How to Make 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread

Good Evening,

Making bread at home is an immensely rewarding hobby. Like most types of cooking, bread baking is relaxing, and the fermenting/baking/cooling bread makes your home smell wonderful. Moreover, fresh bread tastes much better than bread you can buy in the store.

I, unfortunately, suffer from a love of whole wheat. Whole wheat is much more difficult to mold into a loaf, because it has a much lower proportion of gluten than white flour. Gluten is what allows a ball of wheat dough to hold its form and trap the air and alcohol that give bread its fluffiness and flavor, respectively, during the fermentation process. So, to make good whole wheat bread, you have to get creative.

Making sandwich bread, with its thin crust and relatively dense interior, is another matter in addition. So, where's a home baker who wants to eat his peanut butter on home made bread to turn? I'll tell you...

Now, dear reader, behold! The making of whole wheat sandwich bread.

Nutritional Information (from www.myfitnesspal.com/recipe/calculator)
Creates two loaves. Gross nutritional information:
Calories: 3,794
Carbs: 674 g
Fat: 88 g
Protein: 111 g
Sodium: 3,416 mg
Sugar: 123 g

Assuming 40 slices total, per slice nutritional information:
Calories: 95
Carbs: 17 g
Fat: 2 g
Protein: 3 g
Sodium: 85 mg
Sugar: 3 mg

Ingredients
-6 cups whole wheat flour (2 cups reserved)
-1.75 cups lukewarm water (1/4 cup reserved)
-1/2 cup whole milk
-1 packet active dry yeast
-1 pinch sugar
- ~1/3 cup olive oil
- ~1/3 cup honey
-1.5 teaspoons sea salt
-4 tablespoons vital wheat gluten

Directions

-Combine ¼ cup lukewarm water, yeast, and pinch of sugar. Stir until it enters suspension. Let sit until it develops a bubbly appearance, about 5 minutes.

-Combine 2 cups flour, ½ cup milk, 1.5 cups lukewarm water, and yeast mixture in a mixing bowl until well combined. Let sit for about 20 minutes to form a “sponge”

Image 1: The Sponge (this is after I added the olive oil in the next step)

-Add 1/3 cup oil, then 1/3 cup honey to the sponge and stir well. Add salt and vital wheat gluten and stir well.

-Begin adding the 4 cups of additional flour, starting 1 cup at a time. After adding each dose of flour, stir until the new flour is fully integrated into the forming dough. After adding sufficient flour, stirring will become impossible, so switch to mixing by hand. You will be able to tell when you have reached the right balance of flour to liquid when the dough begins cleaning flour off the sides of the mixing bowl and stops sticking in gobs to your fingers.

Image 2: Adding flour to the dough

Image 3: This is what your proto-dough will look like when each new cup is fully mixed

-When the dough stops sticking to everything it touches, dust your counter with flour and turn the dough out on the countertop.

Image 4: A BALL OF DOUGH!

-You will now knead the dough for ten minutes. The purpose of kneading is to mash the different gluten fibers together so that they will form a complex lattice that will trap air and alcohol that the yeast produces during the rise. Kneading should feel like you compressing the dough, never pulling it apart. Mash the dough down into a flat rectangle, then turn it, fold it over onto itself, and compress it again. At the end of 10 minutes, it will be difficult to fully compress it, and this is how you know you have kneaded enough.

Image 5: I want you to want me (flatten the dough with the heels of your palms)

Image 6: I need you to knead me! (rotate the dough 90 degrees then fold, then flatten again)

-Roll the dough into a ball and place it, smooth side up, in a lightly oiled bowl. Cover the bowl, and go do what you want for no less than an hour, and no more than 2 hours, until the dough ball has approximately doubled in size.

