Filling in the Details.

I thought it might be a bit better to explain to everybody my intentions with the Ars pistorica project, as well as my own personal limitations.  Firstly, please understand I have just moved cities, house, jobs, and so on.  There are heavy, involved renovations both on the home- and the professional-front, and, to be honest, this is where most time's being spent at the moment.  I am using whatever, limited internet connections I can find at the moment, which is not fast enough for me to upload photos.  So, until that time, I want to continue to work on other facets of the project, which I am doing at night.  This primarily concerns research, as well adding more parameters to my ongoing sourdough model.

I want to build a bread calculator.  It needs users, though, and will ultimately be able to learn.  Here's what it would look like:

An empty box into which data can be typed, say:

F-L

And then the word "flour" might appear.  A sub-box would pop-up for type, and even specific brands and blends, all with their average data values (those that relate to predicting bread qualities) already input by, well, me and other users.

If users want to add other boxes, they can (they can add as many as they wish).  All boxes would represent every process-parameter that can be calculated for an eventual result.

My goal is to have it be powerful enough to handle any bread-related ingredient (ones that are used; if they are not input yet, then it's up to user-contributors to do so), as well as any process-parameter relevant to bakers (temperature, pH, redox potential, and so on).  There's enough data out there that a person should, if we put in enough data points, say which microflora they wish to have in their starter, and the generator would be able to tell people how to do this.

I also want a wiki for sourdough, which would be like a baseball card for every relevant microorganism involved, as well as a run-down of "stats" (the 'facts' as they relate to bakers), laid out very simply.

I know how to do the research, build the formulas from the necessary maths (yes, having Asperger's allows me to learn a lot), and I have already been accumulating tons of data.  Problem is, I am beginning to accumulate more data than I, by long-hand, can process and interpret.

The reason for this is that we are at a very exciting time in research in Lactobacilli.  So much so that new species are being discovered at a higher rate every year.  Also, more and more LABs are being completely genetically-mapped.  This data is useful.

The most exciting research is being done into quorum-sensing (which itself will likely be redefined in coming years) and LABs, as well as how different organisms are 'assigned' their evolutionary roles.

What everyone will learn from this blog (most of it original interpretation and/or hypotheses on my part) and where the current research is leading the science is that:  LB SF comes from us, probably from cross-contamination from us not washing our hands after taking a shit.  It can likely survive in other areas:  the mouth-nasal passages, the gastro-intestinal tract, breast milk, and vaginally, as well as in other species.  You'll also learn that there is no latency phase in LB SF (once the right conditions are presented); there's still perceived to be one based upon one study, and there have been several studies in the past few years that invalidate this conclusion (but without the researchers making the assumptive leap to do so).

I will also attempt to explain, in full detail, how LB SF co-evolved with humans in every way:  to our palates, to our schedule, and to our nutritional needs.  You'll also learn that it's not necessary for good sourdough.

Fact of the matter is, one researcher has shown, two years ago, LB SF can talk with our colons.  LB SF's growth requirements do not necessarily fit those of most of the other commonly-recovered commensal and/or syntrophic human-gut-based LABs.  But the conditions do match that of human feces and the area of the digestive tracts just after the intestines.

Again, all of this comes from original research.  The more people that join in, well, the more conclusions that can reached; the more powerful our predictive tools; and the better bakers we all become.

Join today.  I need your help.

And, if you look closely inside the heart from the previous post, you'll find LB SF's entire genome.

In time, there will be complete start-to-finished photographed how-to's.  This will have to wait.  I'll also show how-to's in both a professional and home environment, as, well, I've moved for a reason.

Cheers.

De novo.

Donate, Please.

Money, coding skills, managerial skills, research, editing, fund-raising, online social networking, yourself, anything.

Here's what I know:  This is a project called Ars pistorica.  This is not me.  I am separate from it.  I am one person.  Just call me 'il' (pronounced 'eel'), as in the French impersonal pronoun for 'he' or as in 'il pane.'  I know there's a lot of really good bakers online, all interested in answering the sorts of questions I was once interested in answering.

