferent, could simply abandon people in the midst of treatments, in the midst of clinical trials, in the midst of partnership—and not even talk to me, not even have a discussion so that we could plan together: O.K., you are going to have big cuts to make. We will work together and figure out how to solve it.”

That’s not what happened. He will never trust the U.S. again. We are entering a different state of relations. We are seeing lots of other countries stand up around the world—our friends, Canada, Mexico. But African countries, too, Europe. Everybody’s taking on the lesson that America cannot be trusted. That has enormous costs.

It’s tragic and outrageous, no?

That is beautifully put. What I say is—I’m a little stronger. It’s shameful and evil.

Ira Tries Stand-up Comedy (For Real), wherein Ira gets stand-up advice from Mike Birbilgia, is pure joy to listen to.