schematicdreams

Dear Red Robin,

We are two regular patrons of your restaurant and would like to express our concerns regarding an advertisement Red Robin recently aired. For your reference, the advertisement in question can be found here:

http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7nsK/red-robin-burgers-teenage-daughter

In short, the advertisement features a woman who states that Red Robin serves garden burgers, "just in case your teenage daughter is going through a phase." In doing so, it belittles Red Robin's customers, its potential customers, and its food.

Before delving into the full implications made by this ad, we would like to first establish that we have been fans of Red Robin for quite some time. We are Red Royalty members, and we have regularly dined at the Red Robins in Towson, Maryland and in other Maryland locations, where we have enjoyed your selection of food, quality service, and reasonable prices. We have felt confident when bringing our friends and family to Red Robin that they would enjoy themselves, because we could rely on delicious meals, respectful servers, and a pleasant dining atmosphere. We have been happy to spend our money at Red Robin, because, until recently, Red Robin has demonstrated that it valued our visits.

Which is why we were particularly troubled to see this advertisement. By declaring Red Robin's veggie burgers to be the meals of adolescent girls "going through a phase," this commercial implies that adult women and men of all ages know better than to be vegetarian. We are led to believe that Red Robin does not respect vegetarianism as a dining option for any but immature, misguided female youths, does not respect the values it purports to uphold, and does not respect its own veggie burgers as quality food.

Judging by this commercial, Red Robin's marketing team is either unaware or unconcerned with our dining experience. You see, we ourselves happen to be vegetarians and have been for many years. One of us is even female. Yet, significantly, neither of us is teenaged. We are adults, who have just been informed by your advertisement that we have been eating inferior food because of our inferior lifestyles. The commercial gives the same message to those who are not vegetarian by choice, such as those unable to consume meat for medical reasons. And it is not a message we appreciate hearing, especially not from a potential dinner option.

The advertisement even disregards the principles Red Robin claims to hold in high regard. The Red Robin website lists "Honor" as one of your cornerstone values, stating, "Having respect for our fellow team members and celebrating the individuality of each and every guest is the key to Red Robin's unbridled restaurant experience." When we saw this ad, we didn't feel very celebrated. Rather, we felt unwelcome. Red Robin's FAQs, discussing vegetarian options, state that, "Team Members will gladly customize to meet the dietary needs or preferences of our Guests." If this assertion is true, Red Robin should be proud of its service; why, then, does it advertise disrespect for its customers with dietary restrictions?

Even more puzzling, why choose to denigrate Red Robin's selection of burgers? As we've said, we've enjoyed your veggie burgers in the past. We felt good recommending Red Robin to our friends, in particular vegetarian friends, since Red Robin stands out for the many options and styles we can apply to our meals there. Is Red Robin no longer interested in filling this role for us? If not, why dismiss its veggie burgers as substandard fare?

We understand that mistakes can be made, even by companies we respect. Perhaps Red Robin's marketing team simply didn't realize the damage it would do to its relationship with vegetarian, female, and teenaged customers by running this ad. We do not wish to stop frequenting our local Red Robin, and we hope that Red Robin does not wish to lose our business. We would be happy to avoid both unfortunate outcomes if Red Robin would make clear that it values all its customers, regardless of gender or dietary restrictions, and that it understands our concerns. We implore Red Robin to take this opportunity to make good on these words from its website: "Learning is growing, and this is one of our commitments to each other."

Your concerned customers,
Melissa Tillery and Tevis Tsai

Something warm and fluffy pressed on his head. His neck, too, felt a strange, bristly pressure, and even his arms and chest sensed a weight and warmth he could not identify.

At first, he thought he was still dreaming. Strange sensations were the language of dreams. But then, he remembered that his dreams had featured his ex-girlfriend yelling at him for not turning off the stove in his old apartment, and neither his stove nor his ex had felt anything like whatever had spread itself over his upper body. Also, he realized, his eyes were closed, and he seldom dreamt of keeping his eyes closed.

He opened his eyes. An unfocused brown blur covered his field of vision, the image of something too close to his face for him to see properly. He shut his eyes again and shook his head, lifted his arms from their fuzzy prisons, and shoved the brown blur off of his head.

A chorus of peeps and shrieks blared in his ears, concentrated by the walls of his shelter. He pushed himself up by his elbows and looked toward his feet but saw only his uninvited guests, nearly the entire demon bird brood, nestled against his legs, pecking at the interior of his shelter, and screeching at the sudden disturbance. During the night, they must have returned to what had once been their parents' nest, only to find a structure that held the only dry spot in the forest. What luck for them that there was even a heater inside, albeit one that had recently killed their parents and one of their siblings.

He pulled himself out of the feather-filled chamber and into the mud outside. A pungent, earthy smell permeated the forest. The leaves hung low on their branches, releasing droplets onto the moist ground. His shelter had held up fairly well, all things considered, though he could already see some spots on the roof he'd want to shore up soon.

The remains of his cooking were less uplifting. The storm had reduced his rotisserie to a pile of sticks beside his extinguished fire, and the torso of the demon bird had sunk several inches into the dirt. The intact corpse had fared no better, its matted feathers muddied and buzzing with flies. A repulsive smell intensified as he approached, and the bloated belly of his would-be meal confirmed that putrefaction had set in. He nudged at the body with his foot, lifting it from the dirt. Thin swarms of buzzing, winged specks exited the openings where its neck and legs had been, and their subterranean cousins tunneled in and out of the demon bird where its flesh had met the ground. He withdrew his foot and let them resume their meal.

( Turn information )

His first instinct was to restore his makeshift kitchen to its former glory--well, perhaps "glory" was the wrong word--but his good sense politely informed him that the rain would undo any such efforts. He would have to wait for the storm to abate.

