Fried eggs with Maui sourdough toast

Late night snack, wait, I guess it is an early morning snack. Whatever. I'm showing the holes in the bread. See? That is what artisan bread is all about. Rarely will you see that with homemade bread because home bakers follow the usual directions and bake their bread in Pullman pans and at heat much lower and for longer periods than artisan bakeries do. The home bread baker can approximate artisan bread by baking in a cloche instead of a pan, and by using heat as high as their oven will go. Those two things permit a wetter dough which is the third difference. However, the flavor of the bread is produced first by the starter, this one collected on Maui, and by a fermentation period, in this case three days which is just about perfect. The fermentation is more important than any given particular starter, in my humble opinion, the starter being a culture of a  combination of yeast cells and bacteria unique to geographic areas, and the fermentation is the effect of that culture over time.

When the third day rolled around, the baking day, the dough was insufficiently wet. That was corrected by stretching out the dough to a squarish pizza then dampening my hands to dripping wet and applying the water to the top layer and folding the pizza shape into thirds, watering again, folding again, stretching and flattening and watering again, then finally folding in thirds again into a bread shape. That bread shape flattens out on its own over 20 minutes or so of final rising but it is stretched again into a baguette shape as it is dropped into a fierce hot cloche that had been preheating high as the oven goes. Dangerous, yes. I wanted it wet as a jellyfish, more wet than you would imagine could rise and support itself. The wetness made large hole formation possible, the preheated cloche contained the moisture long enough for the dough to expand as thousands of little balloons, and then abruptly SET due to the intense heat having its final way.

If the word cloche seems too scary to bother, consider a clay roaster instead. It's the same thing. The roaster can be used upside down to avoid the dough setting on the built-in ribs intended to elevate a roast.

The current egg scare affects my state. The to do  causes me to want to eat more eggs just to be contrarian. Nanner nanner. It does nothing else but make me suspicious of motive.

My whole schedule is thrown off due to a party I went to yesterday. Met a bunch of really nice people and made new friends. At one point I changed tables and joined another group of people that I hadn't met before. They looked at me a little puzzled as I sat down with them, so I go, "You guys look like you're interesting."  But my abrupt intrusion caused conversation to stall so I continued, "I overheard you talking about visiting Haiti," and conversation spilled out from there. One guy told a story about how life was when he lived in a ghetto area. That caused another person to top that story with another harsher ghetto-living related story that was much more dramatic in which he starred as the hero. I said, "See? I knew you guys are interesting."   I came waaaaaay out of character and drank three sodas, and boy, were they sugary. They could have filled hummingbird feeders. Then the hummingbirds would go, "WUT UP WID ALL DIS SUGAR? YOU TRYING TO KILL US?" Everybody else was drinking beer and liquor and wine but I guess I'm just not into any of that. Dorito chips, which are quite addictive, prepared dips from jars. Cakes from the grocery store bakery. I was starving so I had a sandwich finally at about 10:00PM with sandwich meat and commercial bread. It was mini flat bread that could be sliced into two discs. It was the best choice available, but honestly it still didn't come close to the flatbread I can whip out myself in minutes by making dough and frying it in a pan. <-- FACT.

It's all so clear to me now.

I misunderstood the amount of time between getting the invitation and the actual party. When I realized the error I had only a few hours to crank out a thank-you card, which I prefer to leave on their table rather than mail. There were other things I had to get to too so it was with urgency I cranked out this sweet little pop-up card, if you care to have a look.