Bagels FTW!

Sourdough bagels, that is.

Had one this evening with dinner.

Had a decent dinner, so was feeling quite full when I was done.

But I still wanted another bagel...

Sourdough #3

I'm getting the hang of this...

This week, I didn't want to waste a lot of flour/water by feeding the starter every day, so I fed it on Sunday night & plonked it in the fridge. Left it there until Friday, when I pulled it out and give it another feed. It had developed plenty of fine bubbles over the five days, but not quite as many as it had previously developed in a 12-hour period. 4-5ºC will slow things down a bit, which was the intended outcome.

After a day out on the bench (in some much cooler weather for Brisbane, ~15-20ºC), it was nice and bubbly again, so I gave it another feed to bulk it up on Saturday night, and made the loaf on Sunday morning.

It's still a bit time-consuming to make a sourdough loaf, but it's satisfying at the same time. Flour, water, and salt were the only ingredients, plus some sesame seeds scattered on the top. (Yes, I remembered the salt this time!)

So, without any further ado, here's loaf #3, 100% pure sourdough.







Two comments:
1) you've probably noticed I baked this one in a tin - thought I'd try it out, see how it goes - the shape is much better for toast / sandwiches, but maybe I'll buy a narrower tin, this one is pretty wide, and a higher-but-narrower loaf would be even better;
2) you've probably also noticed why it is sourdough loaves are usually slashed on the top - that oven spring is wicked! :-D

Tastewise, it's nice bread - a bit 'heavier' than commercial bread (this loaf was over 1kg, compared to a commercial loaf of bread that's a bit bigger weighing in at 700g), but with a nice texture and chewy crust. Makes great toast. A very mild flavour on this one, though, not very sour.

Riverfire 2009

Well, we didn't go, again. Not up to dealing with humungous crowds (prolly a quarter of a million people downtown tonight) so we watched it from home. The F-111s cruise past just to the east of our place on their way downtown, so we get to hear them go by.

Took the obligatory photo of what might be the very last public dump & burn from Australia's F-111s, thanks to some clueless bureaucrat deciding to retire them 5-10 years early, because "something we don't know about might go wrong". So they're replacing them with some Superbugs, and plan to buy "up to 100" F35s, to be introduced from 2012. Yeah, nothing will go wrong with that plan...
Hint: Australia will not get JSFs before 2015, possibly 2017, and they'll probably cost about $120m a piece, not the $65m the bureaucrats still sometimes claim. That's assuming the yanks don't cancel the whole program...

Goin' out with style!

Time lapse FTW!

Here's a nice video. And some nice music to go with it! :D

Timescapes Timelapse: Learning to Fly from Tom @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

Leaves my half-hearted attempts at timelapse for dead...

Further adventures in breadmaking

Well, I got the dough out of the bowl, folded it (though I forgot to add the extra sprinkle of flour, oh well) and put it in the casserole dish to prove for an hour or so.

I ended up adding at least half a cup of extra wholemeal flour, and the dough was still, in my opinion, too wet & sticky. Next time, I'll go with even more flour. I'll try weighing it out, too, as suggested in the second video on Breadtopia. The proportions aren't quite right.

Ah, well. If it's like the first no-knead bread I made, it'll still be delicious and tasty, just not quite right. :-D We'll see in an hour or so.


Update:

Well, here it is! Still not quite right - I think the dough was too wet, plus I probably should have let it cook a little longer, as I put the pot into a cold oven rather than a pre-heated one - I adjusted the cooking time a little, but not enough, I think.

Still very tasty, though! :-D




You'll notice in this shot you can see where I folded a bit too much flour into the dough just before putting it in the pot... :-D Plenty of large voids in the bread, though. The biggest problem is not eating too much of it at one sitting! It goes really well with jam. Especially when it's still warm out of the oven.

Third time lucky?

Ok, here's today's bread attempt.

This is a conventional loaf (half white flour, half wholemeal).

I think it turned out ok, although the bottom is a tiny bit overdone.

The funny shape is thanks to the stoneware casserole dish I cooked it in - the bread expanded during cooking and completely filled the dish!

Anyway, going to slice it up & try it out shortly... :-D

Addendum:
The bread has been sliced & tested. Pretty good, even if I do say so myself!
I figured out why it's a little overdone on the bottom. I didn't read the cooking instructions properly, did I... "Bake at 240ºC for 10 minutes, then reduce to 180ºC. Bake for 30-40 minutes". I didn't notice anything beyond the "240ºC" bit... D'oh! Ah, well, still came out ok, lucky I used the casserole dish, or it would have been rather crispy...