He shivered. Splotches of rain impacted every square inch of his body, cold pinpricks robbing him of his body heat. He walked back to the shore, if only to warm himself up, and surveyed the coast.

The ocean had blurred into a vast collision of fresh and brackish water. Droplets bounced in tiny arcs, interrupted the arcs of their neighbors, and merged in split seconds. Lightning arced on the horizon, outshining the last of the day's sunlight. He retreated back into the comparative shelter of the forest.

Animals endured storms with fur and feathers to protect them, and while a man could do the same without, it was his birthright to do better. He would have to build himself a house.

He set about searching for materials. Some of the largest, waxiest fronds available appealed to him as potential roofing; he pulled at these until their owners surrendered them. With his knife, he appropriated some long branches and sharpened their ends. He ferried his armful of foliage to the clearing that had been the nest of the demon birds and started assembling his fort.

He had formulated only vague plans in his mind, and that was probably for the best, since those plans failed at the outset. He plunged four of his sturdiest branches into the wet ground in a square, intent on balancing a grid of twigs and leaves upon them until he had a pavilion of sorts. Before he had added more than four branches to his starting columns, they tilted and collapsed. He bent over to examine the base of his structure. The dirt, he noted, was not firm enough to resist the leverage of so much weight so far from its fulcrum. Unless he could buttress it somehow, his house would not stay vertical.

For his second try, he dug up ground under each branch before staking it in, hoping to gain more traction. Lacking a shovel, he clawed at the ground with his fingers, then a stick, but even with rain-softened dirt it was slow going. Any depression he made in the forest floor quickly filled with water, and his hands had numbed under the bombardment of cold water. He stabbed the branches into the ground, but still they would not remain upright.

Hey, he thought. He was doing this the hard way. Weren't trees already rooted in the ground?

He scooped up his construction materials and plopped them down next to the nearest tree. Wiping the rain from his eyes with the backs of his grimy hands, he rested a long branch in the crook of one of the tree's lower limbs, its other end meeting the ground at a shallow angle. He laid several branches leaning perpendicular upon this first one, starting with very short ones near the lower end and working his way upward, alternating from which side the sticks met the main support. When he'd finished, he had created a shape like an oddly like triangular ribcage; the central stick was the backbone to an widening set of wooden ribs that ended in an opening near the base of the tree.

To this he began adding his collection of leaves, again starting at the base and slowly working his way upward. The waxy fronds he'd collected did an excellent job of blocking rainfall, though it took many attempts and all the finesse he could muster to shingle the entire structure with them. He took advantage of the natural creases in the leaves and the rough edges of the bark in balancing the first layer of greenery, and, after adding an extra layer, he found himself with a lopsided, muddy tent. Though it was by no means watertight, the rain did not enter it directly, and, for now, the winds had not threatened to dismantle it. He had only to try it out.

He crawled inside, feet first. His head rested between two of the tree's roots, and his feet stopped just shy of the branches at the low end of the shelter. It smelled like a freshly cut lawn in here, and the enclosure did little to muffle the sound of the storm. He pulled off his muck-soaked shirt and wadded it up under his head. His skin, though wet, was not getting any wetter.

It seemed to be working.

He closed his eyes. Though his stomach was still empty, his clothes still soaked, and his plane still underwater, exhaustion pushed all thoughts from his mind. He listened to rain drum upon his roof until he fell asleep.

( Turn information )

At the end of this story, I make some pretty good bread. Before that happens, though, I do a lot of nerdy things and make a lot of mistakes. If you just want recipes or to gawk at pictures of the finished products, you should skip to the end now. On the other hand, if you're a fan of science, take pleasure in reading about my screw-ups, or both, please feel free to read this in full.

The other week, Melissa and I tried to make bagels. We found a promising recipe by someone who probably knows a lot more about cooking than I ever will, read it over a few times, got our ingredients together, and started following directions as best we could.

They turned out okay. We wound up with inoffensive toroidal hunks of bread that didn't cause us internal bleeding. They did a decent job as vessels for the shreds of onion we baked into them and the hummus we spread over them. But they were dense, almost entirely unleavened. We had added the yeast and mixed it with what we had incorrectly guessed was "warm" water, and now our bagels were flat.

This is a problem I encounter with many recipes: I can measure a cup of flour, pour a tablespoon of water, and preheat an oven to 425 F, but I don't have any frame of reference for directions like "add warm water (not hot!)" or "do not over-stir," because they rely on subjective terminology and a sense of judgment I don't have. I don't know how hot "warm" is, and the directions don't give me any way to check. So it's no surprise that our guess was wrong.

Understand, I cook the way I play piano; I find a document detailing something I wish to reproduce (food in the one case, music in the other), follow the notation therein, and hope for the best. If I were John Coltrane, I wouldn't need sheet music, and if I were Martha Stewart, I wouldn't need a recipe. But I'm not and I do, so I'm relying on recipes to give me unambiguous directions.

So, I asked myself: how can I determine how hot "warm" is, create a recipe that even people like me would find foolproof, and finally create a bagel worth eating?

Science, obviously.

The first thing I did was read a dozen and a half Google results about yeast. The executive summary is this: there are lots of kinds of yeast. About 1,500 kinds, actually. They're fungi. They all consume sugar, but only some of them need to breathe oxygen, while the rest simply can. They are fermentation agents, which is to say they create carbon dioxide and alcohol as waste; in bread, the carbon dioxide does the job of inflating the dough (making it rise).

All of that information was easily found, but I had considerable trouble figuring out how yeast responded to heat. Different strains of yeast ferment best at different temperatures, and even for individual strains I found conflicting data on optimal growth temperatures. Worse still, I wasn't even sure which strain of yeast was sitting in the jar in my fridge.

