Rye Must I Chase the Cat? There's no easy answer.

I'll assume you know the basics, where the basics—as always; as before our births, yours and mine—are defined in terms of your familiarity with this particular discourse, meaning: we will talk about the intentions of vaguely defined public figures from our bellies, deeply certain, deeply angry about what we've willed ourselves to know; we will scoop the bottom of the trough, sometimes, back to day one, where still mispellings sit untended; we will gather words tighly from just above our chests, letting the air out in a race, praying to look intelligent, or at least to survive wholly from one instant to the next in the body-shell:

That is,


60% hydration [100% flour (3/4 white-bread, 1/4 dark rye), 60% water, by weight]
more salt this time—a full 1/2 teaspoon for 2 cups of flour total. I realized my eyeballing was woefully conservative.

Squashed against the table.
Silk-ball treatment.
Turn a light switch on and off and consider the time it takes to be thoughtful.

2 pre-risings (one of which had to be retarded in the fridge, in the 80's "Let's get retarded!" kind of way, because I had to go to work, and the first rising took a full 12 hrs, because of the salt—please refer to blogue 1, in which the mythology of Sodium-Chloride and saccharomyces, the seeds of its own destruction within, was sown). The first rising was, again, 12 hrs; the second, 6hrs; the third, after shaping, 3 hrs, though I think I could have given it a little more, seeing as it kinda exploded in the oven. As a side note: not a sour loaf. I'm beginning to think that my starter is all yeast and no lactobacilli.

500º oven lowered to 450º Steam-inferno. Baking stone. And so on, and soon.

Use the honey-tarragon-orange butter on this one; it's the superior butter. Brings out the sweetness in earthy loaves, and blooms its own mild herbal warmth on more light blends.

I'm freeze-drying my loves to build a spacecraft. The hull was complete until Sun Ra mocked it and I felt so bad; his is made of spelt and kamut.