Image 7: Dough Ball

Image 8: It Is Risen

-Take the now much larger ball of dough and turn it out on your re-floured counter. Gently flatten it, then cut it in half. Roll the dough up and shape each half into a cylinder about as long as your loaf pans (a loaf pan is a tall, thin pan that you use specifically for baking loaves of bread). Do the same with the other half. Make sure the bottom of each dough loaf is clean by pinching the final seam you create when rolling the dough.

Image 9: Smack that Loaf

Image 10: Loaf Mitosis

-Lightly oil your loaf pans and place a loaf in each. Cover with a towel, and wander off for at least an hour, until the loaves have approximately doubled in size.

Image 11: Form the Loaf, Make It Pretty. Or Not.

Image 12: It Is Risen, Indeed!

-10 to 20 minutes before baking, prepare the oven. Preheat to 350 degrees farenheit and place an extra pan on the bottom rack.

-When the loaves have risen indeed and the oven reached 350 degrees, throw three ice cubes on the pan in the bottom of the oven, then place your loaves in the oven. Bake your loaves for 10 minutes, tossing 3 ice cubes on the bottom rack every 3-4 minutes during the first 10 minutes.

-After the first 10 minutes of baking, turn the loaf pans around, and tent some aluminum foil above them (no need to make it snug). Stop throwing ice in the oven and let the bread bake for 30 minutes.

-Take the bread out of the oven and turn out into a wire rack to cool. Rub a stick of butter all over the crust (this will make the crust extra wonderful). Once the bread is fully cooled, cut off an end and enjoy wheaty wonder!


Image 13: Cool, Buttered Loaves


Image 14: The End Is Nigh!

And that, my friends, is how you make a loaf of 100% whole wheat sandwich bread.

Chana Masala a la Ape

Chana Masala is a vegetarian (potentially vegan-friendly) dish usually served over basmati rice. Traditionally, it consists of chickpeas (also known as garbanzo beans, and referred to by me as chimpanzo keans) and tomatoes in a moderately spiced sauce. The combination of chimpanzo keans with rice (or barley, or other grain) provides a complete protein.* Never the traditionalist, and somewhat obsessed with nutrition, I decided to make it with a lot of extra vegetable matter, and approximately 8 times more of all of the spices and much more oil than usual. Feel free to experiment with other vegetables (peas, lentils, and carrots would probably all be great) and discuss your experiences in the comment section.

Ingredient List
-1/4 cup olive oil
-Half cup peanut oil
-1 onion, chopped
-4 cloves garlic, minced
-One yukon gold potato, chopped
-Handful of green beans, chopped
-One green bell pepper, chopped
-Two habanero peppers, minced
-1 cup basmati rice
-1 cup water
-Whole lot of additional water for part 1
-2 tablespoons ground coriander
-2 tablespoons paprika
-1 Big finger of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped
-1 big length of fresh turmeric root, peeled and chopped
-2 tablespoons cayenne pepper
-2 tablespoons ground black pepper
-1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
-1.5 cups of dry chickpeas/garbanzo beans/chimpanzo keans. Do not use canned beans!
-1 15 ounce can diced tomatoes in juice (or, you can juice and dice your own tomatoes)
-2 large bay leaves
-1 16 ounce can of coconut milk
-Lots of salt

Directions
1. Your adventure with chana masala will begin much like every adventure anyone has ever had with any type of dry bean. Grab your chimpanzo keans, and put them in a pot of water (usually, there's some specific amount of water you're supposed to use, but just make sure the water covers the beans by a lot). Put the pot on the stove and bring the water to a boil. Once the water is boiling, turn the stove off and ignore the beans for at least 8 hours. Even if it seems like they're doing something interesting, ignore the beans for at least 8 hours. Then, drain the water and dump the beans in a slow cooker and fill that with water and cook on low heat for another 4-6 hours. Alternatively, you may put the beans back in the pot, add water, bring the water to a boil on the stove, then let the beans simmer for 1-1.5 hours. I prefer the slow cooker method, so I can take my dog to the park. Do periodic "bite tests" to see if your beans have reached the right level of tenderness.

