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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @07:37PM (2 children)
Basically, give different bakers (not bros, sorry), the same ingredients (first order, which is the surprise I guess)
and the bread comes out differently.
Which explains the magic.
Like most things that grow in a petri dish, it takes significant effort to just grow what you want, and even more to figure out what you want.
Biology - seldom does what you want it to (and here's the Trump meme insertion point).
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/11/12/665655220/sourdough-hands-how-bakers-and-bread-are-a-microbial-match [npr.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday November 21 2018, @10:17PM
Ummm... how about sourdough feet?
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 22 2018, @06:05AM
What I could never figure out was that when baking while in a good mood, the bread almost always turns out excellent. When baking while in a foul mood, although relaxing, the bread almost always turns out poorly. My guess is that it affects the kneading somehow.