I also know that I am but one organism, like LB SF.  However, I, like that Prokaryote during the sourdough process, cannot and will not do this alone.

I'm not much interested in money or control or any such silly (my personal word for "irrelevant outlier" to my own interests) concerns.  I do want to bake.  I also love to read.  Like, more than what's considered obsessive.  I am also good at remembering what I read and distilling it down.  I love to share my passion, which is basically everything food-related.  I push myself to always find something new to learn.  I also know I am really, really, really good at all of these things, mostly due to a lot of actual hours of physical repetition put in coupled with the same quantity but with more selective quality in terms of reading.  I'm that one monkey sitting several typewriters down from the one typing Shakespeare.  And I'm the one typing about sourdough science.  Weird how random chance works out.

Regardless, I am calling all ya'll out:  I need help.  I'm also willing to cease control of the direction of the project and become a normal, contributing editor and content-creator (that's basically the direction I'm looking for).  There could be money in it, but that's irrelevant to me.  Somebody else can become the director, the web-presence "head," etc.  The more independent third-parties there are, the better.  We'd need an accountant, a web-design dude or dudette, researchers, editors, content creators, money to raise "project" research accounts for other researchers/members to have access to the same private journal-databases I use and pay for myself.  We need someone librarian-minded; A-type, dominant; organised; self-directing; interested in online networking.  We also need people who are:  great at coding; programming; good at reading technical literature that includes chemistry, biochemistry, physics, and higher maths; web-design.  We also need test-bakers who are willing to be precise, help run experiments, photograph and blog about their results on the project site, as well as record all data.  I would love to create an online interface where this is possible.  I have done simple versions for other formulas when I was a pastry chef.  My spreadsheet abilities are not that good.

Basically, the more people who want to help build, take control of, and steer the future of this project -- whatever it is -- the better.  I'll fund a lot of it myself.

What's important is that more and more people come together:  more minds equals more solutions found, I promise.

If you've ever lurked and wanted the answers to these sorts of things, or if you've ever dreamed of building this sort of website, please, by all means, step up.  Whoever you are.  I am only interested in being a co-anything, and not particularly interested in what form it takes, as long as it's free for all and as long as it is always producing better, more original content all the time.  This imperative is very easy.  We all want to learn, and there's always something to learn, thankfully.

I just want to personally learn as much about baking as I can before I die.  I'm sure there's lots of others out there who feel the same way.

So, is anybody there?

And so we must . . .

Startered Over.

The entire content of this blog, regardless of whatever eventual, future form it might take, will always be 100% free, with no restrictions placed upon its reproduction, transmission, or use.

There is no claim to ownership or intellectual property rights involved.  Quite the opposite, as there is a claim to complete freedom of information and user-sharing.

Areas of high information must always flow to areas of low information.  If not, we, as responsible members of “society” must make it so.  This imperative reflects the most basic rule of morality, and, incidentally, most physical systems:  treat others the way you wish to be treated.  Such a relationship can only exist if it is both completely and freely reciprocal.  Reciprocal relationships do not exist when a barrier is placed at any point in the system, as this impedes a truly free flow of information and allows it to accumulate in one spot.  True, free momentum in all directions and upon all paths (while also forging new ones immediately upon meeting any new contact point) leads to good, and any barrier, even if only one in an infinite scheme, shifts the entire nature of the system to first benefit the one point where the barrier was erected before every other point in the system. 

Remember this lesson, as it applies to economics, human rights, environmental concerns, politics, physics, ethics, knowledge, truth, access to the basic necessities of life, and how we should treat all living things.  Especially each other.