2. Once your chimpanzo keans are prepared, you can begin the real cooking process. First, cook the rice. If you do not know how to cook the rice, learn to cook rice. You use the same cooking process to cook virtually every grain (barley, quinoa, etc.),  Heat olive oil in a large heavy pot over medium heat; add the onion and saute until it becomes translucent (about 5-10 minutes); add garlic, potato, green beans, bell pepper, habanero pepper, and peanut oil, and saute/fry (at this point, there's probably too much oil to really call it a light sauteing) until everything is reasonably soft (about 10 minutes); add 1/4 cup of water along with all remaining spices except salt (coriander, paprika, ginger, turmeric, cayenne pepper, black pepper, and cinnamon), then cook and stir until fragrant. This should take another 3-5 minutes.

3. Add chickpeas, tomatoes in juice, remaining 3/4 cups of water, and bay leaf into the mixture; bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer until all flavors have blended (about 10-15 minutes). Stir in the coconut milk and simmer for 2-3 more minutes. Salt to your heart's content.

4. Dump it on some rice and eat it. The sweetness of the rice should provide a pleasant counterbalance to the spiciness of the food.

*Note: "complete protein" is an inverted reference to the fact that there are 9 "essential amino acids" that human beings need to eat because our bodies can't synthesize them. Advocates of meat consumption claim people have to eat meat at every meal because no single plant provides a "complete" protein. First, people do not need to eat a complete protein at every meal; you'd do fine if you ate, e.g., histidine only in the morning, lysine only at lunch, phenylalanine only at dinner, and tryptophan only right before bed, then subbed in the other 5 essential amino acids the next day. Second, this is not true. Any combination of grain (e.g. wheat, rice, barley) plus legume (e.g., peanut, kidney beans, chickpeas, soy) provides all 9 essential amino acids, and quinoa by itself provides all 9 essential amino acids. The human body does not take in protein and use it directly; every protein is broken down into amino acids, and then the body uses the amino acids to synthesize human proteins, so the source is irrelevant. As long as you're getting all of the essential amino acids in sufficient quantity, you'll do fine. A more accurate critique of vegetarianism/veganism is that you have to eat a much larger volume of plant matter to get the calories and macronutrients meat provides. In a society where your chances of obesity by far exceed your chances of starvation, this critique begs the question: "so?"

Snowmageddon 2012

Icey Twigs

All of the trees must bow before the whim of Snowmageddon!

ALL OF THE TREES

Frosted roots.

Poem: I Want

I Want...

To wish the world away 

to shroud my sight in darkness 

listen to the silence 

and breathe the empty air. 

Touch an absent hardness 

lose all my defiance 

and taste the nothing there. 

Then dream the world aware 

from art to God to science 

filled with love and kindness. 

Wake mind fully bare, 

complete, with no reliance 

sight restored from blindness 

and live my dreams each day.

Movie Review: ParaNorman

ParaNorman is a very good movie. It is animated in the style that made The Nightmare Before Christmas so charming. It is dark, and imparts what I consider to be good values without being wishy washy and heavy handed in imparting them.

Story: a boy can see and talk to ghosts. This leads to a lot of hurtful actions from his fellow students, grown-ups, and his parents. He lives in a town once cursed by a witch, who was an 18th century female version of himself. Because of the time period she grew up in, the consequence of her being weird was her execution by hanging, rather than the incessant grind of bullying and "why can't you just be normal?"s. Norman is tasked with sating the spirit of this witch and subduing the curse year after year, but he ultimately ends the curse and frees the witch's soul to paradise (or at least oblivion) with some pretty skillful psychology.

The movie is about abnormal people who are generally castigated or ignored by their peers, the people who should care about them most, and society in general. It shows that we are useful people. I think my favorite line from the movie is the ghost of the boy's grandmother saying "it's okay to be afraid...as long as you don't let it change who you are." Learning to be yourself and everything you want to be in the face of fear--whether justified or not--that you will be rejected or disliked is a very difficult lesson to learn in any sort of meaningful sense (i.e. I'm still learning it).

