works of wanderlust

Month: March 2023

  • another sourdough day

    It’s a random Wednesday morning in March and I’ve just pulled my starter out of the fridge. The lovely box of yeasty goodness will celebrate it’s fourth birthday next month and my daughter is keen to break out the sourdough recipe book and try some recipes that are not bread.

    In the meantime, I’ve been writing quite a bit in my daily thread this past month and a half about my sourdough and it felt like a good day to combine, mix, fold and proof those words into a proper post here.

    Set oven to hot and…

    sourdough loaves

    I’ve stopped counting how many loaves of bread I’ve made with my starter. It passed the three hundred mark about six months ago, and I ran out of room for tick marks on the lid of the container where I keep the magic.

    I made two more last night, sandwich loaves in little cast iron loaf pans, crispy on the outside and fluffy and delicious on the interior.

    This morning (February 13th) there are about one and a quarter loaves left. That’s what happens when four adult (or at least three adults and one not-quite-but-eats-like-an-adult) lives in your house. Fresh bread does not last long.

    sourdough first day

    I sometimes tell people who ask about my bread that sourdough isn’t difficult. It’s just twenty minutes of work spread across two full days.

    On day one I start in the morning and take my starter out of the fridge. Some people will tell you that you need to keep in on the counter, feed it every day, and care for it as if it were a child. My starter will be four years old next month and he comes out of the fridge for about 12 hours at a time, just long enough to prime for action… then fed, watered, and right back to bed.

    My starter comes out of the fridge at about 7am, before I head out to work, and by the time I get home it’s warm and bubbly and active.

    I mix my dough, and while I’ve got the flour out on the counter, I replace the half of the starter I used with two parts flour and one part water and double him back up to his regular size with a good mix.

    The starter goes back in the fridge. The dough has some countertop time and some folds over the next couple hours, and it joins the starter.

    Ten tough minutes of work, spread across that first day and I’ve got a fed starter and a bowl of dough resting for tomorrow.

    sourdough second day

    The dough spent the night in the fridge and this morning, shortly after I got up and while I was bustling around the kitchen to feed the dog and make coffee and wake up, I put the covered bowl onto the counter to warm up a bit.

    It was still cool an hour later when I weighed, cut, kneaded and rolled the dough into a pair of loaf blanks and dropped them into my parchment-lined cast iron loaf pans.

    Those two loaves will rest and proof on the counter, out of the way from disturbance, covered and quiet and warm at room temperature until later today. Maybe it will take ten hours, twelve hours or even fourteen — it all depends on the mood of my yeast this week. (But I’m guessing 12 hours.)

    When those loaves rise up over the lip of the pan and start to look and feel ready, I’ll heat the oven up to 450F and put them inside for a thirty minute bake.

    When the timer chimes, I’ll pull them out onto a cooling rack and savour the smell of fresh baked bread through the house while it lasts. It only lasts a while, sadly.

    Ten more minutes of work, spread across the second day and I’ve got two loaves of fresh sourdough ready to enjoy for breakfast in the morning.

    sour flour power

    The flour makes all the difference to the end product… at least according to my daughter, who will devour a half loaf of bread in a sitting when I use 100% white bread flour to make my weekly breads versus a slice here and there when I substitute even as little as 10% for rye, whole wheat or some other blend into the mix.

    I prefer the grainy breads and the darker results.

    But there is something captivatingly powerful to the teenage mind for white bread, it seems.

    This is doubly strange when one considers that we never buy white bread. Not that we buy bread much (or ever really) now anyhow but back when loaves of sliced bread were still on our shopping list we would always go for the grainy, wheat-ish, non-white bread every time.

    Hamburger and hot dog buns, sure. White bread.

    But sliced loaves? Never.

    So, all this means that I’ve had to limit my flour experimenting to alternate bakes, white one week, blend the next, repeat, to surrender to the allure and power of white bread flour.

    dough, soured

    The thing about sourdough is that there is an advantage to a long proof.

    So, when you mix your dough on Wednesday night, say, and intend to rest in the refrigerator overnight and then countertop proof it the next day so that, say, you can bake it on Thursday evening… but you forget and go to work instead and leave the dough in the fridge…

    Well.

    You can countertop proof it on Friday and bake it up Friday evening (instead of Thursday as you had intended) and not only is the final bread fine, it is arguably better for the longer rest in the fridge. Better flavour. Better rise. Better all round.

    Amazing.

    This may have definitely been a true story.

    bread journaling.

    Do you keep a baking journal.

    I know, if you’re not a hardcore baker or sour-bread-head, then maybe that sounds a little nutty.

    But after nearly four years of baking sourdough from my little kitchen and having a few of photos and plenty of tasty memories, I realize I haven’t kept great notes on what I made, how I made it, or when or why or how or whatever…

    I blogged a bit, and you can find it here.

    I made lots of tick marks on my starter-ware to denote a baking event.

    But I couldn’t tell you the specifics.

    Specifics and details and notes are how you learn and get better.

    My bread is pretty good, but it could always be better, right?

    So. Maybe a journal isn’t a terrible idea.

    How do you keep a bread journal and what kinds of things do you write in it?

  • of vegetable matters.

    As much as I have a minor pre-occupation with so-called “urban” sketching, my situation, life, and local environment often steer me towards subject matter that is decidedly more suburban, rural, or parkland.