A system is merely one line drawn between two points:  it can be described as a path, as a relationship, as a ratio, as a contrast, as a comparison, as a number system, as infinite, as finite, and pretty much as any way we choose to see it.  One can zoom in or out from these two points as much as he or she desires, so there is infinite reducibility and inductibility.  However, there are limits to the system of understanding used to describe and map these two points; any such floor or ceiling will also imply that there are real points (barriers) to how far the reductive or inductive measuring of these two points can go.

An example as a simple math problem:  Reduce 80% to its lowest fraction.  The answer, four-fifths, is only one answer.  It can continue to be reduced infinitely beyond that point, but the answer will be redundant (it will always be four-fifths) when expressed in our natural base of 10.

So, understanding there are limits to our knowledge systems might seem trivial, but it’s mentioned as a heuristic:  This will be how the blog works.

I always use my mom as a reference point.  She does not have Asperger’s (the newest DSM has changed its diagnostic term to “high-functioning autism,” which is technically Asperger’s is, but for sake of convention and ease of use this blog will continue to use the older term).  My father’s father did.  It’s likely my father and brother do, too.  We all exhibit similar ways of thinking, but each with whichever specific area of knowledge we have, for whatever reason, chosen to doggedly pursue.  The true litmus test, for me, is to take a subject of knowledge, and then to transmit it in a form that’s not only easily and immediately understood by my mom but one that also makes her interested in gaining that subject of knowledge in the first place.

The second consideration is as important, if not more so, than the first:  knowledge is not knowledge if it’s not wanted, as what’s the purpose of its transmission?

I want to arrive at as simple a truth or sets of truths as I can obtain.  This would be what most professionals refer to as “the fundamentals” within their chosen métier.  The aim here is to continually arrive at as small a set of rules that directly correlates with as much of my chosen subject of knowledge as possible.  The “continually” implies that this searching, collating and editing process does not and must not ever stop.

My chosen subject is ars pistorica, the art of breadmaking.  The “as much” will imply an investigation into every facet of this process, (both in terms of methods and materials used) from start to finish, as possible.

Another aspect of this blog will be to raise awareness for autism, especially in its adult forms, where its life-long implications compound, becoming vastly more complicated.  I do not say this lightly:  I have either quit or been fired from every job I’ve ever had, many of them very good.  Financial stability, long-term social relationships, real-world day-to-day skills, priorities other than my chosen area of interest, and much, much more all eludes me.  What does not, though, is the subject matter of this blog.

I have a proposal for a curriculum, starting with starters.  The content of this blog will have a definite scope, as I am only one person, but the content will be original, extensive, game-changing, in-depth, easy-to-use, and, most importantly, with an emphasis on the learning-process found in real-world kitchen environments (seeing is doing; doing is knowing; knowing is doing, then letting others see).  There will be no secrets here.

This blog is more of a project, one entitled Ars pistorica (pistor was the Roman Latin word for baker; notice its close resemblance to the words “pesto” and “pistou,” all of which go back to a common Latin word that implies an action of “mixing,” which in and of itself shows the dislogic of Jim Lahey’s argument that Romans did not knead their bread).  It is designed to be collaborative, with 100% free content.  The model used here will be one that’s user-driven and -oriented, like Craigslist, within the obvious bounds of what’s fungible and not.

I am but one person.  Bread is also the story of one person.  The story of bread, as you will learn on this blog, shows us that there’s only ever been one loaf throughout our history.  The methods and materials (process parameters) are fixed throughout time, minus one:  the person making the bread.  For there is only one loaf, and so the question each of us, as bakers, must answer is a confoundingly tongue-tying yes or no question.  Do we want to make that loaf, carrying on a tradition that has stretched out before us, millions of times, and also, in the process of making, sharing and eating that loaf, indelibly and forever put our mark on it, a mark that stays for as long as the loaf is made, a mark that’ll allow others to continue to make it, too?  My answer is yes.

We are all making this very same loaf, each slightly different, and yet they are all remarkably the same, stupid bread every other baker has made throughout history.

My goal for this project is to, one day, have a shared, collaborative editorship, and ultimately attract the sorts of people who make up for my deficiencies, which are, namely, everything.  Coding, programming, biochemistry, mathematics—the basic gamut. 