Generally, the animation is not what you would describe as "attractive" so much as cool. However, the visual beauty of the animation builds up to the climax, which is just about the most amazing animation I've ever seen. The final scenes are beautiful to watch.

Movie Review--Bloodworth

Bloodworth is a movie about two people: a man from the Tennessee hill country who abandoned his family 40 years before the movie starts, and his grandson. The grandson ultimately walks away from his entire insane hillbilly family. It ends with "the one who gets out" setting fire to his family's country cabin and walking way, a la What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

This movie was quite good. There are parts that are a bit overdone, but I liked it! The basic tension in the plot is between the importance of family, and the importance of walking away from the people you're bound to if they hold you down and back.

I've come to accept the fact that I like virtually all movies, and no one who ever reads my movie reviews is likely to ever see a negative movie review out of me.

Movie Reviews Catching Up

I'm not very consistent about blogging. I'm generally pretty busy all the time. Here are quick reviews of other movies I have seen.

The Dark Knight Rises
This was a good movie.

My Summer of Love
My Summer of Love was generally a pretty good movie. One problem with the version of it I saw is that the spoken lines did not match up at all with the video. This was very frustrating. I initially thought that it was because it was originally shot in a foreign language, but after carefully studying the main characters' mouths during some dialogue, I concluded that this was incorrect.

The basic plot is that a poor girl meets a wealthy girl. They fall in love and engage in a youthful romance over the course of the summer. The poor girl's brother is hyper-religious, sort of the born again variety. She, herself, is very passionate, almost to the point of insanity. The wealthy girl is a masterful manipulator and deceiver who ultimately breaks her heart and goes back to school.

I would recommend this to most folks.

The Darwin Awards
This movie was hilarious. The plot is: a detective gets fired after he allows a serial killer to escape under comical circumstances (relating to his fear of blood). He then goes to work for an insurance company. There's a big plot hole here; he is trying to sell what seems to be an aggregate analysis system to help insurance companies properly underwrite life insurance policies by injecting a "probability of dying as a result of extreme stupidity" element into the underwriting algorithms. But, what he actually ends up doing is post-claims auditing to deny insurance claims filed by people who do extremely stupid things. So, I don't see how his original premise matches up with the assignment he is ultimately given.

That point aside, the movie was hilarious and touches on the humanity of people who die under circumstances that are so stupid as to be kind of comical.

Donnie Darko
This was a great movie. Based on the fact that everyone who knows me has said that I would love this movie, I will assume that everyone who knows me has seen this movie. It is weird, it is quirky, it is enjoyable. Watch it.

Little known fact: a young Seth Rogen appears scattered throughout Donnie Darko. By that, I don't mean to say that he was chopped up and his body parts were scattered in various sets in the movie (which would make sense), but that he appears in numerous scenes throughout.

Weird Science
The main lesson I learned from Weird Science was that the 80s were a dark and frightening time, and I'm glad I had only very limited consciousness of my existence throughout them. The story is that two high school geeks use their computer to create a living woman out of a toy doll. She has more or less magical powers (I'm sure the creators intended her to just have super-physics powers but, hey, what's the difference?). She embarks on a quest to not only make them cool by being their hot older woman friend, but to also make them actually cool, mature young men who stand up for themselves and the people they care about, and stand up to bullies and dickish older brothers. She is successful in this quest.

I would definitely recommend this movie to most folks. It's kind of geeky, but funny, so people should see it.

Malice in Wonderland
The trouble with Malice in Wonderland was that I was drunk when I watched it, and it was kind of a spacey interpretation of parts of Alice in Wonderland, which I haven't read in a long long time. I remember liking it quite a bit and feeling that the reviews were unduly harsh. The plot is that a girl suffering from amnesia gets run over by a cab driver in London. The cab driver is a drug dealer who's late for a party at a criminal kingpin's house. The kingpin is about to set up a bank robbery, and it is believed that he will divvy up jobs for the robbery (and, hence, its profits) to whosoever should bring him the best gift. The amnesiatic girl is the daughter of some high power, criminal-type businessman. Anyway, there were lots of little adventures that were fun to watch, and I'd recommend people seeing this.