So I decided to run an experiment. I would mix some yeast, sugar, and water at different temperatures, measure the volume of gas produced, and declare victory. The only question was how.



My first idea was to use an overflow can. "Overflow can" is a fancy term for a container full of water with a tube coming out of one side. The idea is that you fill it until water starts to drain out of the tube, then wait until the water stops draining. You place a cup next to the can, under the tube. Now you can measure the volume of anything you subsequently submerge in the can by measuring the water which flows out of it. Alternatively, if there was anything submerged in the can before you filled it, you can measure its increase in volume from the water that leaves via the tube.

My plan was to put yeast, sugar, and water of some known temperature inside a plastic bag, then weight it with a rock, seal it, and drop it in the overflow can. I would measure the water displaced from the can after a fixed period of time, then repeat the experiment, varying the temperature of the water (but not the amount of yeast, sugar, water, or time). The water displaced from the can would correspond to the gas produced by the yeast, since the gas would increase the volume of the sealed bag.



I had to buy a kitchen thermometer for this, but I made the overflow can out of an empty juice bottle, the body of a ball-point pen, and some hot glue:



High-tech stuff, I know.

I realized early on that it was important to keep the temperature of the yeast as constant as possible for the duration of each trial. If I didn't control the temperature, then I wouldn't have a good idea of which temperature the yeast preferred. To this end, I wrapped the overflow can in a towel and kept it covered. By pouring hot water into it and tracking its temperature for half an hour, I confirmed that this kept the the can reasonably well insulated; it consistently lost only one percent of its difference from room temperature per minute.

Unfortunately, when I started my first trial with the yeast, it became evident that I had underestimated the volume of gas produced by the fermentation process. Within a couple minutes, enough gas had collected in the bag that it floated to the surface, despite the weight of the rock inside. This meant that the overflow can no longer measured the volume of the entire bag, because much of it was no longer submerged. That in turn meant that I no longer had a way to measure the volume of gas produced.

Since a rock is only a few times denser than water while carbon dioxide is about five hundred times less so, it would have been impractical to simply add more weights. Furthermore, there was enough gas that I was concerned that the bag would rupture. So I decided to try a different tack.



This, I thought, was foolproof.



I had a cup and two jars. The first jar, or the fermentation jar, was filled with 1/2 teaspoon of yeast, 1 teaspoon of sugar, and 3/2 cups of water of a given temperature. Like the overflow can, it was wrapped in a towel for insulation. It was then sealed, save for a hose running into the second jar.

The second jar contained only water. It was sealed but for the input hose from jar one and the output hose to the cup. The input hose ended near the top of the jar, well above the waterline. The output hose extended to the bottom of the water jar.

The cup was just a plain, empty cup. I assembled my apparatus out of two empty jars of pasta sauce with holes poked in their lids, some polyethylene tubing I picked up at Home Depot, lots of hot glue, and a cup from one of my kitchen cabinets:



The gameplan went like this: the yeast in the fermentation jar would create carbon dioxide gas. This gas has volume (which is to say, it takes up space), so it wouldn't be content to stay crowded in the fermentation jar. Rather, it would move up the hose from the fermentation jar and into the water jar. But this would mean moving some of the water in the second jar out of the way, and the water would leave the water jar the only way it could: through the hose leading into the cup at the end. I'd weigh the cup after each twenty-minute trial, subtract the weight of the empty cup, and wind up with the weight of the water displaced from the second jar. Knowing the density of water, this meant I would also have the volume of water that had left the second jar, and therefore the volume of gas that had left jar one, and thus the volume of gas produced by the yeast. I could repeat the process using different temperatures of water in the fermentation jar to get all the data I needed.

And that was almost what happened. I ran two tests Here's the data I got:



First, some comments on the data's presentation.

I've sorted the trials by initial temperature, not by the order in which I performed them. In reality, I ran them with initial temperatures 117.5 F, 95.1 F, 103.6 F, 83.7 F, and 89.0 F. My kitchen tap doesn't have temperature settings, just "hot" and "cold," so I didn't have a convenient way to specify temperatures in the order I wanted.

The "no data" entries indicate that, for my first two tests, I only ran the test for twenty minutes. I decided to extend subsequent tests when I saw that the initial two results (35 and 29 milliliters) were only 6 milliliters different; I had hoped that, with more time, the differences in fermentation rates would become more evident and reduce the effects of any error.

Okay, so what did this data tell me?

At first glance, it looks like "hotter is better." In almost every trial, a higher temperature created more water displacement. In theory, this meant that higher temperatures increased the rate of fermentation, but in practice, we have good reason to doubt.

No biological process I know about always benefits from higher temperatures. Even before I ran the test, I knew you should be able to kill yeast with enough heat, but the hottest temperature I tested, at 117.5 degrees, represented the hottest water my tap could provide. At the very least, I needed to run the test with still hotter temperatures to see if the apparent fermentation would drop off. If it didn't, I'd know that the method wasn't accurately measuring the gas produced by the yeast.

All of that discussion ignored the fact that many recipes specifically called for "warm" water, not "the hottest water from your tap." As I've said, "warm" is a subjective term, but 117.5 degrees feels "hot" to me. So why did my results indicate that hot water was best?

I pondered this question for a while and came up with what seemed like a possible reason: hot air expands. The mixture of yeast, sugar, and water in the fermentation jar only filled it about half way, leaving plenty of room for air. If my suspicions were correct, the yeast mixture was heating the air in the fermentation jar, causing it to expand and displace water without the effects of fermentation. This explanation might even account for the "hotter is better" trend of the data, since air does expand most at higher temperatures.

I tested my supposition by running one more trial with the hottest water my tap could provide but without the yeast or sugar in the fermentation jar. Sure enough, after twenty minutes, six milliliters of water were displaced. My test didn't prove that these six milliliters were the effect of heated air expansion, but they did prove that factors other than fermentation could affect the water displacement.