The content being introduced in the beginning will immediately impact the way every baker approaches bread, as it provides better tools of understanding and predicting your crumby results than those provided before.  I am not much interested in personal attribution, as I, as a person, am irrelevant.  The only thing that matters for me is producing good bread and sharing it.  Having a form of autism allows me this personal divorce, which might be at odds with most readers.

I have recently moved house.  So, I’ve “startered” over, literally.  I threw out my old starter, maybe six days ago.  This new house has a kitchen I have never cooked or baked in before.  The oven is new and it really, really sucks.  I have never used this make or model, nor would I wish it upon any of you.  The backyard, climate, and city are all also new to me, so the only thing I will be using will be my own personal reference points (i.e., the same as those you will be learning on this blog).  Everything I do in terms of making bread will be visually-documented (photographed and maybe one day as video, if I decide at some point to be “personally” involved), thoroughly and simply investigated and explained, with results recorded, and themselves investigated and explained.  Errors are very likely, but their rate of occurrence probably low.  There is no personal judgment on my part for or against any one particular process presented, but I, as an individual, do have my own personal preferences. (These will be shared, at times, or if ever asked, with the reader’s understanding I view my tastes as irrelevant, and neither better or worse than any other person’s.)

Here's a sample of things to come:  how-to’s and tutorials for how to create and maintain a starter; use and manipulate any home-oven for better bread; how to mix and handle dough; dough rheology and fermentation (the how’s and why’s, as they relate to bakers); how to calculate, exactly, your dough’s outcomes, both in terms of time, flavour and overall qualities; high-quality .gifs on how to shape anything using several techniques; the limits of bread; a photographed and extensively documented start-to-finish lesson for:  my city loaf; my table loaf; my baguette; my slipper loaf (ciabatta); my pizza; my room-temperature pizze (Roman-style); my brioche; my croissant; my bagel; suburban wheat-growing and -milling; create and understand any formula, easily; behind-the-scenes look at both industrial-sized stone-ground and roller-milling; the science, history, art and sociology of bread.

They say those who can’t, teach.  I rarely fit in other people’s “box.”  I do know that thinking outside the bread-box, so to speak, has gotten me to where I am.  I am not much interested in money, but I am interested in raising money to make this project my (and hopefully other people’s) job.  Why?  For the betterment of bread.

If you’re sceptical about donating, then just wait or do not altogether.  But I do promise you one thing:  You’ll get the content for free either way, and it’ll be worth more than your fifty best baking books combined.  By the way, how much did you spend on all of those?

Here’s to all of us becoming better bakers.

The Sound of Silence.

Please mind the gap:  I will be away for a week, maybe two, and so any updates will be written ones, assuming updates occur at all.

But once it starts, it's going to come hard, fast and ain't nobody gonna keep up.  I hope I cannot, either. (Keep up, that is, as I want this project to grow beyond me.)

As always, I can be reached at arspistorica at Google's own e-mail service.

Thank you for reading.

Le retour à pain.

In his Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot wrote a quartet of lines that captures one elemental truth about the human journey, about how the only true personal transformation that matters is to understand there isn't one, that all there is to life is yourself and that around yourself:

                    "We shall not cease from exploration

                     And the end of all our exploring

                     Will be to arrive where we started

                     And know the place for the first time."

Before both of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants opened in New York City, the restaurants' executive chef, Neil Ferguson, and I would sit around, often past midnight sitting on hotel function-room chairs, talking about food.  Specifically, bread.

Ferguson, a soft-spoken, elven man with noticeably British teeth, used to run the pastry department at L'Arpège, a three-Michelin-starred restaurant known for serving the most expensive menu in Paris, and it's mostly buttered vegetables on discus-sized, art-deco plates.

