Thwarted Again

Category: cooking

  • sourdough starter day 3

    I decided to make a couple of changes in the starter this morning based on what I’d been reading in the Tartine Bread book last night. I did find a brief mention of what the starter smells like and the sour vinegary smell is because the culture is leaning toward acetic acid production rather than lactic acid. He says that a warmer, wetter starter will move toward lactic acid production and smell more sweet and less sour.

    Previously my process looked like this:
    Every 12hrs:
    30g reserved starter +
    30g rye flour +
    30g water =
    90g (30% starter)

    This morning I did this
    20g reserved starter +
    20g rye flour +
    20g KA bread flour +
    45g water =
    105g (≈20% starter)

    This is more like the 50/50 white/wheat mix he was talking about and is ≈110% hydration rather than 100%. It’s Friday so I’m probably getting home later than usual so we’ll see how the starter gets along with an extra three hours or so of fermentation time. If everything goes ok after a day or two of this I may just go ahead and switch to the default feeding schedule in the book.

    Also, in the interests of science. The house, in A/C mode, is allowed to get to 80°F and probably has the last few days.

  • dinner

    I’ve made three meals using my fancy-ass Nomiku now. Tonight’s was the second batch of Jerk chicken. I did it at 63°C for 70 min where last night I did 64°C for 45 minutes. I also did not dredge them in flour and fry them this time, opting to just put them in a lightly oiled skillet. I should have used the non-stick skillet because they did stick pretty badly. The longer time and slightly lower temperature made the chicken come out more like a piece of fish. It was very good. I mixed it with penne pasta, a Kalamata olive pesto I made and steamed broccoli.

    Jerk chicken with penne, olive pesto and broccoli
    Jerk chicken with roasted Brussels sprouts
    NY strip with broccoli and brown rice

    Also my sourdough starter is going ok. I’m not entirely sure what it’s supposed to smell like but it’s kinda unpleasant and vinegary at feeding time so I think maybe it’s going to fast. I don’t really have a way to keep it at 65°F – 70°F though so I guess that’s just how it goes.

  • Cooking

    A while back (*cough* a year ago *cough*) I participated in the Kickstarter for a home immersion circulator for cooking sous vide called “Nomiku”. It finally showed up this week so I’ve been playing with it. I cooked a steak, broccoli and rice on Monday night and I did Jerk chicken a roasted Brussels sprouts tonight. The meats come out perfectly done. The steak was on the medium side of medium-rare all the way through and the chicken was what I would call medium/medium-well and probably could have been done a two or three degrees cooler with an extra half hour on the clock and would have been even juicier. I’ve been pretty happy with it but I have a way to go. I have learned that it is worth seasoning your meat before you bag and cook it. The steak was lacking something which I attribute to it not being salted and peppered before sous vide where I usually season the meat and let it rest for an hour or so before I grill it. The chicken marinated all day in the fridge and tasted wonderful.

    Also, I got the Tartine Bread book for my birthday and it is all about the sourdough starter so I started one of those and it’s going pretty good. The dude is super serious about his bread though and it basically takes more than an entire day to go from a piece of starter to a baked loaf you can eat so it’s the kind of thing where, at best, I’d get one loaf a week for seven days of twice daily feeding. It’s worth a try though and maybe the rhythm will stick with me.

    I’ve been putting the pictures of the new cooking in here:
    http://thwartedagain.com/zenphoto/cooking/

    When I was on my recent diet where in I got down to 160 lbs (normal!) I actually spent a lot of time baking. I didn’t really take any pictures but I made a blueberry pie and a cherry pie from scratch, some banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, some bread and some ice cream. I plan to continue with the baking so I’ll have some pictures of that at some point.

    bmi_end

    I had a pretty good birthday as far as such things go. I had dinner with a small group of friends (including the charming young lady who I have been seeing :D ) at Hillside Farmacy. The food was good and I got an egg creme soda and an ice cream cookie. I got a bottle of interesting Northeastern Italian dessert wine and a package of books from the aforementioned lady. I’ve read the first one, “The Lake” by Banana Yoshimoto and I really enjoyed it. Her style reminds me of Murakami but it is less surreal and is more concise. I think it’s interesting that characters in the Japanese books I read always seem to have their whole mental state thought out and seem to kind of passively observe their own life in first person. It’s strange. She tells me that it’s part of the Ukiyo-e tradition where the world can only be observed imperfectly through this separate layer (which the Blanton exhibit dubbed “The floating world” in the print exhibit I liked from years back) and that it is extremely common in Japanese literature. The everyday occurrence and acceptance of the supernatural and surreal is another common theme and there is a little of that in the book but not as much of that as Murakami likes to use either. Next up is a thriller / horror book and then I got a couple of silly things when I exchanged After Dark which I’d already read. Plus I have the rest of my To Be Read stack on the coffee table.

