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Eater has a longer article on how sourdough, and bread in general, is back in fashion and the changes being inflicted on the millenias-old staple by tech bros.
“I spent a lot of time — I don’t want to say ‘debugging,’ because that sounds really technical — but just working on recipes and trying to teach myself and there really weren’t a lot of materials out there at the time to do that,” he told me by phone this spring. “With bread baking, you kind of follow an algorithm to produce a result and that result isn’t always what you think it’s going to be, so you kind of have to step back and debug and diagnose the steps along the way. How did I go wrong here? That’s because technically the temperature might not be right or the dough strength might not be right. That iterative procedure and working through those algorithms kind of appeals to engineer. There’s the precision part of it, but also, when it comes down to it, technical people like to work with their hands. You want to construct something and I think bread is a good way to do that.”
(Score: 5, Touché) by Uncle_Al on Tuesday November 20 2018, @10:30PM (18 children)
"there really weren’t a lot of materials out there at the time to do that"
There are these things on paper called BOOKS
you can learn all sorts of things from what is written in them
In particular, BREADMAKING
Check it out "bro"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @10:35PM (3 children)
Yo uncle bro, RTFA
"With custom-made bread ovens, temperature-controlled proofing boxes, at-home grain mills, laser thermometers, and a $600, 52-pound cookbook."
I think 52 pounds of BOOK is more than enough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @10:42PM (2 children)
That $600 cookbook was written by another bro, bro. The patent troll guy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @11:01PM (1 child)
Bro that point doesn't even matter because bros making books for other bros still results in books being read by bros as opposed to the original point "There are these things on paper called BOOKS" made by some old person I'm guessing who thinks millenials are all bros who bro it up without the slightest bro idea about how to bro. I mean read.
(Score: 3, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday November 20 2018, @11:15PM
But it's cool, bro. As you were.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday November 20 2018, @10:35PM (9 children)
Real bros don't eat carb loaded bread.
Real bros go paleo, breh.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Tuesday November 20 2018, @11:17PM (7 children)
Bread is paleo, bro.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/16/archaeologists-find-earliest-evidence-of-bread [theguardian.com]
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 21 2018, @12:33AM (6 children)
Paleo was the diet of 100,000+ years ago, not 14,000 years ago.
Dawn of agriculture took toll on health [blogspot.com]
Early Farmers Were Sicker and Shorter Than Their Forager Ancestors [discovermagazine.com]
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday November 21 2018, @12:53AM (5 children)
If you're getting that rigorous, then it's bloody difficult to go paleo - you'd want to eat only wild game and wild plants, since the nutritional profiles of pretty much every domesticated animal and plant is radically distorted from anything available 100,000 years ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @01:10AM (4 children)
The problem is people consuming minerals from plants and animals raised in one area and then shitting them out somewhere else where human population is denser and flushed into water purification plants. The minerals are then often filtered out of the water by one means or another and go who knows where. It is a recipe for less nutritious food (mineral-wise) and creating a requirement to buying supplements from people who get to collect minerals from human waste (the right to do so is controlled by the government).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221451411500121X [sciencedirect.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 21 2018, @01:43AM (3 children)
That might be a contributing factor, but the organisms themselves have also been bred to be far more calorie-rich and easily digestible than their ancestors. Even if the two plants were grown in the exact same soil, the modern varients would be far more calorie-rich and less nutritious per pound. And animals - ever eat wild game - very little fat, strong gamey flavor - modern farm animals are more like meat-pudding on the hoof than traditional meat.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday November 21 2018, @02:58AM (2 children)
Yeah, exactly. The "paleo" diet is nonsense unless you eat the original wild plants and animals. I remember watching a video a few years back from an actual paleobotanist who tried to explain just how enormous the quantity of fiber you'd be eating would be to get the amount of calories in modern varieties of fruits and vegetables that have been bred over the millennia. And how much energy you'd expend chewing. And digesting.
