Bread......Act IV

Got cranking again today on another batch. Last week's "Experiments in Bread" yielded decent results, but I made two glaring errors that came back and bit me.

Error #1 was mixing the dough too long. The flour company said 6 to 7 minutes, while the mixer company said 4 to 5 minutes. I watched the dough mix and the time, and right about 4 minutes in it started to look really good. Pulling away cleanly from the sides of the bowl, and balling up nicely. It still looked OK at 5 minutes, but I could sense it was changing (it didn't look as 'shiny' as it had), and by 6 minutes it was beginning to break up. Result? Dense bread, again.

BUT.....(Epiphany time) I now know and understand what the dough looks like, and how it changes as the mixing time progresses. This error won't happen again!

Error #2 was using the wrong stuff to dust the baking sheet with. I didn't have any corn meal or Semolina to dust the pan with (both items in stock now), so I bowed to my Sweet Little Wife's suggestion to use the package of Jiffy corn muffin mix that was sitting on the shelf.

WRONG! The mix has other stuff in it besides corn meal and flour, like lard, salt, sugar, and baking powder. This caused these "extra ingredients" to get added to the bottom layer of the bread, throwing the flavor and texture off. Not to mention the fact that when lard and flour get up to 450* or so, they SMOKE, then char, and that adds a "flavor" to the crust of the bread as it bakes.

Other than these two errors, I have the process and recipe tuned up to what should work pretty well.

So let's get this show on the road.....

Ingredients and equipment? READY!

Put 'em in the bowl.....

And after combining in the lukewarm water, the Happy Bubbly Joyous Yeast, and mixing for precisely 4 minutes and 30 seconds, we're rewarded with a nice ball of dough, not too dry, and not too moist.....

Pop it into the 100*F oven to raise, covered with a damp terrycloth, and go do something else for two hours.....

Yep....sure looks like it's doubled.....almost looks kind of "sourdoughy", with some big bubbles.....

Prepare the baking sheet with Semolina on the left side, and cornmeal on the right side.....

"Gently Deflate" the dough, divide it in half, do a bit of "shaping", and plop them on the baking sheet for the second raise.....

After 45 minutes, I removed the proto-bread from the oven, started the oven preheating, slashed each loaf three times across the top, and "generously" applied more lukewarm water with a brush, per the recipe.

Then we popped the sheet back in a 450*F oven for 25 minutes.....

Yeah, it deflated a bit when I cut the loaf tops. Still gotta work on figuring that out. I think next batch will get baked in the glass bread dishes we have.

22 minutes later, and we have BREAD!

And this time it came out really good. Like "High End Restaurant" good. The crust came out perfect again, with a nice hollow "Plonk" when you thumped it, but this time the insides are nice and light. And the flavor, devoid of the various adulterants I used for "cornmeal" last time, is superb.

I baked it using the regular "Bake Mode" on the oven, and I'm definitely going back to "Convection Mode", where a blower moves the air around inside the oven, as it bakes the top of the loaves in a much more uniform manner. It also bakes a bit faster, needing only 20~22 minutes vs the 25~27 minutes this mode took until it "Plonked" just right.

So, I'm calling this batch an inside-the-park home run. The only thing I can find "wrong" with this batch is the fact that it slumped a bit more than I expected, but wow, it sure tastes good.

Now if I can get it to come out looking like this......

Been Busy.....

I'm chugging along on the little Valco amplifier, and I should have an update (with pix, or it didn't happen) later today.

Got the rest of the parts for it, along with some parts for the little race car. Turns out I have a steering linkage angularity problem that requires a more elegant solution than what I previously came up with, which was just a longer ball-stud on the servo to get things to line up better.

And since Grandma #2 (aka "Nana") is down with a really, really, really bad cold, we've had The Little Guy during the day while Nana recuperates.

He "helped" with the bread last Sunday, but decided right off the bat that he didn't like playing with squishy bread dough, so he mostly just watched. He got a real kick out of watching the dough hook rotate and orbit in the mixing bowl, though.

Be back later.....

