S U N D A Y S O U R D O U G H

Been a while since I baked, been a while since I wrote anything. I went into a bit of a tailspin after the inauguration and did a bit of science policy writing, before sinking deep into a labwork rabbit hole, which is where I've been since late March. Overnights doing chemistry; a few intensive mass spec days; no time for baking.

But now we're back!

I had a few weeks of pretty crappy bakes, tbh. I pulled my starter out of the fridge sometime mid-April; it had languished there, shoved behind yogurt cartons, for at least a month and a half without any attention. I got home from three nights at the lab on a Wednesday; fed it Thursday and Friday; and made a levain Friday evening. The bread that came out was...let's just say it was lackluster. It was slack, floppy, impossible to shape, impossible to score, and generally unattractive. But as always, it tasted good, so I was ready to get back to trying.

I topped off lil starter buddy and put him back in the fridge until the following Thursday, when I basically did the same thing. Let me also note that I was hydrating the crap out of my dough--I think I was up at ~85%, by accident one of the times and intentionally the next, because my instinctive response to failure is to try harder with the same variables in play, assuming that it's some error on my part that's causing the problem. I thought the problem here was shaping technique, so I watched a ton of YouTube videos and came back at my sloppy dough with new strategies in hand. Turns out you can't shape your way past dough that has no structure--or at least, I can't.

It was clearly time for some calm, measured, science-y variable isolation. Several factors could contribute to floppy, weak dough: a) overhydration, e.g. introducing more water than the flour can absorb, b) underdevelopment of gluten during bulk, most likely caused by poor turns/not enough turns (or not autolysing the flour for long enough), or c) overfermenting the whole mess.

A) seemed pretty likely, but I didn't really want to admit it. I've baked 85% hydration breads before and they came out fine! But the doughs from these last few bakes looked slack even a turn or two into the bulk, and my flour was at least a few months old. Swallow your pride here, Ale, and pull back on hydration until further notice.

B) didn't seem right. If anything, I've been turning too aggressively, trying to fix the weakness in the dough via manual manipulation rather than chemistry. I've been turning ~16-20 times, 3-4 times during bulk, and while the dough smooths out nicely, it never feels like it's getting strong. I hadn't felt it seize up and resist a turn at any point. Also, I'd been autolysing for at least an hour.

C) ....maybe there was something here. I've been following the Tartine/Perfect Loaf timings pretty closely, bulk fermenting for about 4 hours, shaping and resting for 30-40 minutes, and then proofing for another ~4 hours on the counter or overnight in the fridge (my fridge proofs always looked pretty tight, though, so I've generally pulled them out and put them on the counter while the oven preheats, adding an extra 1-2 hours of counter time. Our kitchen is generally around 68F).

At the end of bulk, the dough surface is always shiny and quite bubbly, and has risen ~25% above the initial volume. At the end of my final proof, the dough looks jiggly and soft, and pillows up roughly ~30% beyond it's initially-shaped volume.

I read, and I thought, and I looked at a LOT of pictures of other people's dough on the internet, and I decided that a) and c) were both probably major contributors to my failures. Maybe my starter is a lot more active than I think it is, because it's running through the dough way faster than it should, given the temperature of our kitchen and the times involved.

SO: in this weekend's bakes, I acted like a bad scientist and changed two and a half variables at once. I pulled the hydration back to just over 76%, and I decided to finish the bulk fermentation in the fridge to both firm up the dough for shaping and to slow down the starter's activity. Then, I decided to overnight proof in the fridge and to forgo the counter finish. I think I've been pretty consistently overproofing, waiting for that jiggly, bubbly look (which I assumed was right because it was what my dough looked like after the allotted times in basically every recipe I've ever seen). I wish I had pictures, but I don't. Sorry.

I'll work on nailing things down a bit more over the coming weeks. Here's the final recipe, very lightly adapted from The Perfect Loaf's Beginner's Sourdough:

LEVAIN:
start @ 9AM

• 40g starter
• 80g Tartine flour mix (half whole wheat, half white AP flour)
• 80g water (I'm not precious about the temp here)

I wrote this post a few weeks ago, when most of the leaves were actively changing color, but neglected to post it. Despite an unseasonably warm month, most of the trees in NYC have dropped their leaves by now. The study of when and why things in the natural world change, on a cyclic schedule, is called "phenology," and this extension of the growing season--leaves coming out earlier in the year and falling later--is a consequence of a changing climate. It's an area of intense study, and we should talk more about it at some point!