Like me, he loved bread, and at Arpège they made a rustic miche in-house (at the time, as Alain Passard, the owner and chef, has since worked with two separate artisan bakers to develop a house loaf).  I, of course, used this conversation to try and reverse-engineer their method and formula, and, at one point while I mentioned something in French, Neil's eyes lit up.  He often speaks while drawing an inward lisp of air through his teeth, and over the saliva on his tongue:  His eyes had lit up at the word alveole, as he began to remember many instances of a crazed Passard fanatically hovering over, jamming his index finger at the oven doors where, just inside, freshly-loaded breads began to puff up at the sudden increase in temperature.  Les alveoles!, he remembered Passard screaming, happily, verbally projecting his wish for huge, irregular holes to worm throughout the bread's insides.  

Coincidentally, Passard also seemed to yell the same sort of thing for souffles, millefeuilles, and pretty much anything else that rises during baking.

Bread stands out for me because, no matter what job I have had and no matter what circumstances life has thrown me, it has always been in my life as a constant.  If working as a pastry chef, I would always somehow figure out a way to take over the bread program, and, if one did not exist, one would magically be created.  Same if I've worked as a chef:  restaurants that didn't need a bread program suddenly got a bread program.  Even when I first started working in the hospitality industry as a barista, well, breads would somehow appear.

I love bread.  It is my favourite food.  It has been this way since I was a child.  Upon hearing prisoners were only fed a diet of water and bread, I surmised that jail must be kind of cool.

I was raised in Texas, eating what most good bakers would call bad bread:  Wonder Bread, Popeye’s buttermilk biscuits, Lender’s Frozen Bagels, Sam’s Club bulk croissants, Little Caeser’s Crazy Bread, glazed doughnuts before church every Sunday morning; basically, Houston during the 1980’s.

Some time ago I hopped across the equator, and landed in Australia.  I have always wanted to live some place where all the ingredients I needed for bread and pizza grew around me.  I have ended up in such a place, a place I chose to settle down for bread alone.  Now there are other, wonderful circumstances tying me here (children that talk funny), but I am very lucky to have found my place in the world.

I would like to think that I always return to bread, but this isn't the case.  Bread always stays with me.  Literally.  I'm referring to a bacterium funnily named Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, as it was first isolated and thought to be characteristic of San Francisco and its famed sourdough.

Researchers still scratch their heads over its origins, as it has never been isolated outside of an environment other than properly-maintained sourdoughs.  But, as we will later learn on this blog, just by making and eating this kind of bread, a baker engages in a relationship that likely dates back tens of thousands of years, a tradition that can only be carried forward if we, as a species, continue to bake and then eat this kind of bread.

That is bread's existential Catch-22:  it cannot and would not exist apart from us, as humans.  This sort of paradox is often forgotten by those who talk about foods that are natural.  Terroir is only terroir because of the human element; if we are taken away from the equation, you end up with wild grapes.

This blog is for anybody and everybody who wants to make and eat bread.

The content of this blog will be diverse, but most if it follows a general rubric.

For understanding bread specifically, as something we bake and eat, there will be two considerations that will be explored over time:  the in's and out's of breads, or, in baker's terms, a dough's fermentation and rheology.  Within each of these there will be an exploration of all the significant parameters that affect both a dough's fermentation and/or rheology.  These will be each then be sub-divided into methods and materials, along with an understanding of their impacts during processing on the categories above them.

The other elements of this blog will be to answer the sorts of questions I have never seen answered in any bread or baking book, all based upon the latest cereal- and baking-sciences to date; extensive how-to's, practical tips, tricks and guides; interviews with a wide-variety of bakers, from professional to home-based; and, lastly, the development of an online model that can hopefully be transformed into a universal bread-engine, where every formula and possible parameter can be input, stored and eventually interpreted so that we, as bakers, can begin to build a more in-depth understanding of bread's how's and why's, hopefully all at our fingertips, digitally-accessible, and as quick to predict an input outcome as a calculator.   This last consideration is also the biggest hurdle, as nothing of its kind exists.  Of course, as a former pastry chef, too, I would love to create a universal bakepedia, of the sort described above but capable of mapping, describing and predicting an outcome for all baked goods.