    I hurt my back while exercising on my diet and ended up re-injuring it several times through bad form, muscular imbalance, lack of flexibility and not enough healing time. As a result I ended up at the Orthopedist and he sent me to Physical Therapy which I finished last week. I have been given a laundry list of PT homework that I am to do from now on to maintain my core strength and posterior chain flexibility. I’m getting better at it but it’s slow. My goal now is to complete the entire set of homework three times per week for all of October. If I can stick to that I’ll allow myself the opportunity to resume lifting in a limited and cautious aspect. Also it’s time for the LiveStrong Challenge so I’ve been riding my bike again. Oddly enough I’ve been able to keep a decent pace even though I haven’t been riding much but the rides have been short so that’s not terribly surprising. I am quite a bit lighter than I was. I think this weekend I’m going to try to do 30 miles since it’s going to be nice out.

    I suppose that’s it for now. There’s been more going on but I need to be better about just putting stuff in here as it happens instead of always waiting months and then trying to cram it all in at once. Anyway, so far, so good.

  • mole

    I like mole. El Chile here in town does a good red Oaxacan mole (and holy crap I just learned they moved south of the river and the Manor location is closed. That is bullshit.) and Taco Deli does a good one too that they put in tacos. Both of those are red moles and there are a few other generally recognized varieties. Really though mole is from mōlli which means sauce and it encompasses and entire spectrum of sauces. So, that said, I’ve wanted to try making some for a while. I bought Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen cookbook because it has several mole recipes in it.

    This weekend I made the Adobo de Ancho Chile paste and last night I used that and a bunch of other stuff to make the Simple Red Mole recipe. It came out ok but I think not as good as either of the places I mentioned above. It took about three hours all told but that included quartering and poaching a chicken which was also a first for me. I also dirties every single thing in the kitchen.

    The recipe ended up making about 5.5 cups of sauce. I tallied up all the ingredients via the USDA Nutrient Database and I’ve decided that a batch is about 1300 kcal. A serving is about 1/3 cup which is about 80 kcal. That and 150g of chicken works out to around 350 kcal which isn’t too bad. With a serving of white rice that’s 500 kcal for lunch and you could add on another side for dinner to bring it into the 750 kcal range.

    That brings me to another topic: calorie counting. A friend has been doing this lately and has lost about 40 lbs which puts to mind the days of 2008 / 2009 when I went from 217 to 175. When I changed jobs I put 15-20lbs back on in free office soda and eating out all the time and then I got the bicycle and got back down to the high 170s. However there I’ve stayed oscillating between 175 and 180, doing bicycles and weights.

    Seeing my friend’s success I decided to take another run at getting down to “normal” BMI. People like to shit on BMI because athletes, people with metabolic disorders and people at the two sigma points on the height distribution don’t really fit into the BMI model. However, for the remaining 90% of the population it’s fairly well correlated to actual percent body fat. In particular, I’m built about as average as they come, my doctor says I’m 5’9″ (175cm). National average for over 20 males is 5’9.3″. I don’t have any metabolic disorders. I’m just a regular Joe. According to the BMI scale if I get to 168 lbs I’ll be a “normal” body weight where I am currently “overweight” and was “obese” before I started in 2008. So, as of this morning my scale says 172.2 lbs which is down 5 lbs from when I renewed my efforts. I decided that I was going to try to keep it up until my birthday in September as my gift to myself. A linear extrapolation puts me at 162 lbs by then but this is not a linear process so I think it’ll be more like 165 lbs. In the mean time I’ve continued lifting weights and occasionally doing some other work.

    Ultimately I’d like to get down into “normal”, stay there and get my main lifts into a range I think is strong but reasonable. I can already bench press my body weight which was a goal for a long time. I’m at 1.32x body weight for squat and I want that to be 1.5x and I’m at 1.61x for deadlift which I would like to be 2.0x. I think for those second two I’m going to have to finish the weight loss and then eat and lift back a few pounds. It’s pretty hard getting stronger while you’re cutting back.

    Ideally, I’d be able to do those lifts, 15 pullups, a muscle-up, ride 50 miles at > 17 mph, run 10k @ < 9 min/mile, and row 1000kcal in an hour on the rowing machine. That's a long, long term goal though and this is the first time I've even written those things down. The running will be hard because I hate running more than pretty much anything else. The rest is doable but all requires a fair amount of training. We'll see.