Since six milliliters of water was greater than the differences between some of the trials of this experiment, the data could no longer be trusted to point to the optimal fermentation temperature. In other words, I would have to redesign my experiment and run it again.



I didn't change much this time around. I figured that, if air in the fermentation jar was messing up my results, I could lessen the problem by leaving less air in the jar. I accomplished this by filling the jar with much more water, 515 milliliters. This filled the jar nearly to the brim, leaving little room for air.

To be certain that the reduction in air would reduce the error, I ran another "blank" test, with the yeast and sugar omitted. I used a hotpot to heat the water to 189.8 F, just below boiling, and measured the water displacement after forty minutes. There was none. Thus, I could be sure that hot water alone would not introduce significant errors to the experiment.

Of course, error is guaranteed in any experiment, so I took other steps to reduce its effects. I doubled the amount of yeast and sugar to 1 teaspoon and 2 teaspoons, respectively, in hopes of increasing the fermentation rate. I extended all trials to 40 minute intervals, so as to give more time for fermentation to occur. At the very least, these changes would increase the signal-to-noise ratio of my data.

The results:



Again, I have sorted the data by initial temperature. Chronologically, they were conducted with temperatures of 113.5 F, 89.5 F, 95.6 F, 186.4 F, 144.9 F, 133.0 F, and 120.0 F from start to finish. For the hotter temperatures, I again used a hotpot to heat the water, mixing in cooler water as necessary to reach the temperatures I wanted.

I also noted the amount of foam at the surface of the water in the fermentation jar when I concluded each trial. The trials at 120.0 F and below resulted in a layer of foam which covered the surface, while the 133.0 F trial resulted in only some foam. No foam was visible at all for temperatures above 133.0 F.

The data seemed conclusive, for a change. I knew from the highest temperature tests that fermentation dropped off at the highest temperatures. This fit the scenario in which the fermentation displaced the water much better than it fit the scenario in which hot air did. The differences in displacement varied much more than they had in the prior experiment, consistent with the increased amounts of yeast, sugar, and time elapsed. The presence of foam (and the characteristic yeast smell) confirmed that temperatures with the greatest displacement did involve fermentation. Best of all, I had conducted more trials at a greater range of temperatures, giving me a better picture of the relationship between temperature and displacement. In short, it looked like the best explanation of the data was that the experiment had worked the way I wanted.

To be responsible with my conclusions, however, I must also ask, "What are the ways I could be wrong?" There are, as usual, plenty:

• The temperature inside the fermentation jar may have varied in unexpected ways. The ambient temperature in the room was only 65.7 F, meaning that, even insulated, the yeast mixture probably cooled over time. In fact, the ambient temperature may not have been constant for all trials, since they took approximately seven hours to perform.


• The glass of the fermentation jar might have been warmer or colder than the yeast mixture at the start of some trials. This may have further changed the temperature of the yeast mixture during trials.


• The yeast itself may have changed the temperature somewhat as a side effect of metabolizing the sugar.


• The barometric pressure in the room may not have been constant. The pressure of the air in the jars may have thus differed from external pressure and caused or prevented water displacement for reasons unrelated to fermenation.


• The polyethylene tubing and jar lids are somewhat elastic; they may have expanded or contracted in response to pressure changes, further altering water displacement.


• The seals on the lids and tubing may not have been perfect, relieving pressure that would otherwise have displaced water.


• Small amounts of humidity and water may have remained in the fermentation jar between tests, despite my best efforts to dry it.


• Water could have evaporated from the cup, reducing the apparent displacement in some tests.


• Gas may have dissolved in the water of either jar, again changing the interior pressure.


• Air and water are both somewhat compressible, meaning that not all gas production would necessarily have caused displacement.


• The mixture of the fermentation jar may imperfectly model yeast fermentation when inside dough, i.e. when in the presence of flour, salt, or other ingredients.

. . . and so on. Luckily, most of these factors would probably either have very small effects or affect all trials in about the same way, so the data is probably still a reasonable source of clues for ideal fermentation temperature. As always, I could be wrong for reasons I don't know about, which is why the only way to do good science is to tell the world your methods and results and invite them to disprove them.

But!

So long as we understand and accept these errors, we can state our conclusion: the temperature of "warm" water is somewhere between 113.5 F and 130.0 F.

All I had to do next was try baking something.



My first two attempts at bread failed miserably. For both of them, I started with a recipe something like this:

• 1 teaspoon yeast


• 2+1/4 teaspoons sugar


• 1+3/4 cup whole wheat flour


• 3/4 teaspoons salt


• Too much water

I stirred together all of the dry ingredients (that is, everything but the water) in a metal mixing bowl, then added the hottest water my tap would provide.

My first time, I added more than a cup of water to the mix, realized that I had created more of a soup than a dough, then tried to backtrack by adding four more tablespoons of flour. The soup thickened into something more like batter, and I went ahead with it. Even the second time around, I reduced the amount of water, but not nearly enough.

I want to reiterate, in case it wasn't already crystal clear, that I had almost no experience making dough, and I had no idea how to judge for myself a good mixture from a bad one. So both times I went ahead and tried to knead my creation, then plopped it into a bowl for fermentation, or "proving."

The proving process was its own hassle. I knew the correct temperature for fermentation by now, but maintaining that temperature was a different matter altogether. Most of the recipes I'd read only seemed to advise "putting the dough in a warm place" after kneading, but I knew from my measurements of heat exchange that there was no sufficiently warm place in my kitchen. My oven doesn't have a setting for temperatures below 145 F, hot enough to kill yeast. The stove top would certainly be too hot. I would have to come up with a different way to regulate temperature.