There's a very good reason why agriculture developed and the human diet focused more on grain (as well as breeding fruits and vegetables to be more calorie- and nutrient-dense) -- because living on the "real" paleo diet was difficult to get enough energy and nutrition from.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @04:03AM (1 child)
It works exactly as advertised. It is basically low carb so you feel less hungry (smaller insulin spikes I would guess). Anyone can try this shit for a week and see so it is ridiculous to still hear people pontificating about it.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday November 22 2018, @05:52PM
Not knocking the actual diet itself - it is in fact a lot closer to scientific recommendations, and the diet of a "wild human". It's just that often pretentious people pretending they're actually eating anything like our ancestors did 100,000 years ago gets annoying fast.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Tuesday November 20 2018, @11:40PM
When your bro goes pale-o it's time to open the truck's window or pass the bucket-o.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday November 21 2018, @02:05AM (3 children)
Okay, I'm not sure when this guy started, but let's note there was a lot of nonsense in books about bread until about 20 years ago -- particularly if you wanted to make traditional "artisan" breads of the crusty variety, and especially if you wanted to know anything about sourdough.
I know. I looked. I'll get to explaining that in a second, but let me just say that this article made me incredibly angry reading it. I'm not sure I've read an article this long that was so ignorant in a while.
You see, in the summer of 2003 I set off on a quest to make sourdough bread. I don't really know why. I had a friend who baked his bread every week (not sourdough, nothing special, just fresh bread and always the same), and I made his recipe a few times. And I experimented with some other things over the years. And then in 2003 I decided I wanted to make sourdough.
And you know what? I was really hard to find ANYTHING useful in books. I bought several and borrowed plenty more from libraries. There was a lot of crap about sourdough out there -- a lot of BS based on cooking and baking lore, not science. The best resources were on the internet back then, and they were hard to find. I was inspired in part by Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice, but even that book was woefully uninformative in good sourdough information. I soon bought Jeff Hamelman's book, which is basically the best book on bread technique ever (though not really for beginners -- there's an entire chapter on shaping techniques that took my bread to the next level). And he had some good, reputable info on sourdough cultures, but again not a lot.
Back in 2003, there were scattered bits in info on the web about sourdough. I resorted to going to the university library and looking up food science journal articles, because that was the only place to really find good info.
Anyhow, you know what? There really wasn't good info on sourdough cultures available in books until Tartine Bread (mentioned in the article) came out. That book annoys me in places and is overkill, but it gets a lot of stuff right that no bread books were talking about until recently. Up through the 1990s, you mostly had books devoted to the American style of white bread where everything was about speed. Flavor, texture, etc. was secondary to the 1950s ideal of making bread quick and easy and like Wonderbread. Sure, you could find books about other types of bread, but they were often influenced even in their recipes for traditional breads by the obsession with quicker yeast, bread machines, etc.
As for TFA -- it's written by someone who obviously thinks it's weird that so many men are baking bread and obsessing over it. But look back at history, moronic author! Who were the chefs who wrote the classic cookbooks on French and German bread styles in previous generations? That's right -- they were men. Yes, I'm sure there were plenty of great female cooks too, but why should it be surprising to anyone that men are authoring cookbooks on fancy artisan food? How many top chefs in previous generations were men? Men are often more obsessive about the details of cooking than women... that stereotype likely has some truth. And prejudice in the past about who "authorities" were played a role in sexism.
But the author's idiotic idea that somehow men are "disrupting" the bread-baking world now by obsessing about details is just nonsense. Peter Reinhart arguably reintroduced this obsessiveness to American bread-making about 20 years ago, something the author clearly knows nothing about. You know where Reinhart learned his stuff? From French bakers -- male bakers -- who were still doing it "the old way." He went and studied with them, and then wrote his books. Tartine is an expansion of this stuff, particularly emphasizing sourdough techniques that were less known in the U.S. until recently (except among professional bakers and those who searched internet forums on breadmaking, as I did).
