Kneading Bread is Like Making a Shinto Sword

In one of my dreams I live in Paris, in the 5th Arrondissement, a short walk from a boulangerie and pâtisserie.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I don't consider yeast risen "coffee cake" in a class with real cake. I never had the pleasure of Huize van Wely.

I'm not all that enthusiastic about cake. My wife can bake a superb cake (moist flavorful and light), and her butter frostings are the best I've tasted anywhere.

She's got me beat on pies too. She has a very light touch with crust.

Leach ftrom the masters: There are even "scientific" cookbooks - there is a guy from Reading University (can probably dig it out) and I like also Raymond Blanc's "cooking for friends" for *explaining* the purpose of doing things a certain way.

The Problem is that - an unfortunate trend these days - whatever the local bakery makes comes from the very same "sack-o-s**te ready-mix (TM)" that the factory uses. The only difference is that the bakers incarnation of the factory bread happens to be fresher.

The Local Bakery shoppe is *easily* and deservedly beat, IMO.

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Then there are oven with a special baking 'profile'. This often has a great effect on the crust, the transition from crust to the softer bread. Cheap and simple ovens cause a slow transition, so there is a millimeter under the crust where the bread is rather dense. As if there is a layer of lard between crust and inside.

Another reason it is impossible to even immitate a bread from a good bakery. Of course you can throw in all kinds of seeds, nuts, raisons and what have you to improve your bread, disguising all the faults your bread has.

Not in your dreams can you beat the bread from a real baker. You lack the knowledge, the experience, the tools and the ingredients.

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Not at all, please continue baking your own bread.

Cake! You obviously never were able to compare your own cake to one from 'Huize van Wely', about 15km from my place. Not in your dreams will you ever be able to produce something like that.

I could not agree more. Doing your own cooking/baking is great fun.

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Ah, those are the dreams. Don't forget to pick up some of the good stuff from the traitteur around the corner, the guy that has his better products on display in the window. In your dreams, you can't miss the place.

A while ago I was in Gent (Belgium) and got trapped in a chocolaterie. I lost my mind there and good deal of cash, I'll spare you the details.

I started brewing around 1989, and it my second batch tasted as bad as the first, I might not be brewing today. I was working from "The Complete Joy of Homebrewing." I sanitized with bleach - big mistake. It is hard to rinse the equipment well enough to eliminate all traces of bleach. I still spray the work surfaces with bleach, but anything that touches the beer gets a sodium percarbonate wash.

Batch size for me is ~25 liters, with thermostatically controlled fermenters. (I throw a couple of old sweatshirts over the carboys, put them on heat pads from the drugstore and plug it in to a thermocouple controller - monitor one and control all three, the three heat settings per pad allow me to adjust the heating)

I only brew during the winter and don't have the room for an all-grain setup, but can still turn out beers that can compete with the best.

I think all breweries may fall into the same trap that killed real beer in the US/Canada. Trying to please everyone, and do so without spending money on ingredients - like Campbell's Soup or Chef Boyardie. (another analogy . . . bland enough for the discerning palet of five year olds)

I was talking to the brewmaster at a local brewpub and mentioned that his brews had somewhat less hops aroma than I liked (I was being generous there was no hops aroma and little hops flavor). He said if it were up to him (it is up to him) he'd use more hops but his clientele found the beer too harsh. His beer was bitter, but no aroma or flavor.

He caters to the tourist crowd and doesn't have a regular patronage.

I like your description of Carlsberg and Tuborg. Take that and water it down a little and you have Budweiser. (an insult to equestrian urine)

If it weren't for my memory of what beer used to taste like or the fact that they started importing Samuel Smith's beers here, I'd probably drink Bud and think it was beer.

Heineken has stayed true to taste (if I can find a bottle that isn't "light struck") But Heiny is wimpy as beers go. Lownbrau and Molsen went bad years ago. (here in the US). Rheingold was good, but they folded.

You have a gas station that sells good bread? How does that come about? Here the gas station / "convenience stores" sell sliced wrapped commercially produced "bread."

No - "Around Here" the local *Petrol Station* sells the best bread (they use one of the small Dantherm ovens that can control humidity as well as temperature profiles), the "baker" have it trucked in from god only knows where and use an old oven on some of the ready-mix stuff to keep up appearances.

Sure, but I am not very good at brewing; I have played with it on and off for fun, maybe I need real equipment ... I have tools for 50 Liter batches which is maybe too small. I should try again with some better raw materials.

But rescue is at hand:

Quite a few mini-breweries are coming on-line in response to people being fed up with the industrial beer; Carlsberg, Tuborg mainly (They killed their speciality brands and have now acieved "perfection" which to them is beer that always and consistently taste like the exact dilution of some bodily fluid extracted from an equestrian and appear in Bond movies).

When you can buy the beer from the micro breweries, it is often very good. Their niche is that the "micro-beer" does not keep very long and you have to collect it or have it shipped as soon as it is ready. They can take some part of the market, probably even the part of the market willing to pay more for quality, but they will not be large.

A lot of the breweries are started by engineers that get fed up with idiot colleagues, long working hours and useless projects and desire to "semi-retire" maybe doing some consultancy work on the side (Due to unfair progressive taxation, it will hurt the IRS a lot more than the individual to "scale down" and if you are of the age where it does not matter how hard you work because you will not go a lot further in your "career" then it is a good side business).

I do not think the same revitalising of the art will happen in bakeries because baking is work-intensive and per tradition they start too early in the morning for anyone to want the job. But *Maybe* if they can change the hours they work. It is not like the customers get up early either ;-)

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Kill the Heretic!!!

Engineers are experts at *anything* they choose to do, meddle with or even philophize about. It is the natural order of things and cannot be challenged.

;-)