Archive for January 20th, 2013

Bread blogging: Sourdough Beer Bread.

Sunday, January 20th, 2013

I thought I’d go back and revisit a recipe I’d made recently, but didn’t document here: sourdough beer bread from Brody and Apter, pages 141-143.

I kind of screwed this one up. Instinctively I put in an entire tablespoon of yeast, which is standard for most Brody and Apter recipes. But I forgot this was a starter-based bread until after I added the yeast; I really only needed half that much (one and a half teaspoons). The end result was a bread that I think was over-yeasted and over risen, making the top kind of ugly.

(This time I used a better camera than the spectacular cell phone CrapCam.) Here’s a top view:

So, yeah, kind of lumpy and mis-shaped, at least as far as the top crust goes. But I blame the over-yeasting/over-rising for that. How does it look inside?

Not too bad, actually. It has a nice texture and a slight, but not overwhelming, sourdough tang to it. It toasts up well; I’ve been eating it for breakfast with some butter and honey. I also made a big pot of French Onion Soup, and this bread was a nice compliment to it just placed in the bowl with some grated Cheddar cheese (not traditional, but I was trying to use it up before it went bad). This would be a good sandwich bread, too; perhaps a nice patè, or some good meat and cheese.

I think I’d like a little bit more sourdough tang to it, but that may just be my starter. The nice thing about this bread is that you don’t need much beyond starter to make it; flour, yeast, salt, sugar, and some beer, all of which I generally have on hand. This is probably a B; maybe an A if I make it again with the correct amount of yeast.

I’ve got everything lined up now to make Brody’s Sourdough Chèvre Bread (have you ever tried to find powdered goat’s milk?), but I want to take a break from Brody. The next bread in the queue is Laurence Simon’s French Onion Bread. (Sorry, Mom.)

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The Baseball Gods Must Be Angry.

Sunday, January 20th, 2013

Stan Musial died yesterday. NYT. St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

“There is only one way to pitch to Musial — under the plate,” Leo Durocher, the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants teams that Musial often victimized, once said.

There are some other things I like from the various obits:

A gentlemanly and sunny figure — he loved to play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on his harmonica — he was never ejected from a game.

Take that, Earl Weaver.

The Dodgers’ Don Newcombe, major league baseball’s first black pitching star, recalled hearing taunts from some Cardinals players, but never from Musial or Schoendienst, Musial’s longtime roommate.
“We’d watch ’em in the dugout,” Newcombe told George Vecsey in “Stan Musial: An American Life.” “Wisecracks, call names. I could see from the mound when I got there in ’49. You never saw guys like Musial or Schoendienst. They never showed you up. The man went about his job and did it damn well and never had the need to sit in the dugout and call a black guy a bunch of names, because he was trying to change the game and make it what it should have been in the first place, a game for all people.”

And:

“A lot of times we would go visit kids in hospitals whenever we were on the road,” [Red] Schoendienst [Musial’s former teammate and roommate – DB] once said. “He didn’t want publicity for it, and he didn’t do it to seek recognition or humanitarian awards. He just did it because he thought it was the right thing to do. He enjoyed making other people happy and maybe give them a small ray of sunshine to brighten up their lives.”

The Post-Dispatch website says that today’s physical paper will include a “14-page special section” devoted to Stan The Man. I’m trying to think of a single Houston sports figure who would get the same treatment on their passing, and I can’t.

Posted in Clippings, Obits, Sports | 3 Comments »