perfidy

The Carnival of the Recipes #69 is up, an appetizers bonanza. I also missed last week's edition, which had the theme of spicy foods. It burns, burns, burns, that ring of fire. Check them out!

I'm spending this week working up a version of my usual sourdough with blue cheese and walnuts, based on one in Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice... I'll surely report on how that went. I also need to work on tweaking my wild-yeast sourdough recipe for flavor and consistency. I need to figure out how to balance acetic and lactic acids better to achieve a more rounded flavor, and I'm thiiiis close to adding some commercial yeast into the final dough build in order to promote a faster rise and a more vigorous oven spring. Since I don't have a half million dollars to blow on a giant professional oven with steam injectors, and the oven I do have is halfway for crap, I guess I am reduced to cheating to produce consistent results that are better than acceptable to the eye and tongue. Also, my starter has been sluggish recently, taking hours and hours to raise feebly even when fed up to full strength vigor. It's probably just the weather, or cosmic rays, or the trilateral commission meddling again, but whatever it is things just ain't hitting it right now. Hence the desparate thoughts of cheating.

Watch this space, because I'm sure that by February I will retract every sentence of the above and reaffirm my loyalty to the wonders and ineffable magic of wild yeasts and bacteria in all their perfection. I'm a caviller. I cavil. And waver. And vacillate. Not to mention hedge, snipe, kvetch, whinge, and bellyache, and dither, scruple, flip-flop and shilly-shally.