The only line I remember from the movie was the riddle "what has no conditions but one condition" (the obvious answer being "love"). I remember this because I thought it was oh-so-insightful in my drunken stupor.

TiMER
This was a fun movie! The premise is that a company has developed an implant that can read a person's internal signals and calculate the precise moment when they will meet their soulmate. This resonates with a theory my father has espoused for most of my life--that people marry the people they marry not for who they are but because they happen to be ready to settle down and get married at the time they're dating them. Another way I've heard this theory stated is: "don't think that you're going to be the one who can convince another person to settle down. They'll be ready to settle down when they're ready to settle down and if you happen to get them when they're not ready, you're fucked." I happen to think about that topic an awful lot--whether perhaps I've met the right person but just wasn't ready to be with the right person or the right person wasn't quite ready to be with their right (see graph below for a representation of this thinking)...anyway, I digress.

The movie has its funny moments, and the un-timer-ed romance in the midst of it is sweet. The male object of that romance was possibly the prettiest man I've ever seen in a movie. It's weird being a guy and seeing a guy and thinking "wow, I could really agree that he's pleasant to look at" is a weird experience. I digress again. In the end, the various romantic developments turn two sisters against each other, and the protagonist ends up meeting the man of her dreams one morning while out on a jog.

Ultimately, this movie could have been a lot better than it was. It didn't utilize the dramatic tension well enough, and it could have been funnier. But it's a good way to enjoy an evening at home alone or with someone else if you're both in the mood for some goodhearted fun.

12 Monkeys
12 Monkeys is pretty widely known, so I'll be brief. The plot is that a man from the future keeps getting booted back into time to discover and/or stop the source of an outbreak of plague that more than decimates the human population and drives the remainder underground. He repeatedly runs into the same psychiatrist (who initially treated him as a paranoid schizophrenic on his first trip back in time), and ends up kidnapping her and convincing her of the veracity of his claims. In the end, he almost stops the release of the plague and dies in front of his childhood self in the past. It is pretty well-acted, and the effects are silly enough to be enjoyable.

Ruby Sparks
This movie tells the story of a washed out, high school drop-out author of a wildly successful book at the age of 19 who has writer's block at 29. As part of an assignment from his psychiatrist, he creates a character named Ruby Sparks, the girl of his dreams. Then she steps out of the page and into his life. This theme has been done a few times before, and this telling of it was charming. The best, most insightful scenes are at the home of the protagonist's parents, where you see that the protagonist really is not very comfortable in his own skin around other people who are comfortable in theirs. He is rude, ungrateful, and withdrawn, largely because his mother does not fit into the mold that he believes his mother should fit into. This behavior drives Ruby away before he decides to manipulate her by writing new facts about her into his story, which forces her to do whatever he's written. Ultimately, he releases her and wipes her memory, and turns the whole story into a novel that sells very well.

The movie is, at heart, about the folly of forcing people into the boxes of our expectations for them. The lead character is driven by his view of the way people should be, and when he encounters a divergence from his pre-set vision he (1) ignores it so thoroughly that he doesn't notice it, (2) runs from it and hates the person who diverges from his image of them, or (3) tries to force a change to make the person align with how he thinks they should be. Freud once defined love as "the overestimation of its object" (this is actually a misconstruction of what Freud said; he was only talking about sex). In my opinion, you can't truly love a person until you accept them as they are and love all aspects of them. A quote I came up with when I was 17 (i.e. this isn't a new theory for me): "perfection makes us beautiful, our imperfections make us lovable."

I think that's all the movies I've watched in the last three weeks or so.