I ended up putting the dough in a covered bowl inside of another bowl filled with hot water. Of course, the hot water didn't stay hot, so I had to regularly siphon water out of it while pouring in freshly heated water of the appropriate temperature--a task which itself required a lot of trial and error as I mixed boiling and lukewarm water. The temperature usually stayed within 10 F or so of my 120 F target (erring on the cold side so as not to kill the yeast), but the process required constant, tedious attention.

I removed the dough from its proving bowl. I would later discover that greasing the bowl before proving would ease this process. I plopped the result down on an oiled cookie sheet and baked it at 425 F for twenty minutes. The end result was a thick, crusty pancake. It tasted a lot like the bagels (which is no surprise, since I based these on the bagel recipe).

While these first two bread failures were disappointing, they demonstrated two more problems I needed to solve: first, that I didn't know how much water to add, and second, that I didn't have a practical way to keep dough warm while it proved.

The first problem I solved by taking the time to play with flour. I took a quarter cup of flour, then added water in quarter tablespoon increments as I mixed it. I knew my goal with dough was to create something moist enough to hold together but dry enough to hold its form. This exercise taught me to be parsimonious with water, as it's easy to mistake for a dry dough what is actually just an insufficiently mixed one. I needed a lot less water than I thought to get the flour to stick together, and I highly recommend this exercise to you if, like me, you're a total novice with baking.

With the first problem solved (but still siphoning and pouring cold and hot water for the proving process), I was able to make this:



This is the result of my third attempt at baking bread. The small clump you see on the edge of the bowl is the flour and water clump I created, cooked just for comparison. This loaf was still on the dense side, and, in subsequent attempts, I decided to let the dough prove for eighty minutes, rather than sixty, as in this one.

The second problem, providing a warm proving environment, took more time to solve. If finding the optimal yeast temperature had been a job for science, providing that temperature had become a job for engineering. At a friend's suggestion, I tried using a heating pad to warm the proving bowl, but even a layer of towels couldn't keep it warm enough. I tried heating the oven to 145 F, turning it off, and waiting for it to reach 120 F, but it didn't retain the lower temperature for long enough (which is how my fourth attempt failed).

Eventually I opted to put the dough in a bowl in a few inches of appropriately hot water in a cooler. Coolers are designed to keep cold things cold, but they do a pretty good job of keeping hot things hot, too. Finally, I had a way to provide the dough with a moist, closed environment hovering around 120 F.

I also made the switch to all-purpose flour at this point, having read that whole wheat flour was less inclined to rise properly. Whole wheat flour includes bran and germ, which are not present in all-purpose flour and do not capture gas as effectively as all-purpose flour. Whole wheat flour does, however, offer nutrients and taste that all-purpose flour does not.

And that's when I started making things like this:



This is actually the second really successful loaf I made, but I somehow neglected to take a picture of the first one before eating it (shame on me).

The first one I made using the same recipe as the one I listed above, but with only about 10 tablespoons of water, which is enough that the dough is slightly sticky when you first start kneading it but mostly not after about twenty minutes (at which point it's ready to be proved). I baked it for 44 minutes at 350 F. The crust was quite thick.

This pictured loaf was made with:

• 2 teaspoons yeast


• 1/2 tablespoon sugar


• 1 tablespoon honey


• 3+1/2 cups all-purpose flour


• 1+1/2 teaspoons salt


• About 17 tablespoons water

which is the same recipe as the other loaves, but with all ingredients doubled, one tablespoon of sugar replaced with honey, and about 17 tablespoons of water. As far as I can tell/taste, the honey had no effect but to reduce the proportion of needed water. I baked this loaf for 49 minutes at 325 F.

More recently, I baked this:




using the same recipe, but with a bag (about a cup) of sun-dried tomatoes thrown in, and the honey switched back out for sugar.



There's still plenty I don't know about bread, and there's still plenty of stuff I want to try (flavoring the bread with fruit juice, varying the proportions of sugar and yeast, using some fraction of whole-wheat flour, et cetera). I may also revisit my jar experiments if I decide to get a more accurate picture of optimal temperature. I'll post the highlights here, in any case.

***

Squawk-Click had met Mate before yesterday's yesterday's yesterday. Their courtship had been so long ago that Squawk-Click couldn't say how old it was, only that it was older than most of the things he remembered. Sometime after he had fought for his share of his mother's attention, after he had become strong enough to leave her, but before he had provided for the young. All of these memories rested sometime before yesterday's yesterday's yesterday, but he somehow knew that they had not always been.

Squawk-Click had chosen his place at the edge of the trees, near the Water Not To Drink. It was a good place, because it was full of growing food and and easy to keep his, since the Water Not To Drink guarded one of its borders. He could sit in the middle of it and do all of his favorite things, like bellow his favorite call, eat his favorite leaves, and stretch his neck around and try to preen the feathers behind his head. He slept there, feeling safe, because he bellowed his bellow for a long time every day, and no one else would enter because they would know that it was his. If anyone ever did enter, he would show them his big wings and bellow louder, and they'd have to go away. And if *that* didn't work, he could always kick them.

But one day, someone had entered Squawk-Click's place. He'd been munching on a clump of growing food when something made a noise nearby, and he'd known then and there that he'd have to go confront whoever it was right away, or his place wouldn't be his place anymore. With his wings spread and his head raised, he ran toward the intruder, calling out his own name.

The intruder had been Mate! But Mate was not Mate then; she was still new. When he saw her standing there, at the edge of his place, Squawk-Click became very excited. But he was not excited the way he normally was when strangers entered his place. He felt good about this female being in his place. He wanted to show her more of it, and to make her stay.

So Squawk-Click got her attention with his favorite bellow. He spread out his wings as much as he could and showed her how big he was, how brown his feathers were, and how loud his call was. He strutted around the edge of his entire place to show much was his, beating his wings the whole way to make sure she was watching. And when he was done, he bellowed even louder, because she had walked even further into his place.

