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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: 2) by rleigh on Wednesday November 21 2018, @04:13PM
I don't get why you need to optimise it so much. It comes out tasty and edible whatever you do!
Flour, salt, butter/oil/lard, seeds, yeast. If you get the proportions wrong, it's usually still really nice. If you let it ferment too long or too little, still nice. Cook too short/long/wrong temperature, still nice. Just comes out hard fired or a bit softer. If you want absolute consistency, then it might make it worth the effort, but if all you want is something tasty to toast or make sandwiches with, then it seems a bit pointless.
The only thing I ever did which made it awful was to forget the salt!
I am getting more into it now though. I just got a 25kg bag of white bread flour plus smaller ones of wholemeal/spelt/rye, and make a loaf or morning rolls every ~3 days. Only takes 10 minutes to prepare other than waiting for it to rise and bake.