And here's a pic of the stoneware casserole dish I baked it in. Thanks for the wedding present, Cathy! It's been sitting in the cupboard for eight years, but it's had a workout the past few weeks! :-D

Baking, part deux

After last weekend's efforts with the no-knead bread (delicious, but the proportions weren't quite right) I went looking for other bread recipes during the week (ok, so I was killing time at work... ).

I found myself a recipe for a wholemeal loaf from this site. It's not bad - very, very easy to make. You simply mix the ingredients together to make a dough, let it rise in a greased baking tin for 30 minutes (or silicon pan in my case), then put it in the oven & bake for about 40mins.

The resulting loaf, pictured below, was absolutely delicious. It needed just a little more baking time, though, being a touch too moist in the middle. I'm going to try baking one of those in a casserole dish next time, like the other no-knead bread, and see how the crust comes out.





As you can see by the last pic, though, the silicon pan wasn't such a huge hit... a little too soft on the sides! Cooks well, though. :-D

An experiment

So I found a recipe online for no-knead bread, and thought I'd try it.

Here's a pic of what it looked like after baking:


The verdict:

• Absolutely delicious!
• Very little effort involved
• The recipe I got off the net ended up having waaaaaay too much water, and not enough flour. By a long shot. I added an extra half a cup of flour (which is a lot to add) and it was still too wet, really. Don't really know why, maybe american flour is really, really dry or something?
  

Gonna try a wholemeal loaf next. Supposedly the recipe I found only needs 30min of proving, and 30-40min of baking. It involves kneading, but that can be therapeutic. :D

What I did on my holidays

While spending Christmas in Sydney with relatives, we went to the zoo. Taronga Zoo, to be precise. While the weather was pretty crappy (very overcast & occasional showers), it was a nice visit. Unfortunately, crappy weather equals poor lighting for photos. Bummer.

The below are probably the best pics I took. Enjoy!

Typical Queensland Summer

So it's warm.

Although, it's somewhat atypical for queensland by being warm and dry.

Yesterday it was warm and humid, as evidenced by this photo taken shortly before sunset. Temps around 32-33º, with apparent temps a few degrees higher.



Today, though, we only got to 36ºC. Right now, according to the Bureau, it's only 31.9ºC, but the apparent temp is only 28.1º - yup, it feels cooler than it is. Part of that is because it's windy (although it was windy yesterday too), but a large part is because the humidity is only 32%. That's a bit drier than yesterday, when the corresponding figures were 30.0º, 30.1º, and 67%.

So it's warm, but not too much so.

I wonder if we'll hit 40º this summer? We often get a week of weather approaching or exceeding that in mid-to-late January...

Oh, and by the way...

I uploaded a couple more games worth of gaelic footy photos to the gallery. These ones are from April this year. Only another 3-4 games to upload, now... they might have to wait until after the nationals next week, though - I need the space on the laptop drive for the photos I'll be taking then.

I now have 23GB of memory cards for the camera. I expect to use most of that. :D

Beach volleyball in the rain...

Ok, so the previous post pretty much summed up my Sunday.

Now, here's Saturday for ya! Or some of it, at least. Some of the folks from ERM were playing in the Corporate Games at the Uni of Qld, beach volleyball, as the title says.

The first couple of games were ok - they lost one narrowly, won the second convincingly. Then the heavens opened...

The calm before the storm...


Freaky sunset cloudage. This photo is straight from the camera. Around about this time, the temperature dropped from about 22-23ºC down to about 15ºC in about five minutes. We were not prepared...


There were about 30 people crammed under our tent, most of us holding on to the roof to try to stop it blowing away... the Cardno one partially collapsed just after this photo.


The game must go on! Crazy people...


The ERM team in action after the storm had passed... (yes, that is a lightning bolt in the background)


BTW, this storm hit after the "severe weather warning" had been cancelled, as there were no more severe thunderstorms around. Good to know it wasn't "severe". I guess then we would have gotten wet on both sides, rather than just our backs.

Some more photos...

This is a shark - there were half a dozen of these swimming around.


This is an Australian Hobby, otherwise known as a Little Falcon. It was nesting on the cliff-face beneath the lighthouse.


A view of Byron Bay


Just in case you didn't know...


And, of course, the lighthouse...

Work has some perks...

...today's example being a trip to Byron Bay for a meeting, which allowed me to take the following photos, from Cape Byron (up near the lighthouse).

A pair of dolphins:




The darkish blots are all turtles...


...like this one!


Another view

Anthea FTW!

Anf showing some of the l33t skillz she's picked up over the past few years of playing gaelic...

Shame my photography skills aren't good enough to actually get the photo in-focus! D'oh!