Author: Nat

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Making Bread with Natural Leavening (Sourdough Starter) Needn’t Be Complex or Time-Consuming

OK, let’s get a few things out of the way.  I don’t really like to call bread made with natural leavening “sourdough” because a lot of people immediately turn off, saying, “I don’t like sourdough bread.”  Naturally leavened bread doesn’t necessarily taste sour. The phrase “naturally leavened” is a little leaden and pedantic, so I instead favor the French word “levain,” which sounds pretentious and, uh, pedantic. Oh well, “You pays your money and you takes your choice,” as they say.  “Starter” works pretty well when it’s not ambiguous.

Here are the top six reasons why I bake bread using natural leavening, in rough order of importance:

1. It tastes better.

2. It tastes better.

3. It tastes better.

4. It stays fresh longer.

5. It is healthier (lower glycemic index).

It seems amazing and delightful to me that the only store-bought ingredients in my bread are flour and salt. The water comes from the tap and the yeast comes from the starter, and ever-renewable resource.

Continue reading “Making Bread with Natural Leavening (Sourdough Starter) Needn’t Be Complex or Time-Consuming”

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Helpful Books on Bread Baking

tl;dr (that’s internet for “executive summary”): If you want to make really good bread with minimal effort, go for Jim Lahey. If you want the next step after that, so you can make great bread with a bit more effort, go for Ken Forkish.

This post discusses some of the bread books I’ve used, and the pluses and minuses I’ve found. I hope it’s of interest to you, and if you decide to buy any of them I hope you’ll use the links here, because Amazon says they will give me a small kickback.
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A Purely Geometric Proof that the Square Root of Two is Irrational—With a Couple of Bonus Side-Trips

Lots of proofs are based on simple ideas, but get bogged down in notation or exposition that doesn’t bring out the salient points, as if the soloists and all the members of the choir were singing at equal volume.

Sometimes some warm-ups can help people understand what is essential in a proof and what is extra. They can help the simplicity of an idea shine through.

So the first warm-up is a purely geometric proof that the golden ratio is irrational. A number of years ago, I saw such a proof… but the diagram that went with it was laid out on a single line, and it got bogged down in a bunch of notation, and I kind of got it but it certainly didn’t excite me.

Then one day I was looking at my business card and I realized that the proof was right there.  When I was designing my business card, I tried to figure out a good logo, and I eventually settled on a golden rectangle and golden spiral:

Continue reading “A Purely Geometric Proof that the Square Root of Two is Irrational—With a Couple of Bonus Side-Trips”

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Making Really Good Bread is Really Easy!

OK,  I have been meaning to do this post for almost a year now. In April 2016, I organized a workshop, and had dinner with four out-of-town colleagues afterwards. They asked if I was happy with how it went; I said that I was very happy with the workshop, but I mentioned that I was also happy because the previous week I had finally managed to make a loaf of bread that I was truly pleased with. All four were quite interested, and I thought I should put together a post about it.

I decided to do a demonstration using only equipment that most people have in their kitchens. So  I made some videos, but I got distracted and then let it sit until now. Continue reading “Making Really Good Bread is Really Easy!”

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Mac Browser Wars… and the winner is: Safari! [oops, not really]

Update not all that long after I wrote this: I discovered that if I don’t keep too many tabs open while I’m also running a Windows virtual machine on VMWare, Chrome does not get so slow, so I’m back to using it, which is nice because I like it a lot more than Safari. So please just ignore this post. Continue reading “Mac Browser Wars… and the winner is: Safari! [oops, not really]”

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A (long) Comment on Scott Alexander’s Review of “Unlearn Your Pain”

My son Ben texted me the other day that his favorite blogger, Scott Alexander, had published a post reviewing Howard Shubiner’s book Unlearn Your Pain.  Despite being a psychiatry resident, Scott manages to be a prolific writer in areas of interest which appear to be TNTC.  Ben knows him through Effective Altruism, and sent me the review because it mentions ISTDP (Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy), the kind of therapy that I do. I had read some of Scott’s other posts with interest, always wishing I had more time to keep up.

I enjoyed the review, and sat down to email a response to Scott, since my thoughts seemed a little long to post as a comment. Scott asked me to post them as a comment anyway, at which point I discovered that his blogging platform agreed with my initial gut feeling.  So I am posting them here, and will post a link to this post in the comment section of his review.

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OK, how big is a tablespoon, REALLY?

One of the handiest cooking factoids in our crazy US measurement system is that there are 4 tablespoons in a quarter cup.  If you are doubling a recipe for a sauce that calls for 2 tablespoons of flour, don’t measure 4 tablespoons, just measure 1/4 cup and you’re all set.

So I was a little surprised when I was looking at a source I consider reliable (Samuel Fromartz’s In Search of the Perfect Loaf, p. 87) to see “Mix 3 tablespoons (30 grams) lukewarm water…”  Now, “everyone knows” that a tablespoon is 15 ml, and 1 ml of water weighs a gram, so 3 tablespoons of water should be 45 grams.  OK, precision is overrated in cooking, but it is more important in baking, and this is a 50% difference (45 being 50% more than 30), and that is actually significant.

1 tablespoon “=” 15 ml

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Data Ain’t What They Used to Be. Or Is They?

“Hmm… that makes sense,” said Ben.

“Uh, you sound surprised,” was my response.

“Well, usually when people start out by saying ‘Here’s my take on that,’ it tends to not be that helpful.” Well Ben’s a smart guy, and if he hints that it might be helpful, that was enough to get me to write this post, which has been rattling around in my head probably about since blogs were invented.

My “take” had been prompted by another iteration of a typically tedious discussion that you may also have been involved in periodically: whether “data” is singular or plural. For those of you too young to know, or too smart to care, “data” is the Latin plural of “datum,” meaning “a piece of information.” So when a hapless person would say “There isn’t enough data,” grammar snoots would correct them and try to get them to say “There aren’t enough data.”  It’s been a losing battle.  (David Foster Wallace fans will know that he actually called these people SNOOTS, all caps; an executive summary is here.) Continue reading “Data Ain’t What They Used to Be. Or Is They?”

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“The Controversial Therapy That Deliberately Enrages Patients”

A sharp-eyed friend (with the help of google) alerted me to a piece about ISTDP on a site I had not previously known, vice.com, with the above title.  You can read it here.

I made a few attempts to post a comment, but they didn’t stick, maybe because I included my website URL (www.natkuhn.com).  Maury Yoszef did manage to get an intelligent comment up there, thanks Maury!

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