This is the input stage and driver stage (dual triode tube)  of the little Supro amp:

I've replaced all the capacitors (they were leaky) and all of the resistors. The resistors, doing as 1/2 Watt carbon compositions resistors like to do, had all drifted high in value to outside their marked tolerance. I also changed the physical location and connections of several of the parts to eliminate ground loops, and give all the signal grounds a "Common Point Ground" connection. The new parts have higher ratings and tighter tolerances than the OEM parts, so once this is finished it should be good for another 50 years.

The new grill cloth arrived, and tomorrow I'll use the old one as a template to cut the new cloth. I'll scrub up the cabinet and replace the handle and hardware before I staple the new cloth into the cabinet. Then I'll mount the new speaker and the cabinet will be put aside for final assembly. Cleaning the cabinet will also involve some "rework" of the covering material. I can buy new, matching material to completely recover it with, but I'd like to preserve some of the originality of it. Think of this as being a "RestoMod" type of project and you're pretty close. New under the skin, but doesn't look a day over 60!

Bread Experiment #3....The Third Time's the Charm!

Since my Sweet Little Wife gave me this really cool Six Hundred Watt  Christmas present, I've been itching to try it out.

And in order to get to understand it better, I went to what we'd call a "Reference Design" for a recipe. Just plain old white bread from a recipe that King Arthur Flour calls "Hearth Bread". It was printed on the back of the flour bags as "The Easiest Loaf of Bread You'll Ever Bake", and has flour, water, salt, sugar, and yeast. Period. Oh you use some butter to grease the bowl once it's mixed, but it's as simple a yeast-bread formula as you'll find.

I didn't take too many pix this time, as The Little Guy is over, and wanted to "help".

After mixing and raising once, I divided the dough, "shaped" the two pieces a bit, and put them on a cookie sheet. The "stuff" around the loaves is supposed to be corn meal, but lacking any corn meal, Sweet Little Wife said we had a box of Jiffy corn muffin mix, and I could use that. WELL......no. It has other stuff in it, like lard, and when you have lots of extra in the pan, it burns.

So here's ready to go in the oven.

And out on the rack to cool.....

Sweet Little Wife mauled the defenseless little loaf while I had my back turned to get the camera!

So how'd it turn out?

WELL.....I made two mistakes this time. The first concerns the mixing time. WOW.....does this thing CRANK! The mixer manufacturer suggest 4 minutes time, while the flour manufacturer said 7 minutes. I went from dry ingredients in the bowl to nicely mixed dough that was cleanly pulling away from the bowl in about 4-1/2 minutes. I should have stopped right there, as that's when it's properly mixed. Well, I kept mixing away, and stopped after about 6 minutes when I saw the dough was changing consistency. The good thing is I had an Ah-HAH! moment as I watched the mixer doing it's thing. I now grok when it's properly mixed, and that's a big thing to me. Ultimately, it appears to not have 'damaged' the bread, but the texture is a bit heavier. Not much, like that first (burp!) batch of rye bread I made, but the gas bubbles aren't what I'd call "nailed it", and since I got the yeast understood, the next thing is the mixing procedure so I can get consistent results.

The next mistake was using the Jiffy mix instead of straight corn meal. Besides the fact that the excess material on the tray charred, the other ingredients in the mix had an effect on the bottom of the loaf. You definitely get the corn meal taste and texture, but the (overcooked) "shortening" in the product flavored the bottom of the loaf. Not a bad flavor, but it's definitely "different" than what you'd expect.

Anyway.....these two mistakes are easily corrected, and I actually learned something useful about mixing the dough.

And the end result?

Half a loaf gone in 30 minutes. It tastes great, it's not heavy at all, and once again, the crust is superb. Without the two mistakes I made, I'm confident this would have been a hit out of the park for me.

Since I'm now out of yeast, I'm making up a list of stuff to get, like more flour, some straight corn meal, and some semolina to try in place of the corn meal. The recipe is "either/or", and I'd like to see the difference in taste. Since the recipe makes two loaves, I'll do one of each next week.

The next baking project will be cinnamon rolls, so I'll add those unique ingredients to the list. I really like cinnamon rolls.......

Drone Strikes and Squirrels.....

Well, looks like our military took out some more garbage. Others have commented on it, but one thing I found interesting were the pictures used of the vermin in various publications.