Squawk-Click collected some of his favorite foods in his place for her, like the long green ones under his scratching tree and the little round ones that hung from the bush by his sitting spot. He offered these to her, and she took them, which made him feel even better, because he liked her very much, especially when he looked at her long tail feathers and bright beak.

After she had eaten all that Squawk-Click had brought her, she made a call of her own, more beautiful than anything Squawk-Click had ever heard before. Squawk-Click repeated his own call, and she bowed her head and made the motion that Squawk-Click knew meant she was his now, and she became Mate.

Mate was a very good mate, too. When he built her a nest, she filled it with many eggs. Squawk-Click valued these more than anything else in his place, the entire forest even. When the young emerged from these same eggs, he and Mate spent almost all of their time on them, finding them food and keeping them safe. They listened intently to their tiny squeaks; they were, to their parents' ears, the loudest sounds in the forest, even during the clatter of the heaviest rain.

But today, while Squawk-Click and Mate had been away from the nest, foraging, the young made a sound that they had never heard before. It made Squawk-Click feel very uncomfortable, painful in a part of himself he couldn't usually feel, a part that wanted to make sure they never made that sound again. He and Mate abandoned the hunt for food and started running back to the nest, screaming as loud as they could.

A strange creature was standing in the nest. It had no feathers, only a patchwork of different colored hides, dirty and dripping wet. It stood on two stubby, backward-bent legs, ending in a single bulbous toe each. They thickened as they extended upward, then merged into a wide column, eventually joined yet again by another appendage on each side. The side-appendages hung down, angled, tapered, and ended in sets of grasping claws. Atop it all, the creature's abbreviated neck supported a bulbous pink head, covered on top and back with something that looked like slender, black grass. The head lacked a beak; instead, there was an open horizontal slit on its front, just below a pair of raised, downward-facing holes. Just above and on either side of this, two tiny eyes with too much white stared up at Squawk-Click.

Already, Squawk-Click hated this creature for entering his place and his nest. He hated this creature for scattering the young which still chattered their unsettling yelps. But Squawk-Click hated this creature most of all when he saw one of the young hanging in its bunched claws, and when he saw that the young was not moving, only swinging by its neck as the intruder shook.

Squawk-Click and Mate bounded toward the intruder, ready to break it with a snap of any of their powerful legs. The creature ran, but its tiny legs could not step as high or as far as Squawk-Click's. Only a little ahead of Squawk-Click and Mate, it fled to the edge of the forest and away from Squawk-Click's place. Normally, that would be enough for Squawk-Click, but this creature, still holding one of the young, was too abhorrent to let slink away. Mate and Squawk-Click pursued it across the sand and all the way to the edge of the Water Not To Drink, where it hurled the young to the sand where Squawk-Click stood. Mate pushed it with her beak, but the young did not move from where it landed, and somehow Squawk-Click knew it never would.

Squawk-Click and Mate bellowed at the creature as it moved off and vanished, floating on the surface of the Water Not To Drink. Squawk-Click had never known any creature to emerge from the Water Not To Drink, and, if he had, he might not have chosen his place right beside it. He and Mate waited for a long time in case the creature returned, but eventually they heard the young calling again and returned to the nest to gather and guard them once more.

Because he and Mate had not finished foraging, Squawk-Click did not eat as much as he usually did that day, which never felt good. Neither he nor Mate could ignore the urge to watch the nest and the young, and he did not think that would change soon. For a time, it didn't.

But then he heard the creature, back from the Water Not To Drink. It was shouting, a puny shout from a puny being. Mate was already running toward the sound. Squawk-Click took one final look at the nest and the young before springing up after her.

He heard Mate's bellow ahead. Squawk-Click wanted to be there with her, adding his volume to hers, but her call was cut short, replaced with a loud thump. Squawk-Click hastened his step and arrived on at the sand, glaring down once again at the creature from the Water Not To Drink.

The creature looked different. Its side-appendages did not end in soft claws anymore, but a long piece of tree, pointed at one end and splattered with red. The creature was not running; instead it hunched even smaller, its piece of tree directed at Squawk-Click. Beside it, on the sand, was Mate, as still as the young it had taken earlier. Her tail feathers did not puff in excitement; her wings did not beat. Red liquid drained from a hole below her neck.

Squawk-Click bellowed with a rage he did not think would ever leave him. If he shouted until he could not shout, if he ate until he could not eat, if he ran until he could not run, he could not have exhausted the anger he felt at this creature. Even as he kicked and whooped at the intruder, he knew that calm was gone from him forever, that, if he broke the creature with his next kick, if today became yesterday's yesterday's yesterday, he would still hate this creature, still want to break it again for all that it had done to Squawk-Click's life.

He never got that chance. Squawk-Click slipped on the sand, and the creature from the Water Not To Drink lurched forward with the piece of tree. Squawk-Click felt pain, then numbness, then darkness.

***

Squawk-Click did not know where he was. He could not see his surroundings, only a brightness like staring at the sun. He could not feel the ground. His legs would not bend; in fact, he could not feel anything there to bend. He could feel no wings to beat, and no neck to turn. He could not even bellow, because he couldn't find a beak to open.

After what seemed like a very long time, Squawk-Click felt something, though he didn't know how. The something was not a part of his body or even really a thing at all; a thought, a warm presence was with him, and though it was not easy without the sight of her plumage or the sound of her call, Squawk-Click recognized the sensation of Mate.

Mate! Squawk-Click felt her, and he knew that she felt him, too. They were not anywhere or anything they had been before, but Squawk-Click felt some relief to know they were together.

Squawk-Click also felt hatred. He sensed the same in Mate, and she in him. A concentrated ire built in them both, more substantial than they themselves had become, toward the cause of all their loss.

