No-knead breads have become very popular lately, but the recipes all seem to have some incomprehensibly complicated steps (involving folding the dough and a pre-heated pot) in the middle.
So I thought I would try to just bypass those and see what happened, and the results were just as good. And a lot less work.
I don’t think it gets much simpler than this recipe.
There’s just four ingredients:
500g (4 cups) wheat flour
4dl (1.7 cups) water
1/4 tsp dry yeast
2 tsp salt
Put the flour into a bowl.
Add the yeast.
Add the salt.
Stir a bit.
Add water.
Stir until it’s formed a dough, which should take long. You’ll get a moist, sticky dough if the flour/water proportions are right.
Let the dough stand in the bowl for about 18 hours on the bench, covered by plastic wrap or something.
It’ll have risen substantially after 18 hours…
… so beat it down a bit.
And then transfer…
… into a lidded pot that’s lined with baking paper. It should be a pot that can survive being in a 250C (480F) oven for a while, so all-steel or iron is great.
Put the lid on and let it proof for another 90 minutes on the bench. Removing excess baking paper might be a good idea, because they’re usually not rated for that high a temperature and will brown up and become very flaky.
After 90 minutes, the dough will have a-risen again.
Pop it into the lowest rack at 250C (480F) and let it bake for 25 minutes with the lid on.
After 25 minutes, it’ll look like this: Completely pale.
(And remember that the pot is going to be really, really hot at this point, and it seems so natural to instinctively grab the handle — so always wear protection on your hands.)
Take the lid off and move the pot higher up and bake for about another 25 minutes; until it’s how brown you want it to be. Lower the temperature to 210C (410F).
Oops! I forgot to take it out in time, so it’s a bit on the burnt side.
But not seriously. It’s still moist and very wheaty and glutinous: Gluten makes bread nice.
That’s the basic recipe. If you want more fibre, replace some of the wheat with dark rye, for instance, or grind up some nuts and add those: It’s difficult to fail completely with this method. The bread will always come out fluffy but satisfying, and with a nice crust.
Since the first time I heard of e-ink products, I was pretty enthused: Imagine having something with the resolution of paper and the convenience of a very light tablet to read from! What a marvel!
And then I saw an e-ink e-reader.
They’re horrible! The resolution is way less than paper, and when you flip the page everything blinks and inverts and dances around!
Seemed like a bad joke to me, but I assumed that surely they’d get their shit together and then one day e-ink e-reader products would take over.
Then years later, not much has happened, except that e-books have fallen in market share as people are moving back to paper books. Because those e-readers are horrible.
So, of course, when I read that somebody had made an HDMI e-ink monitor, I had to have one.
Because I’ve got an Emacs-based alarm clock in the bedroom, and the light from the screen is annoying. Even the OLED screen I bought isn’t black in the black parts. And its response curve goes from, like, #202020 (as black) and then jumps to #808080 as the next-darkest colour it can display.
The e-ink display emits no light, so perhaps it can be used here?
The manual from Dasung is pretty funny. “It should be said that Paperlike is an innovative product with high courage and honesty.”
“Video display and gameplay shall be prohibited.”
I mean, I know what they’re trying to say: That this isn’t a perfect product, and that there are severe restrictions to what you should expect this thing to do. Because of ghosting and the other problems this tech has.
It’s a thoughtful product. For instance, you need just one cable: It’s a mini-HDMI connector at the screen side, and at the computer side it’s a full HDMI and a USB connector for power. Perfect.
So let’s look like what the screen looks like:
Yup, that’s some severe ghosting, alright.
And this is what it looks like when it’s displaying nothing. Not a screen to display secret things on for sure.
But there’s a “C” button on the screen that flashes to white, and then back to black, and then all the ghosting is gone:
Nice. And it’s supposed to be possible to control this from software, too, so perhaps this is usable as an alarm clock…
It turns out that this screen has several modes for doing conversion from colour/greyscale to black and white, and one of them are based on dithering. You get kinda fun effects by dragging things over the images, so it’s half the real image, half after images, and…
And whatever’s happened here? Kinda solarised? Cary Grant looks very sci-fi.
