ugh - baking misadventures

Dammit - I made another ugly loaf of soda bread. The crust is hard and burnt, inside it's still a bit doughy in places. It should have a dense moist texture, which it has somewhat. It tastes okay, due to some sugar in that particular recipe - okay but still not really the way I remember my grandma's bread tasting. Then there's the issues of in Europe how they measure by weight, and in N. America, it's by volume. It's supposed to have buttermilk, and I use milk that I've just put a few tablespoons of vinegar or lemon juice to sour it... maybe there's something in the buttermilk that does chemical magic that I'm missing. I think my baking soda might be too old. So there's many things that might be going wrong here. :D

But I just did some productive googling, and found out that in Ireland, they have mostly flour made from soft wheat, whereas in Canada, that's called pastry flour, bread flour is made from hard wheat. All-purpose flour is somewhere in between. So I'm going to go see if I can locate some pastry flour, that might be the majority of my problem, as every single loaf of soda bread I've made has been either too tough inside, or the crust was too hard, or both.

As it's supposed to be made with whole wheat flour, and there doesn't seem to be a whole wheat pastry flour (go figure! LOL) I'm going to have to try to use half all-purpose whole-wheat, for authenticity, and half pastry flour, for the right texture. It's supposed to be mostly or entirely from whole wheat flour.

Hopefully this finally works. I'm not exactly jumping off my chair to try baking again tomorrow, but I'll see if I can locate the flour at least, ready for the next time I feel like baking.

"passion for the industry" hmph

I think I've come to the kernel of a thing that bothered me when I was at film school, and former students came to speak to us.

I was ripping something out of the free newspaper, and there was an article on film editors, a statement from it from an editor was "a lot of us lucked into this job". Well isn't that great for the person who has the job already! What does that mean to an audience of students with aspirations to have that job?

I would say, if someone is somewhat vague about how they got a job, if there was any large amount of luck involved, they seem kind of "I am not worthy" and smug at the same time, or, (my favourite) you need "a passion for the industry", then I would think very hard about whether you want that specific job, or whether you are able to roll with whatever opportunity comes your way.

yikes

So this morning in Unrequited Dreams, I read about the sealers who were lost on the ice and found frozen to death.

Heh it's cold right now, -15C, without taking the windchill into account, so yeah, I'm glad I walk from the train station to work, one heated place to another. Though in that climate, doing that work, clearly it was an accomplishment for them to be coming home alive as often as they did. My own grandfather was a fisherman, and never learned to swim. How about that! It's the kind of thing that grounds you and you don't want to forget, but I don't want to tell it to my wee nephew if it's going to sound like it's making a caricature out of my grandfather. Our family doesn't roll like that.

colony of confused anecdotes

I'm reading Colony of Unrequited Dreams. It's good, Wayne Johnston is a good writer.

Unfortunately my mom knows him, or knows someone who knows him, and also he's written a book about where she's from - Baltimore's Mansions - so much of what I know about his books is about all the "inaccuracies" in them. I was truly not sure what section in Chapters to look for Colony of Unrequited Dreams in, it turned out to be in Fiction. Oh wait, on Amazon, Baltimore's Mansions is listed as a memoir, to add to the confusion.

It's weird to have so much written about what is basically a small town, that happens to have a lot of my history in it, history that I largely have no idea about - what I do know is blended with a lot of folklore-like anecdotes that I have heard over the years from my mom. It was weird to go there last summer, and see people who were related to the people in my mom's stories about the place.

(Of course, small towns being what they are, I could see potential new anecdotes happening before my eyes, as we drove around, and as she talked about the goings-on)

Anyways for me, I don't think I'll end up learning more about Newfoundland by reading these books, as much as it'll be adding to the big stew of fact, fiction, memory, and memorable people that exists in my head about the place. I'll be reading closely, yet taking it with a grain of salt.