For now, let's talk about what happens when leaves change color, and why they do so in the first place.

Not all trees shed their leaves in the fall, but those that do respond to an array of different environmental indicators to tell them that it's time to stop growing and retreat into rest-mode for a few months. Temperature plays a role--trees respond to chilly mornings and frosty days--but so does the length of the day. Once nights lengthen past some threshold value (which varies by tree type, location, and other genetic factors), deciduous trees start to draw all of the useful sugars, carbohydrates, and other biologically expensive equipment out of their leaves and back into their trunk-bodies. It's as if they'd laid out their patio furniture in their leaves for the summer, the chairs and the umbrellas and the cushions, and then carefully put everything away in the basement for the winter.

The molecule the trees are most interested in retrieving is chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is the pigment (colored molecule) that captures photons from sunlight, strips those photons of their energy, and diverts that energy toward the building of sugar molecules, which the tree then uses for growth. It's the base molecule for photosynthesis, and one of the most important evolutionarily-developed molecules we know of. Chlorophyll is a pretty complex molecule, too, with some biologically expensive components in it--metals and other elements that aren't really easy for a tree to get its hands (roots?) on, so plants are heavily incentivized to retain as much chlorophyll as they can, rather than letting it fall off along with the leaf and decay on the ground.

Chlorophyll appears green to the human eye. There are some other molecules that help with photosynthesis by absorbing photons with different energies, and those molecules appear yellow and orange. For some reason, not yet thoroughly explained, trees choose to jettison these molecules with their leaves, sucking only the chlorophyll back into their limbs. As the green chlorophyll drains away, the yellow and orange pigments take visual precedence.



The red and purple pigmentation we see in trees like sugar and Japanese maples comes from a different source: a type of molecule called "anthocyanins." These molecules are antioxidant molecules, produced only in the fall from the leftover carbohydrates in the leaves, and we still don't know exactly why they're produced. Because they're antioxidants, they may protect the slowly-draining chlorophyll from sunlight oxidation damage, or they might play some other role in limiting water loss during the fall; it's not totally clear, yet.

I love that, don't you? One of the most basic, fundamental, beloved events of the fall still holds questions for us. Scientists of the future, there's so much work left to be done!

Anyway, the TL;DR version: deciduous trees have light-trapping molecules in their leaves that they don't need to use during the winter, because they aren't trying to trap light, make sugar, and grow; they're just trying to survive until the next growing season. These molecules are green. When the trees call their green molecules back to the home base in order to save and recycle their valuable parts, the orange and yellow molecules that are left behind in the leaves are uncovered, and the leaves turn those bright colors. Other red and purple molecules join those yellow and orange ones, for reasons yet unknown.

My experience with savory pies began and ended with my New Zealand sojurn, years and years ago. N requested chicken pot pie, though, so I dug into some cookbooks and attempted one. I decorated it with pie-crust leaves in honor of the fall (which, to be clear, I really dislike. Summer is the greatest, and fall signals the end of light and warmth and happiness. Go away, stupid fall. Shorts and tank tops  >>>> pants and sweaters).

Anyway, here you go. Go check out the leaves in your area. What trees change sooner than others? Which trees turn which colors?



Recipe: Chicken sweet potato pot pie in a sourdough whole wheat crust

I made the pie dough with some of my whole wheat starter sometime last week and stashed it in the fridge, tightly tucked into plastic wrap. I intended to make an apple cheddar galette, or a squash ricotta something, but the other night we a) didn't have anything made for dinner, b) I'd just seen the BA recipe for a squash/chicken pot pie, and c) we happened to have all the ingredients for this already. Win! I combined this Joy the Baker recipe with this Bon Appetit one and made a few other tweaks. The whole wheat sourdough crust has a LOT of flavor + texture, which I like, but you may not, so feel free to sub in a regular pie crust here. OR just use a some puff pastry on the top, if you're feeling like you want a super easy version. Here's my variation:


Whole wheat sourdough crust:

• 2.5 cups white whole wheat flour
• 1.5 sticks!! of butter (12 tablespoons), straight from the fridge
• cut the butter into small chunks. I usually do this by slicing a stick into ~12 pieces, then cutting each slice into 4-6 little chunklets
• half a teaspoon table salt, not kosher
• 1 cup starter (100% hydration)
• note: feed your starter in the morning if you plan to make the dough in the afternoon, or the evening before if you plan to make the dough in the morning. Cool the starter down before you make the dough by sticking it in the fridge for an hour or so.
• a few tablespoons of cold water 
• if I'm very prepared, I put a cup of water in the freezer about 20minutes before I make the dough. If not, I just use the coldest water I can get out of the tap.