Fellow blogger Fredd used this picture in his story:

While the always PC and left-leaning Wikipedia used this one:

Quite a difference, isn't it? Who's to say which photo is more accurate representing the persona of this former person? I'm told even Satan can smile and be quite charming when it suits his purpose.....Guess this guy will get to find out, right before he gets handed his shovel to stoke the fires of Hell for all eternity.

But then we're not supposed to judge others.

On the home front, I never knew squirrels ate crab apples. These two are owners of the two nests up in a neighbors tree, and we see them almost daily. They also enjoy getting the 'spinner' seeds from the maple tree in the front yard, doing all manner of acrobatics to get at the large clumps of seeds out on some of the more flexible branches.

Rock on, squirrels, and thanks for getting those crab apples off the tree for us. At least they won't land on the ground, ferment, and give little Pebbles The Wonder Dog WMD-grade gas!

Enjoy your weekend!

What's On The Workbench?

I originally found this little guy stuffed under a workbench in my Sweet Little Wife's garage when I first moved in. The garage had been a "Man Cave" type place, with carpet and old couches, a little fridge for beer, big TV set, etc., etc, etc. Her first husband would hang out with his buddies after work and sometimes they'd get the guitars out and jam.

This is what he used, a Valco "Supro":

A very simple little "5 Watt" class amp with a single 6V6GT output tube, which is kinda the "little brother" to the ever popular 6L6GC. I showed it to her, and she almost cried, remembering the jam sessions, so I carefully put it away so I could see what it needed to sing again.

Fast forward about 10 years, and I decided to dig it out (she didn't remember me saving it) and give it a good going over. Over the years I collected all the information and schematics I could find for these small Valco amps, so I'm fortunate to have a schematic that matches the chassis 100%.

I flipped it around and pulled the chassis out:

And set it up on the bench:

Yeah, pretty crusty! I got out my EICO tube tester, and checked the three tubes. The rectifier tube appeared OK, but the 6V6 output tube had "shorts", as did the 6SL7GT dual triode input/driver tube.

And it's a "gimme" that the electrolytic capacitors are leaky, as are all the notorious molded paper capacitors, which are all those pink cylinders:

And to add a fourth 1/4" jack input, they removed the fuse holder, stuck in another jack, and scabbed a 4 Amp breaker in there:

Yeah, it's a mess:

Le Sigh.....

So I sent an order off a week or so ago to "Antique Electronic Supply", one of my go-to places for tube parts. Great service, fair prices, and wide variety of parts catering to old tube amps as well as "Luthier" supplies for old guitars, and things like correct replacement Fender knobs. Got three new tubes, some capacitors and odd resistors, fuseholders (I have fuses), and a new leather carrying handle and hardware for this little guy, as the original leather handle had disintegrated long before I first met him.

All I've done so far besides take the chassis out is to brush the dirt off it, and then wipe it down to get the nasty stuff off.  I pulled the "extra" instrument input jack and put a new fuse holder in there. I'm also going to install a proper 3-wire grounded cord on it a bit later. I cleaned the volume and tone controls, 1/4" jacks, and the tube socket pins with some Caig D5 DeoxIT. And I ordered a replacement 8" speaker tonight, as the old one is just too fragile after all these years.

It'll be interesting to see how it sounds after I finish it. Other than the new handle on top, I'm going to tray and leave the cabinet pretty much alone. I'll clean it and trim/reglue any loose covering, but I'm not going to recover it.

Quiet Day, 2" of Snow, Not Much Going On.....

The snow had pretty much stopped by 0600 or so. The snow rake Well Seasoned Fool told me about worked just great on the car. It would have been nice to have after that big snow we had a few weeks ago, but now I have it for the next big snow:

Well worth the $40 I paid for it. The 48" hardwood handle makes getting all the snow off the glass a breeze, and it gets the snow off the roof above the doors so you don't get dumped on when you open the door.

And don't even bother to ask about that POS snowblower.....now the auger motor won't turn on when you squeeze the switch on the handle. Got the sidewalk cleared, but then it took a dump doing the driveway. It's never acted right, and now it doesn't even click when you squeeze the handle.

And we now have this brute getting ready to be put in service:

The attachments and bowl are in the dishwasher (Dishwasher Safe!), and as soon as we finish the last loaf from the second Great Bread Experiment I'll be making some regular white bread to see how it works.