Danny Meyer, owner of my favourite restaurant in New York, once said:  "All boats rise with the tide."

I believe in sharing as much as possible.

The only way I have become, and continue to become, a better baker is through other people sharing their knowledge and time.  I hope this project, one dedicated to the art of breadmaking, becomes bigger than just one person and one kind of bread.

Because, quite literally, I love all bread.  This does not mean there will not be a limit of scope to this blog's content.  It will, in the beginning, concern itself with two methods of fermentation (alcoholic- and lactic-acid-) and two types of tall-grasses, wheat and rye, as these are responsible for what I consider to be the best kind of bread there is, and, also, I have to start somewhere.

I hope you all have a crumby day.

The Story of Bread Is the Story of Life.

The story of bread is also the story of life.  Quite literally.  Every human culture to exist since we, as a species, began to (even unconsciously, at first) cultivate agriculture, has had a bread, their bread.  Humans swapped an always-on-the-go, nomadic existence for a living structure that closely resembles today’s, but with less density.

This is an important footnote for bread:  since its introduction into human society, we began to live in bigger and bigger groups, which, at a certain point on our timeline, began interacting and affecting with each other, until the saturation point we have reached now:  true global reach.  This produces a greater diversity and accumulation of just about everything imaginable, from shared knowledge to bad memes featuring LOLZ cats.

What does bread have to do with this?  Everything, and nothing.  It touches upon more aspects of human life, of both our being and being in general, and even toggles up a meta-level or two on the ontological scale, with implications reaching into the nature of our universe.

It is also something we, as a species, like to eat, digest and then defecate.  Why do I say this?  Because, well, it’s true:  bread sustains life, and in more ways than one.  What is life, after all, if not just a collected series of eating, shitting and fucking with (hopefully) some genetic replication thrown in, and with the final result of death?  That last, ultimate consequence be damned, we and every other species endeavours on.

Why?

That’s the definition of life, really, an organic substance with intentions of carrying itself forward, somehow, from its current state of being and into another.  The very opposite of entropy.  Matter organising and copying itself from one energy state and into another, only for no other reason than to continue along the same path.

Bread, like mentioned before, is the story of life.  A brief investigation into its origins will show that it increases the life activity of every organism involved in its production.

How?  Simple:

Lactic-acid bacteria want to live (maximise genetic replication).

Yeast want to live.

Tall grasses want to live.

Humans like to eat and get drunk.  They also want to live, too.

There are other, outlier species in this story, too, like insects, rodents, birds and the like, all with similar intentions.  So, all these species, bound by the one common goal, interact with each other, and, over time, unwittingly work together to find a solution that maximises the expression of life activity (metabolic and reproductive) for all those involved.  The solution reached occurs because, as each species is reproducing itself (carrying copies of itself forward, into a new energy state), errors occur in the copying process that result in slight variations.  At times the differences benefit the one, shared goal, to try to maximise the life activity of all those involved, and, when it does, those copies tend to be carried further more often because they simply work.  The funny thing about all this is that each species lives it life separately, unaware of the other, and yet each of their life choices influences each other individual species as well as the group as a whole.  These interactions (co-evolutions) arrive at a very clever solution to the question asked, how to maximise the life potential of all those involved.

The answer?

Bread, of course.

It maximises both the metabolic and reproductive activity of all the players in this game, which is, as I said before, the story of life.

Quite literally.

And the end result?

A loaf of bread, an edible collection of organic matter, arranged to carry life forward.

This is what we get when we crush the seeds or grains of local tall-grasses and then mix the result with water, forming a paste that can be transformed into physically-preserved evidence that organic matter defied, however briefly, the universe’s overarching mandate of eventual degradation.

This blog will explore the in’s and out’s of bread, about what it means to bake and break bread.