Sourdough success!!

I tried again to make homemade sourdough bread, and it was a success!  I tweaked the recipe (more flour for a stiffer dough; used about 1 cup of pretty liquidy starter, 1.5 cups flour, and enough water for a stiff dough, plus 1 scant t salt), mixed up the bread and kneaded it by hand for quite a long time on Wednesday night, then put it in the fridge to rise slowly so I could wait until Thursday night to bake it.  I took the dough out of the fridge about an hour before baking, which seemed like enough time to warm up and rise a bit more.

My aunt Sue had sent me a really good recommendation about baking in a small oven - bake the bread on the bottom rack, then flip it over if it starts to get too dark on the bottom before it's done.  I was going to try that, but I fiddled around with the oven rack and realized I could flip it over and because of the way the shelf was configured, it was about 1 inch higher off the flame than before.  I also baked a smaller loaf this time, so it was finished before the bottom got too dark.  But, I'll definitely try the 'flip' method if needed in the future!

The final result - amazing.  Crusty on the outside, just-right density on the inside, good flavor, and best of all, no sweaty gym sock odor!  I'd never buy bread again, except that that's just unrealistic.  :)

Around the world in a single restaurant

I sometimes make fun of the restaurant options here in Juneau.  There's a lot of bad and mediocre restaurants, and a few really, really good ones.  This weekend, we had one good and one bad experience.  The good one was an excellent new place downtown (V's Cellar) that was billed as "Mexican-Korean Fusion".  It sounds odd, but it was great.  It's a tiny little place, tucked into a basement and kind of hard to find, but I would absolutely go again.

The other one was pretty ridiculous, and in hindsight I should have known to stay away.  I'd heard they had 'decent' pizza.  And it was decent...I make better pizza at home, but it was edible and came out hot.  However, it was the menu that made me laugh out loud.  Despite have an Italian name for the restaurant (which will remain nameless, though Juneau peeps can probably figure it out) they apparently could not settle on just one cuisine, nor even a mash-up of two like the Mexican-Korean place.  This spectacular failure of a concept was an Italian-Thai-Mexican-Chinese-Greek-Steakhouse, with a salad bar, thank-you-very-much.  It also had 1970s supper club style dark amber water glasses (awesome!) and decorative Roman columns as a nod to their Italian name.  I feel like this sort of shotgun approach to menu planning is really common in small towns (or small, isolated cities like Juneau).  I saw something similar in Cordova that was a catch-all Asian restaurant (Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Thai), but this place really takes that up a notch by combining in so many dissimilar options.  How can you even keep all those different ingredients on hand and fresh??  Oh wait, you can't.

Sourdough bread fail

Sunday I made sourdough pancakes for breakfast that turned out really tasty, and, delighted by my success, I made some sourdough bread.  I loosely followed two recipes, but forgot to add salt, so the final product was really flat tasting, like it had no flavor.  There was no 'sour' flavor from the sourdough at all.  It smells and tastes pretty yeasty...actually, it smells like sweaty gym socks.  Not super appetizing. 

I'm not sure what went wrong with the bread.  I think I didn't have enough sourdough starter in it (I used 1 cup), and I think I needed to let the starter ferment longer (like another day) after making the pancakes.  When I made the pancakes, I 'refreshed' the starter right away, then made the bread a few hours later.  So, I'll try again in a few days.  Until then, I think I am going to make garlic bread out of the failed loaf...maybe lots of garlic will cover up the gym sock smell.  Also, note the issue of baking bread in our oven.  I can't bake it on the lowest rack or the bottom of the loaf will burn.  So I have to put it on the top rack to bake and the bread rose up until it hit the over ceiling!  (the oven flame is is in the middle of the oven so you can put things under the flame to broil or above it to bake...but apparently you can't bake tall things.  Or a turkey.).

Sourdough

In Fairbanks I had breakfast at Sam's Sourdough Cafe one morning, and tried sourdough pancakes for the first time ever.  They were great!  Inspired, I am trying to start some sourdough starter at home, using a bit of a 'cheater' recipe where you start with commercial yeast...a recipe I got from the King Arthur Flour website. I'm only at the 12 hour mark, so there's a ways to go before I can use it, but I'm really excited! 