And from my son back in Kommiefornia, I present you the Best Mouse Pad EVER:

It's huge, and has a world map with time zones printed on it.

It's almost too big to fit on my operating desk here in the sun room, so I might have to rearrange the equipment on the desk to use it.

Merry Christmas To All.....

In case I get reeeeal busy over the next few days, I'll take the time now to wish you all a very Merry Christmas!

BREAD!.....Part Deux

Got another Big Ball 'O Bread nicely buttered up and rising in the warm oven.

All the advice I received after the first Great Bread Experiment indicated a couple of things. One, the 70* ambient here is probably a bit too cool for the yeast to really kick off, and Two, the 70* ambient here is probably a bit too cool for the bread to raise normally.

Everybody's solution (D'OH!) was to proof the yeast and raise the bread in a slightly warm oven.

I got curious about how low a set-point our oven could hold, so I downloaded the manual and read it. There was nothing even remotely approaching a set of "Specifications" in any of the documents I could find on the GE Support website, so I did an experiment the other night. I set it to convection bake, entered 100 degrees, and hit start. The display immediately jumped to 170*, sat there a few seconds, and then the display went to 100* (it always does that a few seconds after it displays the set point you just entered) and slowly began to go up. When it hit 170* it stabilized and held it.

OK, a bit too warm. I set it to 170*, let it run for a few minutes, and then shut it off. It peaked at 130*, and when it got down to 100* or so I declared it to be a "warm oven", and commenced baking.

I was MUCH more careful getting the yeast started this time. I mixed the packet of yeast with 1/8tsp of Turbinado sugar and 1/4 cup of water, and put it in the warm oven as I started mixing the other ingredients.

After about 15 minutes, I had this:

Holy Smokes, It more than doubled in volume! And it smelled great, bringing back memories of Mom making bread. Looks I got got some happy yeast this time, compared to the puddle of bubbly water I had last time when I let it sit out in a large bowl at 70*.

Commence Mixing!.....

Adding in the Bubbly Happy Yeast.....

And after thoroughly  mixing the ingredients, we now have a nice, buttered ball of "Smooth and Elastic" dough, per the recipe, something that was also a bit lacking the last time.

Sitting in the approx 100*F oven.....

45 minutes later and it's already close to double.....

90 minutes, and ready to smack down, divide, and plop into the buttered loaf baking dishes....and it's turning into The Loaf That Ate Fort Collins!

Oh, well....on to Divide and Conquer!


The Big Ball was separated and plopped into the two well-buttered glass baking pans, and ut back into the warm oven to continue raising.....

I need to take lessons into how to get the two loaves the same size....

Out of the oven after 45 minutes so I can preheat the oven to 390*.

Wow...they filled the baking dishes this time. Happy Yeast!

DING!

In they go.....

And 35 minutes later....FRESH BREAD!

Yeah, one of them slumped a bit, but they both popped right out of the dish after cooling for 20 minutes.

So?

Much lighter than last time, but it has a tendency to fall apart. It tastes great, but my Sweet Little Wife commented that it needs a bit more salt, so I'll increase the salt by 1/4~1/2 tsp. One of the reasons it falls apart is that this loaf has a "seam" in it from when I divided the Big Ball and shaped it to fit the dish. I didn't make sure all the parts were blended together, and now the San Andreas Fault is running through this loaf.

Not much beats fresh bread with fresh dairy butter on it!

I'll get the recipe dialed in better, but now that I have the yeast proofing nailed, and the raising temperature nailed, the rest is just "Adjust to Taste".

Snow vs. Trains

From a friend........

New video. The other link went POOF!

 

A Little Cleaning Progress

Still not "Hittin' On All 8", but I have made some progress getting the basement area squared away.

The "workbench" for building models is getting much more organized:

I've had the lamp for a year or so, but the toolbox is fairly new from Harbor Freight.

An upcoming "Must Do" project will be to get additional lighting over this bench and the electronics bench on the wall opposite this one. I think the easiest way is to do surface-mount track lighting, which should give me some flexibility in moving lights around, type and color temperature of the illuminator, and the ability to snap another light in the track if I need more illumination.