I'm all for giving women credit, and I deplore sexism, but this article is just bizarre. And for all its talk of "disruption," I'm not really sure what the hell the author is talking about. People have been obsessed with bread techniques for generations -- lots of scientific studies of bread in the early to mid 20th century clarified this stuff and led to advances in technique. Again, most of these were well-known to professional bakers and food scientists.
Whatever these tech folks in Silicon Valley are doing -- they aren't "disrupting" the bread industry. Maybe they're disrupting their own households by taking time to make bread. I see nothing in the article that says anybody is changing anything... except maybe Leahy and his "no-knead" method (which the author grudgingly admits maybe somebody else published previous recipes -- ignoring the history of bread recipes with little kneading that literally goes back CENTURIES!). The (re-)popularization of "no-knead" methods about a decade ago certainly made it more likely that a home cook might produce passable crusty bread without a lot of work. But it hardly disrupted the bread industry, which already by that time was moving back toward "artisan" loaves in specialty shops and serving up crusty baguettes at your local supermarket. That's the reason the damn recipe got the attention it did at that point -- because people were interested in better bread and this recipe allowed them to make it at home!
I made my first sourdough bread-build spreadsheet back in that summer of 2003. I have my "lab notes" from creating my first sourdough cultures, experimenting with all sorts of technical elements and parameters. Back then it was the Wild West because nobody knew anything, books were full of bullshit on sourdough, and 90% of the stuff on the internet was bullshit (well, that's always true). Lots of folks in internet communities were doing it back then. And we cobbled together knowledge that eventually got picked up by a more readers and allowed these "bread bros" to exist now. They actually have decent info if they know where to find it. They don't have to do the primary research themselves, as TFA makes it sound like they are doing. The idea that the author of TFA thinks this is new, let alone "disruptive" (what the hell does that mean anyway?) and suddenly male-dominated is just idiocy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @02:19AM (1 child)
Sourdough isn't so complicated that you need a book to learn how to do it. Make a starter, make bread, you're done. It's really no different than any other baking except for the starter and fermentation time. The science can be interesting but is totally unnecessary to baking a good loaf. This is a good resource if you like that stuff though: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=BCD41CAAE6C67E3E98FFEEB2FFA114C4 [lib.rus.ec]
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday November 21 2018, @02:37AM
First, making a starter is in fact an easy process, but most people think it's incredibly challenging. The reason is because of all the crap out there about it. As I said, there's a lot of BS lore out there (e.g., "catching the wild yeasts from the air" when most of the yeast that gets a starter going is likely found on the flour; many traditional "starter" recipes involved adding all sorts of contaminants from grape skins to potatoes to milk, which likely led to most contamination rotting and failure, or starting with bakers yeast to "kick start" things when it just interferes with the establishment of proper microorganisms, etc., etc.). There's a lot of BS lore about maintaining starters too -- from "don't touch it with metal utensils" or "don't use plastic" or whatever to stuff like you have to maintain THIS feeding schedule or you can't maintain a starter under these conditions (temperature, type of flour, hydration level, or whatever).
There is simply a lot of crap out there about this, and it has only been sifted through in the past decade or so... and you'll still see all sorts of nonsense in cookbooks about this.
Secondly, it's easy to make standard "sourdough" bread. It's less easy to understand how to use "sourdough" (i.e., natural yeast) as a tool to make just about any bread type, including sweeter breads, brioche, or whatever you want. If you don't want the sour flavor to be prominent, you need to understand the longer process. Again, it's not especially complicated, but that process was basically unknown to American home bakers until recent years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @03:02AM
Usenet was amazing for this sort of thing. Using info from usenet, I started making breads (including home made starter sourdough) around 1992 (access to Internet through university). Food preservation FAQ on usenet was super informative too. Started canning etc. stuff from the garden after reading that. This info was on the Internet (pre www) for around 30 years now. How to turn soybeans from the garden into tofu, and make tempeh I learned, in person, from hippies, though.