Room2 | reboot11
Baking Bread
Actual bread, baking.
Bread is the main thing to understand: the staple of speculation, the food for all theories about what happens next.
- Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
At the preboot dinner in Malmö tonight we got excited about the possibility of bringing bread-making activity to reboot.
Our plan is to bring 100 kilos of flour, yeast, and salt to Kedelhallen, along with some sort of oven to allow bread to be baked
The oven is going to be the hardest thing to acquire; if you know of a rental oven company in Copenhagen, please comment below.
We'll set up outside on the lawn with a table and some basic instructions, with hopes that many will join in, knead up a loaf, and we'll fill reboot with the smell of baking bread.
Time is short to pull this off, and we'll need the help and cooperation and enthusiasm of others to do so; please add your comments, and express your interest if you like.
15 comments
solar oven
we can attempt to build a solar oven.. should be easy
apparently (solar) bread is best baked in dark (coffee) cans..
will try to bring materials.. though we surely can not go through 100kgs with solar.. more like a few breads if we are lucky;-)
Just wonderful...
...you can also just dig a hole in the ground and use charcoal, but I think we need the high technology of ceramic, there's nothing like freshmade pita bread, you bake it by "throwing" the dough on the side of the ovenwalls.
Also read, or I'm SURE you've already done that, so re-read it, what Henry Miller wrote about bread in Tropic of Cancer: www.parisiana.com/article.php3?id_article=117
Quote (not too sure about the Copyright for this, Henry Miller has been dead for MANY, MANY years):
I have now found that the only way to eat our most unwholesome, unpalatable and unappetizing American bread, the staff of our unsavory and monotonous life, is to adopt the following procedure. This is a recipe, so please follow instructions to the letter.
To begin with, accept any loaf that is offered you without question, even if it is not wrapped in cellophane, even if it contains no kelp. Throw it in the back of the car with the oil can and the grease rags; if possible, bury it under a sack of coal, bituminous coal. As you climb up the road to your home, drop it in the mud a few times and dig your heels into it. If you have a dog with you, let him pee on it now and then. When you get to the house, and after you have prepared the other dishes, take a huge carving knife and rip the loaf from stem to stern. Then take one whole onion, peeled or unpeeled, one carrot, one stalk of celery, one huge piece of garlic, one sliced apple, a herring, a handful of anchovies, a sprig of parsley, and an old toothbrush and shove them into the disembowelled guts of the bread. Over these pour first a thimbleul of kerosene, a dash of Lavoris and just a wee bit of Clorox; then sprinkle guts liberally with the following - molasses, holley, orange marmalade, vanilla, soy bean sauce, tabasco sauce, ketchup and arnica. Over this add a layer of chopped nuts, assorted nuts, of course, a few bay leaves (whole), some marjoram, and a stick of licorice cut into fine pieces. Put the loaf in the oven for ten minutes and serve. If it is still lacking in taste whip up a chili con carne piping hot and mix bread with it until it becomes a thick gruel. If this fails, piss on it and throw it to the dog. But under no circumstancesfeed it to the birds. The birds of North America are already on the decline, as I pointed out earlier. Their beaks have become dull, their wing-span shortened; they are pining and drooping, moulting in season and out. Above all, they no longer sing as they used to; they make sour notes, they bleat instead of tweeting, and sometimes, when the fogs set in, they have even been heard to cackle and wheeze.
AMEN!
Gas stove?
To be able to make anything at this short notice, I guess some things gotta give.
I thought of small gas stoves. On larger plates. Need some cover from wind, though.
Can you bake bread in a Spheric Grill?
Probably! Let's keep brainstorming here...
Local bakery
Olle's sister suggests approaching a bakery in the neighbourhood, as they likely don't use their baking ovens during the afternoon. We could prepare on site at reboot, then transport for the baking phase.
We would, however, lose the smell of baking bread.
Bodenhoff - Bageri & Konditori
Bodenhoff - Bageri & Konditori is only 1km away. I'll contact them to see about borrowing their ovens.
small scale solution: camping stoves?
Cool idea...!
In case we dont get a big oven: maybe we try this with many good camping stoves? I can bring a gas powered Trangia stove and optionally a simple camping gas stove, but would have to know by wed morning. I heard from some people who used the Trangia successfully for baking bread "in the field".
Of course these stoves would only give us about 1 bread/h per unit, i guess.
Alternative: flat bread that can be baken on a bbq?
Anyway, if you need helping hands, i'm in and arriving at early afternoon on wed.
Smaller Scale = Interesting
The "small scale" idea is seeming more attractive, especially it's a more exportable form of action – what good is bread if you need industrial infrastructure to make it?
Thoughts from others?
Using a large covered grill?
We could, in theory rent a large covered grill and then use the approach covered here to cook the bread on it.
Possible Oven
Have a line on a possibility of a portable bread oven; waiting to hear back.
Re: Possible Oven
Have a line on a possibility of a portable
bread oven; waiting to hear back.
That would of course be cool.... :-)
So close...
The portable wood-fired bread oven (with included bread expert) fell through last night, alas – a victim of just-a-little-too-late project planning.
So we now have to move on to plan B. Three possibilities in evidence right now:
1. There's an oven in the kitchen at the Kedelhallen that we might be able to use, although it may take some negotiation, in Danish, to get permission for this.
2. @kim_bach put me in touch with a guy who has a simple gas-bottle-fired oven in his garden that, if we can find some strong backs and a truck (or maybe a station wagon) he is open to us borrowing. He may or may not be around today, and we'd also have to bring it back, so maybe this is too complex for us to take on?
3. @kim_bach and others have suggested a more DIY approach – i.e. we build our own oven. There has been official high-level frowning on the notion of an open fire-pit on the reboot grounds, but perhaps we can do something here? Certainly this would be the most Action-oriented approach.
If we can't figure out a way to bake bread, surely we don't deserve to call ourselves geeks!
Final Report
In the end here's what happened:
We held a session on Day 1 of reboot11 in Room #2 with half a dozen people in attendance. Peter Madsen-Mygdal helpfully brought the raw materials to construct a solar oven, and we launched right in.
The oven consisted of a base of styrofoam painted black with aluminum foil-covered cardboard "wings" to concentrate the sunlight, and a clear cellophane cover to create a "heading chamber."
On Thursday we got the temperature up to 36 degrees C (measured with a meat thermometer with the probe inside the chamber). With some tweaks on Friday (securing the "wings", improving the angle, better sunshine, better location) we reached a maximum temperature of 132 degrees C.
We never did actually bake bread, nor even attempt to bake bread, but we did lay the groundwork, and we did have a lot of fun.
ewrwe
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What kind of oven, electric is OUT of the question ;-)
So try to contact Lejre Forsøgscenter da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagnlandet_Lejre