Hello! We've tumbled down the rabbit hole of autumn over here. Everyone else seems to be giddily unpacking sweaters and coats and posting pictures of mugs of tea next to their perfectly mussed pile of blankies, but I'm over here sulking. Fall is scary! It gets dark super early, my walk to the gym in the morning is pitch black and cold, and it's only going to get worse for the next few months. There is nothing to look forward to. Everything is bleak.

JK JK, not everything is terrible. My afternoon breaks from lab work look like this, now:



...and more importantly, turning on the oven no longer heats our apartment into a 600sqft sauna. Also, I like apples, so the loss of tomatoes + stone fruit from the farmers market is a little less devastating than it otherwise could be. Also, there's surf, because it's hurricane season.

Each fall, my non-scientist friends tend to ask me some variation on these two questions: 1) why do we have seasons, and b) why do the leaves change color? These are totally excellent questions that show that my friends, who are obviously great, are behaving like good little scientists: observing change in their natural surroundings and trying to figure out what mechanisms drive those changes. Nice!



Above, we see a rendering of the earth, with a US-centric orthographic projection (we can talk about map projections and shape distortion another time. Maps are super fun, and the earth looks really different from different perspectives). This projection is pretty common; we often see the earth represented as this sort of round ball oriented, vertically oriented, with the North Pole up at the top of the picture and Antarctica puddling at the bottom.

Of course, we could also look at the globe like this,

or like this (my view most of the time these days, since my research focuses on Antarctica and the Southern Hemisphere):


but for now, let's look at it in more or less the same orientation as that first few. It's still more or less vertical, but tilted a little bit onto its side. It's cocking its head at us, asking why we're staring at it.

The earth orbits around the sun every year. The angle at which the earth is tilted--how far over its head is cocked--stays the same for the whole time. I often find it helpful to physically move around to help myself understand how the orientation between sun and earth changes, so play along, if you'd like.

 Stand up and tilt your head to your left about 20 degrees (or about as far as any semi-flexible person can go without stretching too hard). Your head represents the earth; the northern hemisphere is basically everything north of your ears, and Antarctica is down at your chin. Pick a point a bit to your left to represent the sun, and walk in a counterclockwise circle around that point, facing the same direction the whole time.

When you first start, your northern hemisphere (your upper head, basically) is closer to the "sun" than your chin. That part of your head would get more sunlight than the lower half, and more sunlight in = warmer. In other words, it's summer up around your temple, and winter down at your chin. Keep Once you get halfway around your circle, your right lower-head-chin area will be closer to your sun than the top half: it's summertime down under!

We can make this the best new dance move, guys. Tilt and orbit. Tilt and orbit. The "tilt" puts one hemisphere closer to the sun than the other at some given point in time; the "orbit" controls which hemisphere is in that sun-facing position.  The end result is seasons, felt more intensely in the places that experience the largest

We'll talk about why leaves change colors next time, and I'll pair the explanation with a very fall-friendly sweet potato + chicken pot pie recipe in a whole-wheat sourdough crust. For now, let me tell you about these sourdough waffles we made last weekend.

My sourdough starters are happy and active; they really perked up after I started feeding them Bob's Red Mill dark rye flour, but that was getting expensive, so I transitioned them back to a 50/50 white:white whole wheat flour mix. The rye feeds had greatly increased the starter's activity, though, and the colony wasn't exhausting itself in the 12 hours between morning and evening feeds. When we got home on Friday evening at ~9pm, the little starter dudes were going strong, still totally puffed up, smelling like very ripe apples, and crying for a pat on the head. "OK, little guy," I thought, "if you're that excited, I've got a job for you." I scooped out about half a cup of the active starter and mixed it into a slightly-modified waffle recipe, covered it with a towel, and left it on the counter overnight.