Squawk-Click saw the creature from the Water Not To Drink. It was still standing on the sand by the edge of the forest, still clutching to a piece of tree. He did not see the creature from any one perspective as his eyes would have; he viewed the object of his bitterness from all directions at once, even some he did not know existed. Mate, too, honed in on the scourge of their beings.

A thought passed from Squawk-Click to Mate, and Mate's presence heated in agreement. They would devote themselves to the task they had not finished, would assault this creature, in whatever way they could for as long as it breathed.

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The football-birds erupted in shrieks as he claimed the body of their fallen kin. Their traipsing picked up speed but not direction, like a stampede of bumper cars. They collided with each other, the brush, and even still his ankles in their aimless hysteria. Eventually, the birds at the periphery of the horde wandered further outward, and the crowd thinned.

He took this opportunity to amble forward on the vacated ground. He might as well search for kindling in all this growth, now that he had a meal in hand. Even without the swarm, he had to step cautiously about the uneven terrain, hopping from one leg to another over high obstacles. The snapping of twigs and fallen leaves punctuated his first several strides, but one anomalous footstep over a high fern coincided with a loud crunch.

He recoiled at first, waiting for his foot to signal some pain of pressure or impalement. When it didn't, he navigated around the plant to investigate. A circular clearing, padded in dead grass and leaves, hid here; inside it, there rested the remains of several dozen eggshells that, when whole, had been the size of his head. Where his foot had landed, one of them had flattened into fingernail-sized fragments; the rest were mostly in halves or thirds, large chunks he inferred had split when their former owners had hatched.

He eyed the lifeless creature in his hand. Its size matched the eggshells well-enough, and the number of eggshells he guessed was about right for the flock he'd seen before. But if this was a chick, it was the largest one he'd ever seen; only an enormous bird could have--

A deafening wail in the insufficiently distant distance. The foliage rustled and crunched in a succession of ever-closer steps. Two simultaneous screeches drowned out all other sounds. Large, angry somethings pushed through the high branches. A dim-witted bipedal primate stood dumfounded in their nest, one of their dead chicks in its shaking hand.

It was as if someone had inflated the symbol for quarter note to the size of a phone booth, tarred it, feathered it, glued a broad orange beak to the top of it, and mounted the whole thing on stilts. One of them raised its telephone-pole-thick leg with a flex of its backward-bending knee and plunged its enormous foot down on the ground a few feet from where he stood. The other flapped its useless wings and snaked its neck forward, opening its maw and repeating its cry.

( Turn information )

Sated for the moment, he allowed himself to do nothing for a spell. He regarded the oncoming waves with some disdain, having not yet forgiven them for taking his plane and nearly his life. He directed his gaze upward, searched idly for any contrails in the sky, and, finding none, wondered if he should try to set up a signal of some kind. It occurred to him that his situation was a dire one, and he should have been busy feeling bad about it rather than wasting time staring into space.

He scratched his head, freeing globs of sand from his scalp and hair. He wondered if the plane's ELT could still function when submerged and, if so, for how long. He wasn't sure if radio signals could get through all that water, anyhow. His hand scratched lower on his face.

Hey, his face itched. A lot, actually. And had his lips always been this big? They felt kind of engorged.

Oh, no.

He lept to his feet, frantic. He looked around for a mirror, remembered that he was on a desert island, then put his hands to his face. His lips and mouth were hot and sensitive, and now that he held them in front of him, he could see that his hands had sprouted bright red bumps. His throat and stomach began to burn.

He ran back into the waves and vomited. A slurry of berry juices mixed with this morning's coffee dyed the water a swirl of red, brown, and green. He knelt down and held his stomach as his body pumped it clean. His mouth and throat stung with stomach acid as the last of the offending substances left him. The waves accepted his donation as they receded, then tossed it back to him as they returned. When he was sure he had finished, he waded away from the mess and wrung his shirt out in cleaner water.

When he returned to his spot on the beach, he lay back and breathed deep. His inflamed palate made this difficult at first, but, as he willed himself to calm down, he realized how lucky he was to be breathing at all. He wondered if there was an EpiPen somewhere in the plane's wreckage, but decided he'd rather lie here than gather the energy to fetch it. He closed his eyes and waited for his day to improve.

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His first and greatest mistake was becoming a ferry pilot.

It had been a hard offer to refuse. Rich folks too lazy to take care of their own toys would pay him to fly their planes, light aircraft so packed with ferry tanks and extra gear that he had to fly solo. No boss breathing down his shoulder, not even a copilot to force him into smalltalk. He could scratch his privates with impunity and fart into the wind at 10,000 feet, all while enjoying a view of creation the envy of just about everyone short of the ISS crew. Oh, and he got all the hours he could clock.

Those had all seemed like selling points, at first. But a few twenty-hour flights in cramped cockpits quickly took the magic out of the job. Packed between steel boxes full of fuel, a thermos of thick coffee, and a control column, he spent hours over the oceans, bumping his knees on the instrument panel, radioing dull reports to Control, and pissing in a bottle that spent most of the flight jammed next to his chair. An endless blue carpet of waves sloshed beneath him in daylight, and, at night, it vanished into a darkness broken only by the glow of his flight instruments.

He was constantly occupied by nothing. He scanned in all directions at nothing. He listened intently to nothing on the emergency frequencies. He ate nothing for hours on end. He concentrated on the nothing on his indicators, thought of nothing for as long as he could take, and, when he got bored, talked to nothing while it said nothing back.

Now, flying a Piper PA-28 Cherokee through the purgatory of the upper troposphere, he kicked himself for ever seeking solitude in the skies. Or, he would have, had his legs had enough space and freedom to so.