Wow, that’s really out of focus, dude.
ANYWAY.
The software-refresh thing is available on Linux, so kudos to Dasung for that. However, it doesn’t work on Debian, only Ubuntu. And it’s not a command line program, but a GUI. However, it does bind a “hot key”, so I could definitely work around that by just sending the program some software-emulated keys.
The software refresh isn’t as thorough as the hardware button… and the program uses 100% CPU while running. Dasung hasn’t made the source code available, either, and people are trying to decompile it to figure out how to work with it.
What to do…
OK, let’s just try to use it without the software and see what it looks like.
So I plop the new little computer into the Box Of Electronics in the bedroom…
And… Hm. There’s definitely refresh issues, but not quite like I imagined. You can see the missing “08:00” (that was there before), but the time itself is very clear?
Oh, yeah. If you stare at it really hard, you can see the “8” that has been where the “9” is now, and if you stare even harder, you can see the faint ghosts of other numbers.
That’s not bad at all, I think?
Uhm… I found this connector in that box… it’s an… HDMI to DVI to DVI to HDMI connector?
Yes! Useful!
This is what it looks like from some distance. Can’t really see the ghosting at all. Nice!
But then I tried to use this thing tonight, and it turned out that I couldn’t really make the clock out… because it’s too dark! Duh. So I need some lights that I can flick off and on.
Do USB-based lights allow that? It depends? Seems like only very specific hubs has support for this stuff? Are there any USB lights that you can program? That like expose a serial interface you can say “off” to? No?
For now, I’ll just use a small Ikea lamp and control it via the Tellstick interface.
There! I have the on/off light switch by the bed, so perhaps this’ll work… Perhaps a light that can be mounted on top of the screen would be better, but there’s some glare from the screen, so I’m not sure whether that’ll work. Worth a try, though.
I’m going for a Designers Republic kinda vibe with the design. What you’re looking at is, of course, an Emacs buffer, but I’m using SVG to get things lined up better now.
Quite a few of these late-40s DVDs have been from Olive Films, a company I was previously unaware existed. Is this a new iteration of one of the older quality-minded DVD companies? Like… uhm… Eureka? Artificial Eye? Curzon? Tartan? I know that some of those have gone under and been resurrected under other names…
All the Olive movies look great. They aren’t super-restored or anything (you can definitely see the film grain and the wear of the film stock), but that just adds charm. The discs look really sharp and cool.
But there’s not a lot extra features: At most, just the ad for the movie in question.
Anyway!
This is a Max Ophüls movie, so big, big drama, expertly shot. The first half hour of this film feels really special: We get an excellent portrait of a woman navigating her possibilities.
But when she marries, the movie loses interest. The husband is so awful that the scenes become a chore to watch. But then it gets interesting again. I really like Barbara Bel Geddes understated performance.
Handsome production values have been wasted on a complicated, unpleasant story that is a curious hodge-podge of romance and psychological melodrama … It is an odd picture, impressive in many respects and ‘corny’ in others, but on the whole too contrived and implausible.
That’s true. And there are parts of the ending I rolled my eyes at, but this is a pretty solid movie.
*gasp* Nineteen fortynine! I just have 12 more movies to go for this blog project!
This is pretty good. We get presented with three women’s lives, possibly at a pivotal point for any of them, and it’s pretty interesting. But mainly I’m wondering whether Ingmar Bergman saw this movie and then thought, hmm, I can do this a lot better. And then did.
Because this pales in comparison with that movie, of course.
Still: It’s a solid movie. It’s mainly let down by the performances; and mainly the performances of the men. I don’t really buy any of them as real characters.
The disc includes the radio play (that the movie’s based on?), and it’s a lot funnier than the movie. The movie goes for pathos, while the radio play goes for slapstick. It’s fun!