    In other words, leafing through my growing stack of sketchbooks, the common theme seems to trend towards nature, trees, insects, and outdoors… in the wilderness sense.

    In the winter this has meant snow and brown, leafless trees.

    In the autumn I specifically went to the art store to buy and build an autumn foliage paint collection.

    And as spring approaches once again for what will be my third warm-season of outdoor painting adventures, I’m anticipating not just building a new “spring” foliage paint collection as a seasonal counterpoint, but finding lots of blossoms and insects and fresh growing things to sketch and paint through April and May.

    Leaves Aren’t (Just) Green

    Nature is tricky and like so many objects that we find emerging from the tips of our paintbrushes, has a subtle colour palette that bears explanation through a glimmer of science.  Leaves seem green because leaves tend to be stuffed full of chlorophylls, a family of plant-chemical that absorbs all the blue, yellow, violet and orange light in an effort to make energy.  But biology is tricky and chlorophyll can fill leaves in varying patterns, be missing entirely from one part of a leaf or another, degrade due to plant health or through the season, and more. And all this means is that the reflected green light is often mixed with a variety of other colours, sometimes yellow and sometimes oranges and sometimes reds, pinks, violets or blues, all merging into a green that is rarely just green, but some other collection of hues that define the very nature of the plant we are painting.

    I was longing to be outside painting plants today, partly because it’s been a long winter, partly because the weather has started to warm and people are talking about the near future state of the streets and parks free from snow, and partly because it’s almost exactly one week until the spring equinox and we can run out into the front yard shouting that “spring has arrived!”

    So I painted a houseplant in my window instead, and I used just three colours, payne’s grey, sap green, and indian yellow to blend and blur and mix the various shades and depths of colour that defined that particular spider plant sitting on the ledge looking at the longer, sunnier days outside.

    Soon that window will be full of life, but most of it will be on the other side of the glass. For now, I’ll use what I can to inspire me.

  • while I worked…

    …and my daughter had the day off from school, she baked.

    Tomorrow is Pi Day. March 14th. 3-14, if you write it out the proper way to look like the first three digits of the mathematical constant pi, 3.14…

    She baked a pie.

    It is an apple pie, with ingredients she found stuffed away in various cupboards, pantries, and freezers.

    While I worked the smell of fresh apple pie wafted through the house.

    Tomorrow is Pi Day.

    Tomorrow.

    There is a fresh apple pie on my countertop filling the house with lovely apple pie smells, and it must wait until tomorrow.

  • on the first day of daily drawing.

    If you haven’t been keeping up with my daily notes, then you may also be unaware that I’ve dubbed March 2023 a month called #mARTch and am planning on drawing, sketching, painting, and otherwise being squwetchy all through the 31 days of this month,

    As I write this, the first day of March is essentially three quarters over, but I’ve fulfilled my end of that bargain and already produced a not-terrible watercolour.

    In my planning for thirty-one days of drawing I have been reminded of previous drawing-streak challenges I’ve given myself and recall that a big chunk of the actual challenge comes not from doing the art, but in finding inspiration: something to draw and devote a chunk of time to bringing to life on the page. As such, I’ve been snapping photos of random objects downtown and around the neighbourhood, and one of those was a reasonably lovely sunset… obstructed by a bunch of trees and buildings, otherwise known as a silhouette.

    sunlines & silhouettes

    Sunsets and sunrises are essentially an opportunity to paint light directly. Sure, every colour is either light or reflected light or refracted light or implied light or maybe just lack of light, but a sunset is sunlight transmitting through the atmosphere across a distance that is essentially no different than any other time of daylight, except that the straight line between the sun and your eyes at dawn or dusk cuts through a whole bunch extra air due to the curvature of the Earth.  The result is that much of the shorter wavelengths of light start to get filtered out as the light cuts through that little slipping fraction of sky at the cusp of that transition zone, all the violets, blues and greens more likely to be hitting dust particles or other molecules in the air and vanishing from the spectrum, leaving reds and yellows and oranges behind in a blur of colours we recognize as a sunrise or sunset.  Painting light is a delicate effort, building up those red and yellow colours without leaving muddy messes behind, filling the space with a wispiness that implies clouds and air and light and reminds us in utter simplicity of what it's trying to be.

    I’d love to make sunrises and sunset part of my signature style, but they have been one of the toughest things I’ve encountered so far to paint: blurring and blending and merging colours in a darkened sky.

    I started with a wet-on-wet technique, laying down some generously moist yellow lines just above where I supposed my horizon to be. After about ten minutes of letting that seep softly into the page, more wet-on-wet with some alternating reddy-orange streaks, all of it just trying to touch but with enough room for each colour to hold it’s own on the page. As that started to dry and set, I tried to find an optimal time to fill in the space around it with a very diluted deep blue, and added slowly compounding layers to the rest of the sky and slowly, carefully and deliberately pulling the grey-blue tones into the red and yellow spaces.

    The silhouette was a little more chaotic, and I roughed it out with a fine-liner & brush pen before using a dilute india ink wash to deepen the blacks and add some speckling to imply some detail and dust.

    As always, the photo included doesn’t do the final painting justice and I think it turned out vibrant and balanced.

    Now, just 30 more daily paintings to go.