The next morning, the batter had roughly doubled in size and smelled like wheaty apple cider. The waffles that came out were lighter and fluffier than any I'd had before, and I'm used to pillowy overnight yeasted waffles, which do not slouch when it comes to texture. The sourdough leavening was powerful enough to lighten up a 100% wheat flour batter, which, under normal baking circumstances, would have ended up as a dense little waffle bomb. Not so, here!


Overnight Sourdough Waffles, adapted just a bit from The Perfect Loaf:

• 2 cups milk (you can curdle it into buttermilk with ~1tbsp white vinegar to make the crumb a bit more tender, Just mix the vinegar into the milk and let it sit for ~5 minutes)
• 1/2 stick (4 tbsp) melted butter
• 1/2 c sourdough starter
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 2 c flour. I used all whole wheat this time, but a better proportion is generally 1 1/2c white: 1/2c whole wheat.
• 2 eggs (room temperature, if possible)
• 1/2 tsp baking soda (for that little bit of extra lift)
• 1/2tsp salt

I spent the entire month of November in a state of suspended reality, panic, and deep introspection. I'm half Mexican; I'm a climate scientist; I'm a woman. I've been lucky enough in my life to have experienced very little direct discrimination or aggression (though I can catalog many instances of the softer kinds, but that's a post for another day), but I have many colleagues, friends, relatives, and acquaintances for whom this is not the case.

I can't say anything about the election that hasn't already been said more eloquently elsewhere, for basically infinite reasons, I support Hillary, and I support her wholeheartedly. I am a person of color, from a family of Mexican immigrants; I am a scientist; I am a woman. I support the candidate and party that supports me, and that--at least in theory--supports the kinds of social, economic, and scientific positions that I hope will help us develop into a more equitable and progressive society.

Several years ago, I tried to build a sourdough starter. We were in the depths of a Boston winter, but I've never let practical I mixed the dregs of whatever white flour my mother had mouldering away in the pantry with some water, probably cold, and sat the jar on top of one of our clattering old radiators, and...nothing happened. My mother drove to one of our excellent local bakeries and brought back a few loaves as consolation.

I've baked my whole life. The Silver Palate, Joy of Cooking, Bittman, whatever French and Italian cookbooks I could entice my parents to buy for me-- sometimes I cooked the recipes, but mostly I just flipped to the "Dessert" section and covered the kitchen in flour dust. Quick breads, galettes, cornmeal cakes, macaroons, eclairs: I'd make the things I wanted to eat, vacillating between fussy, day-long cakeprojects and the simplest one-bowl cookies. By the time I was a teenager, I could throw together scones and pie crusts with whatever odds and ends I could find in whatever kitchen I found myself in.

I didn't really start doing science until college, and I didn't recognize the parallels between baking and science until much later, when I started graduate school. One day, I brought cookies to the lab and my (completely awesome) lab manager exclaimed "Oh, you're a baker! I always ask people I'm interviewing for lab jobs if they bake." Bakers, she explained, intuitively understood chemistry. This thing + that thing + heat/time/whatever --> something very different--not an addition, but a transformation. Bakers generally know how to follow directions, understand the importance of both precision and flexibility, and are used to the idea of iterative work: you do something over and over, and it gets better each time.

There are many other parallels between baking and science. Both can be done hastily, with back-of-the-envelope calculations and quick, intuitive work--but they turn out better when the observational notes are voluminous, the pipetting or stirring is careful, and the goal is clearly defined. The actual physical work can feel similar, as well. In the lab, I've got a funny little coat and hairnet and shoes, and I'm on my feet, reaching in and out of cabinets all day and watching beakers of liquids get to the exact right temperature, and cleaning endless dishes. In the kitchen, I'm...basically doing the same things, minus the lab coat. The work is physical, tangible, and goal-oriented. There are lots of dishes to wash.

Anyway! Back to the bread! I love bread, and I've eaten some absolutely jaw-droppingly delicious ones in my time. I live in New York, so I have access to plenty of the good stuff, but I want to make my own. I also like science. Bread + science go together. I'm going to write about both, and probably some other stuff, too.

Note: the photo is from one of my first commericially-yeasted loaves, following Serious Eats' "Workhorse loaf" instructions. I totally failed at scoring it, the crumb was as dense as a brick, the bottom was scorched, and the flavor was...bland, at best. But my superpower, or more often my Achilles heel, is that I'll always try the thing that is probably better left to others. So here we are, on a bread-baking adventure. Let's do it!