And for the first time since we moved in here, the floor is (somewhat) unobstructed, giving The Little Guy, the dog, and my Kyosho Mini-Z some maneuvering room:

From the original listing pix:

Still have quite a ways to go to get it "nice", but it's getting there. Dumping stuff on eBay has helped clear out a LOT of space, and I've got more to list on Sunday.

Friday Again?

Not much going on. It's overcast, 44*, the wind is blowing like crazy (sustained 15MPH, gusts to 25...), and we're expecting snow.

And I'm still flogging along with this "low level" cold. Not coughing much, but sneezing some, and got aches, no fever. Didn't roll out of the rack until 1500 the other day, and just have slightly more than zero energy.

Was supposed to go see "Ford v. Ferrari" today, but as I was sneezing into my coffee, my Sweet Little Wife came up and said it was probably better if we stayed home today.

Think I'll go have a bowl of soup.....

Christmas Clean-Up Time

Since we'll be hosting the clan for Christmas, and I'm sloooooow, I started doing the Christmas Clean-up this week.

The tree is up, the Nativity scene is up, and all the little battery-powered doo-dads my wife likes are up and running.

I'll do the sweeping, vacuuming, and mopping of the tile (we have a LOT of tile) the week before, along with doing all four bathrooms, and the laundry room. The final item to be cleaned up and squared away will be this desk in the sun room where I do my radio and computer ops.

And then there's the basement.....

Since this will take the longest, I started a few days ago, and I've almost got the "workshop" area cleaned up, picked up, and (somewhat) sorted out. I've thrown away a lot of stuff of ambiguous nature, sorted out bags of resistors and capacitors, and moved them to the "parts room", and tripled the size of my "eBay-Sell-It-Pile", which had shrunk to frighteningly small size.

And FOUR large cardboard boxes were sorted, consolidated to ONE medium box, and then flattened out and put in the recycling can.

I can now freely walk around in the workshop area without dodging boxes of "stuff" on the floor. Tomorrow I'll paw through the two small wire racks I have stuff on, get that corner of the shop cleaned up, and I'll be happy.

Had quite a snow show today for a few hours. It was snowing big, fluffy flakes, and it was coming down so hard it was hard to see more than a couple of blocks. But it only stuck where we already had snow left from the big storm before Thanksgiving, and melted immediately on the streets and sidewalks.

And I'm still getting over this low-grade cold. Not coughing or sneezing much, but all stuffy, runny nose, and major case of the BLAAAHS.....

When I finish cleaning the shop I'll post a pic. Time to hit the rack.....

US State Department Gives S7 Permission To Relocate Sea Launch Spaceport To Russia

Very sad day for my fellow ships and myself. It was a ballsy enterprise started over drinks one night in a "What If....." session.

Now that all the ITAR controlled equipment has been pulled off the ships, and presumably accounted for, the State Department has signed off on letting the ships leave.

The entire (very short) article is located here.

The FarceBook group I'm a member of has been talking reunion and bon voyage party, so there might be a trip back to Sunny Kalifornia in the future.....

California Pioneers Subsidized Housing for Public Employees

More tax dollar stealing by the unions!

Here's a very good article by California Political Review.

Reminds me of the last line in "Bridge on the River Kwai".....MADNESS!

Local Weather Observations

One of the hobbies I've acquired over the last 15 years has been the weather. "It All Started When...." I went to work for Boeing on the Sea Launch program, and one of my job responsibilities was to maintain the Weather Monitoring and Recording System and the Weather Radar System. As a kid growing up in Northern Illinois, I remember the little "Weather Station" my Dad had. Very simple thing, just a barometer for local air pressure, a thermometer for local temperature, and a hygrometer for local humidity.

It was an Airguide unit like this:

Some years later, he gave me one of these that I had for many, many years:

So I had a fairly basic idea of weather in general, which got much more detailed when I took flying lessons, and was formally taught "WEATHER!" in ground school. We got a pretty good education in weather, obviously geared towards flying, but we got to learn how to read the charts, read the forecast, and make an informed decision on whether to fly or stay on the ground.

In 1982 I moved to Southern California, where the weather is pretty boring compared to Illinois and now Colorado, so my weather skills kinda got archived.

