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Reviews (2)
Nov 11, 2015
The title is misleading; but great bread is not effortless
3 of 3 found this helpful After retiring, one of my missions was to learn how to bake good bread. I received a copy of the Tartine Bakery bread book as a Christmas present, which led me to buy their original/first bread cookbook. When I started to bake, using this book, I produced loaves that were best suited to be paperweights. If I were a less patient person, I would have given up but that is not my nature. I persisted. I looked online and found some helpful advice relevant to naturally leavened breads. After three or four attempts, I hit the jackpot. Everything came together in a delicious way, and now I have a group of friends who hope that when I visit them I have a loaf of bread with me. Unless I am very very busy, I don't buy commercial bread anymore, and I live in an area where commercial bread is quite good.
My wife is gluten intolerant. For someone who loves bread as I do, and pasta as I do, this is a horrible thing to have happen to someone you love. I love to cook, and in our household, I am the cook. I adapted many recipes that call for flour or bread crumbs or soy sauce, and have succeeded in making them gluten-free. However, it just bothered me that my wife had to eat the mediocre "bread" that was gluten-free. So it became a mission of mine to produce high-quality, delicious, gluten-free bread.
My first independent efforts were, in retrospect, not as bad as I initially thought. I had a flour mix that was actually pretty good. When I created a natural leaven using gluten-free flours, the leaven "exploded". I got lots of rise. I thought to myself, how hard can this be? Well, despite these positive initial indicators, when I baked bread, I revisited the "paperweight" phase. Moreover, the doughs just behaved so differently from gluten-containing doughs that I was on the verge of giving up. The baking times tend to be much longer. I borrowed this book from my local library, tried a recipe, and some progress was made. It was not a total success by any means, but better than what I thought I would have accomplished on my own. I bought the book.
I have now made several batches of dough and baked bread. It remains difficult to get substantial rise in the dough. You get very little oven spring (for those who bake and know what this refers to). I have played with the water, which was a major issue in getting gluten-containing starters and doughs to rise, and I have played with temperature and time, and I have resorted to a Dutch oven for baking the bread. The most recent versions of the dough and the process have resulted in loaves that are reasonably aerated, that have a good crust, and have good flavor. However, it was not without effort to get to this point, and some of the changes that I made were guided by my experience with baking gluten-containing doughs. If you think this book will be the magic silver bullet, and help you bake loaves like those on the cover with "Five Minutes a Day" of effort, you are quite likely to be disappointed. It will require considerable effort and persistence to get to where you want to go. I would encourage patience. If you work at it, you can produce bread that is equal to or better than commercially available gluten-free breads, but if your first loaf is disappointing, then realize that some effort is required and this book is not a panacea. If you are baking for a loved one, I hope that they appreciate the effort that went into your ultimate success.
Mar 16, 2017
Replacement for a $300 Hammacher-Schlemmer down pillow
1 of 1 found this helpful Many years ago I bought a Hammacher-Schlemmer goose down pillow, and over the years the down compressed, and it just was no longer possible to sleep comfortably on this pillow. I went to the Hammacher-Schlemmer site and found the pillow, now selling for $300. I decided I would look and see what alternatives might be available that would be suitable for a stomach sleeper. I ended up ordering this pillow. I have owned it for a bit over a week now, and at least to this point it seems well made, and a good choice for a stomach sleeper. Ironically, when it came, it had a $300 price tag on it. Whether this is real or whether this is marketing I leave up to you to decide, but I can't say that I see any obvious difference between this and the quality of the Hammacher-Schlemmer pillow that served me well for over a decade. I will hope that it holds up and gives me an equally long lifetime.