And then, suddenly, he felt a kick from something else entirely. The plane lurched around him, rattling him against the side of the cockpit. Damn, he thought. He'd hit an air-pocket. Had he let his altitude drift? The altimeter didn't seem to think so. He tapped at the analog dial, as if it mattered.

Again, the plane jerked under him, tossing his thermos from his lap. He clung tight to the control column and wrestled with the wind shear. He fought to control the plane, and the sky fought back. The ferry tanks rattled in their restraints, and the horizon bobbed up and down in the distance. He pressed the plane to descend.

All at once, the turbulence stopped, and the plane returned to nothing. Too much nothing. In fact, there was so much nothing that he now realized he had lost something. The abrupt quiet hinted at what his indicators confirmed: his engine had died.

He clawed at the ignition. What the hell was this? How does a little turbulence knock out the engines? He was no mechanic, but he was pretty sure this kind of thing was something designed out of most aircraft. He fumbled at the controls, but the engine ignored him, and the propeller waved lifelessly in front of him.

Okay, keep your head. This could be worse. He was just thousands of feet above the middle of an ocean, strapped to a hunk of slowly falling metal along with several tanks of fuel. He'd be fine.

He tried to recall the specs on this plane. It had a glide ratio of, what, nine to one? That meant he could go at least a dozen miles before he hit the water. Maybe he'd get lucky and the engine would spring back to life before then. That could happen, right?

He though he felt the return of turbulence, but he realized that he was the one trembling this time, not the plane. He remembered his training. Radio his Mayday signal. Soar as long as he can.

Time passed. The horizon crept slowly higher, and he began to make out the troughs and crests of the waves below. No contact on the radio, despite his repeated calls. Nothing had held him on its tongue for too long, and now it would swallow him.

A dot appeared in the distance, on the water. It lay almost dead ahead, growing slowly as he approached. He banked gently toward the whatever-it-was, hoping he had enough altitude left to reach it. The dot became a speck became a blob became a smudge of green and brown.

An island! A small one, yes, but even small islands featured the marvelous perk that you couldn't drown on them. Since the ocean could produce no better counter-offer, he committed his remaining time in the air to reaching the isle.

As the island grew ever larger, he considered his plan of action. He'd never had to ditch before, and the fact that he hadn't had always felt like a good thing until this moment. Now he felt he could have used the practice, though he couldn't think of any safe way he could have gotten it. In principle, a water landing (more of a "watering" than a "landing," really) wasn't too different from a runway landing, up until the part where the plane made contact with the ocean. The tricky part only started right after the plane stopped flying.

Palm trees dotted the coasts of the tiny island. The whole thing couldn't have been more than a half mile in diameter, and there were no signs of man-made structures anywhere. He looked for a clearing large enough to land on. There were none.

He wondered if he would die in this cockpit, trapped between containers of fuel, coffee, and his own urine. The water was getting awfully close, now, and he thought he could smell the salt below him. He veered slightly away from the island so as to touch down next to it, not into it, estimating based on nothing in particular what a safe distance from the shore would be. He had the urge to use the urine bottle one last time, but decided there would be time for that later.

He pulled the brake lever and nosed up. The stall warning went off, and he braced himself.

The cockpit quaked as the plane skimmed the water. The drag of the ocean surface threw him forward in his seat, and a curtain of saltwater threw itself against the glass. The plane tipped forward, and the propeller submerged itself under the now vertical fuselage. The sky and ocean traded places, and he hung by his seat restraints as the unfastened contents of the plane bolted to the ceiling.

Water entered the cabin. His hands scrambled furiously at his safety belt as the ocean seeped into the mangled flyer. He freed himself, cracked his head against the ceiling, and righted himself to the new orientation of the plane. He tore off his headset and threw his weight against the door, every cell in his body determined not to drown in this tiny room. The door swung slowly open, and water rushed in at the opportunity. The water line rose against the windows. He pulled himself through the opening and into the open sea.

He grabbed on to the overturned wing beside him and thrashed his legs to stay afloat. He gasped for air, though he had only been submerged for a moment, and searched his surroundings. The island was no more than a hundred yards away, an easy distance for any frequent patron of a community swimming pool, but an impossible-looking one for the panicked survivor of an only moments-old plane crash. Still, the wing sank under his grasp, leaving him with no other choice.

He pushed off against the wing and swam shoreward. He tried to maintain a straight frontstroke, but his execution was sloppy and furious, creating high splashes as he slapped the water with his arms and legs in only piecemeal coordination. His sneakers, waterlogged and heavy, resisted the motion of his legs, and the cuffs of his khaki pants dragged through the water like loose sails. Saltwater stung at his eyes and invaded his mouth and nose. He couldn't keep his bearings with his face submerged, so he raised his head from the water every few strokes to reorient himself; the water took these opportunities to envelop the rest of him, and he would flail harder to return himself to the surface. The island was still a hundred feet distant, and he could feel nothing solid beneath him.

A wave lifted him, and, for a moment, he felt optimistic that the current might bring him closer to his goal, but then the wave crashed down on him, and he realized that, while the waves might eventually take him to shore, they had no intention of keeping his head above water. He writhed underwater for a moment, found the surface in an unexpected direction, then, righted himself just in time for another wave to pummel him back down. Several times over, this cycle continued, oscillating between breath and brine until at last the waves flung him against a wall of wet sand.

Not a wall, but a floor, he thought, as the water receded again. He crawled forward on the wet, grainy terrain. The waves slammed him down, a little less fiercely this time, and he continued forward and upward. Under his palms, he felt the sand transition to a dry, hot gravel, and the waves licked his heels one final time as he collapsed on the beach.


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24,017 words down, 25,983 to go.

Only hundreds of words from the halfway point!

22,021 words down, 27,979 to go.

Finally, some of the main characters are meeting each other.