In 2004 I went to work for Boeing, and woke those skills back up as part of my job duties. Working with the Meteorologists was very educational, and in short order I had a weather station set up at my apartment, and connected to the Internet so I could watch the (boring) weather back in SoCal while we were out to sea.

I brought those skills with me in retirement, and now have my own "Weather Monitoring and Recording System" here at home, which occasionally shows some interesting things, like what happened here last night:

Look at the Outside Temperature and Humidity graphs, right at midnight.

The temperature shot up about 25*, from 25* to 50*, in less than an hour, with a corresponding drop in Relative Humidity.

At midnight.

With no "unusual" barometric activity.

This had me scratching my head for a while until I noticed the wind data. The winds kicked up approx 1MPH to 4MPH, with gusts to 15~20MPH, and the vector (direction and velocity) indicates they're coming from a West to Northwest direction, from down out of the mountains.

Reading the Forecast Discussion for today shows mention of Downslope Winds, known as "Santa Ana" winds in SoCal, and "Chinooks" here in the Rockies.

And it looks like I caught one coming through.

No boring weather here!

Hmmmmm....Ariens -or- Honda?

Well now that the "SnowJoe" snow blower has thawed and dried out, I put the batteries in it to see if I could get a handle on the thumping noise, and the "Coffee Can Full Of Gravel" noise it was making.

It powered right up, and rattly-buzzy-bad-bearings noise was gone, and the thumping noise was extremely subdued.

I'm putting the gravel-in-a-can sound down to it having a bunch of gravel/stones/frozen mulch stuck in it's craw, but I haven't fully diagnosed the thumping noise yet.

The auger assembly consists of two sets of augers on a common shaft driven by a right-angle gearbox. The augers kind of "float" on the driveshaft, and have two "shear pins" each, consisting of a soft 1/4-20 (or a Metric bolt that size) bolt that shears if the auger gets jammed. Pretty standard stuff, and I wonder if the bolts have started to shear from the workout it got two days running.

ANYWAY....since this thing handles wet snow so poorly, and was taxed to the max dealing with 20" of snow, I'm throwing in the towel on it, and getting a gas-powered snow blower to replace it.

I'll either dump it on craigslist, or more likely strip the motors, electronics, and other useful stuff from it and scrap the rest. I'm thinking go-kart for the kids, or maybe buy a used Power Wheels riding toy and "upgrade" it a bit.

So what do we get for a replacement snow blower? I've got two thumbs up from Reverend Paul on an Ariens model, and they get great reviews on-line. Talking with the menfolk of the clan at our Thanksgiving gathering, I found that they don't have much experience with "little" snow blowers, but they agreed Ariens is a very good brand. They also liked Honda, and Toro. Anything Honda with an internal combustion engine in it rates very high on my list, but YIKES! A 24" Honda goes for $2,200, while the Ariens goes for about $1,100.

The other night, Well Seasoned Fool suggested I look on craigslist, which I did.

What did I find? A one-year old Honda 24" for $900!

And the ad was well written by what appears to be an intelligent person, sometimes a rarity on craigslist.

To wit:

Looking for a heavy duty snowblower with lots of options and quality construction? Then it’s time to introduce yourself to the Honda HS724.
This snow blower is just the type of machine that will handle the type of snow fort collins just found itself in!
Don't compare these to the machines you see parked outside the big box stores. These are expensive high end machines new! Check out Honda's website and see for yourself! This was over 2000 new!
I Don't need to sell, not in hurry to sell! PRICE IS FIRM.
It has a 24 inch clearing path and a 7hp Genuine Honda OHV engine.
This has more power than residential machines rated at almost twice as much! Full commercial grade!
This features Honda GX series engine that is the workhorse of a ton of different honda products!
The Hydrostatic drive system is similar to that of a lawn tractor. The reason these are so superior is that the hydrostatic offers the user infinite speed adjustment for the self propel. There are no set speeds that limit your options. The build quality is top notch!
Comes with a working headlight so you can see the path in front of you no matter the hour.
It fires up and runs GREAT!
Tires are like new.




Hmmmmm....new Ariens for $1,100, or a slightly-used Honda for $900?

I'm leaning towards the Honda.

What say you?