Another thing I had for breakfast that morning (and another first for me) - a reindeer sausage omelet!  It was excellent!

Fairbanks wrap up and now back home

I got back from Fairbanks yesterday afternoon and promptly took a two and a half hour nap.  The week was really exhausting, I'm really behind on classwork now, and I would like a couple of days to recover.  But that's not going to happen, so I'm in the lab catching up on email and some homework assignments (and blogging, of course), and Steve and I will tag team laundry and making dinner tonight. 

The meeting was ok overall.  I think from an attendee's perspective things went smoothly.  I was a bit frustrated at times by the lack of organization, because that meant questions would come to me, and since I wasn't in charge, I rarely knew the answer and would get sidetracked while trying to find out.  Oh well.  It's over now!

One part of the week that was really fun was the welcoming social on Tuesday night.  It was held at the Museum of the North, on the UAF campus.  It's a really great museum and I'd like to go back sometime to explore some more.  There was a natural history section (very cool to see some of Alaska's wildlife up close) and an art/native culture section.  Photography was allowed, so I took the picture at the top of the post, which was my favorite piece of local art.  There was also a native dance demonstration, though I have forgotten now which native group they represent.  They did a good job of explaining the meaning behind the dance and the moves in the dance.  For example, one dance was a story of making an ice shelter, and the movements pantomimed what you'd do to make it - cut blocks, stack blocks, brush of snow, etc.  The two youngest kids in the group were very entertaining!

I'm so glad to be back home, though it's back to rainy weather here.  In Fairbanks is was cool(ish) and very dry.  I was surprised how the lack of moisture really made a difference in how much less cold it felt there.  Even at 25 degrees, it felt relatively warm outside.  I spent quite a bit of time outside without a jacket, and it was fine.  I was also surprised at how nice it was to be in a wide open space.  Fairbanks has some rolling hills, but is generally in a big bowl-like valley.  On a clear day you can see mountains, but for the most part, it feels very open.  It felt a lot like the midwest.  In Juneau we're pushed up against the mountains and the only real sight lines are along Gastineau Channel and Lynn Canal, but both of those have mountains on both sides.  I really liked Fairbanks, and would like to go back and do some more exploring.  And I really, really want to go back in winter to see the northern lights and go dog sledding!

Fairbanks is wicked cool!

I somehow had the foresight to pick a seat on the left side of the plane from Anchorage to Fairbanks and was lucky that we had clear weather for a view of Denali yesterday.  Wow.  It is so much higher than everything else around it!  It has an incredible 18,000 feet of vertical relief over the land around it.
 

After a long day of travel and setting up for the meeting, I jumped at the chance to go to Chena Hot Springs last night.  It's about 60 miles from Fairbanks...60 long, dark, and potentially moose-filled miles.  We did not see any moose, much to my disappointment.  We did not get to leave until almost 8 pm, but they're open until midnight.  When we got there it was COLD outside, definitely below freezing, and the main pool is outdoors.  But the water was hot - almost too hot for me - and it felt nice to alternate between the hot water and sitting on the rocks around the pool.  Since there was such a temperature differential, the air was filled with gently swirling fog...which would occasionally part and reveal about a billion stars.  Spectacular.  There were very few lights at the hot springs so the stars where so bright.

However, the absolute highlight of the night was seeing a WOLF loping down the road on the trip to the springs.  We stopped the car to watch it until it disappeared into the night.  I love this state.

There's ice on Mendenhall lake!

We had ice on the truck this morning!  We loaded up Seca and went for a walk at the glacier (after stopping for coffee) and there was a lot of ice on Mendenhall Lake.  Some of it will probably melt today (not the icebergs), but I'm surprised it's cold enough for ice to form.  We also saw a bear.  It was headed in a different direction from us, though. 

This picture was Steve's idea - he thought the mountains reflected in the water were cool.  I agree!

I head to Fairbanks tomorrow for the week.  Steve is holding down the fort at home.  I'm not sure if I'll have time to take any pictures, but I hope so!  I've not been to Fairbanks before.