Having enjoyed some success with the bread-making, I veered further off my established recipes and tried something a little different. I’ve been incorporating oat flakes or rye flakes into most of my loaves recently; they lend a richer, more textured feel to the bread. I’d also experimented with using some rye flour. One interesting thing I noted was that much of the flavor I associate with rye bread is actually from caraway seeds that are traditionally sprinkled on the top before baking. Rye flour bread without the caraway seeds tastes more like whole wheat flour, with sightly bitter overtones.
For this batch, I used toasted rye flakes and mixed rye flour together with regular bread flour in about 50/50 proportion. I also used molasses instead of honey; like the rye flour, I’ve been enjoying the more earthy, dense taste that molasses lends the bread. I doubled the amount of molasses to insure the yeast had something to chew on.
The result: so-so. Certainly edible, but not a keeper recipe, which was disappointing because I thought I was closing in on some interesting tastes that would work well together. The bread had a slightly bitter aftertaste, as if the rye flakes had burned slightly during toasting, that may have been accentuated by the flavor of the molasses. I could try the rye combo again and go back to honey as a sweetener, but I’m still enjoying using molasses, so I might make a version with whole wheat flour instead of rye flour, to see if that mellows the flavor.
In other excitement, I received a clock kit I’d been ogling online for quite some time. When you google “clock kit,” most of the results are for woodworking kits in which you construct an enclosure and drop in a prefab quartz timer, perhaps customizing the face and hands. I wanted to build a clock from scratch, assembling the mechanism like a clockmaker. While I grasp the principles and could sort out the math behind the gearing, I wouldn’t have the first idea how to begin building a timepiece more complicated than a sundial. The aptly-named site www.wooden-gear-clocks.com sells just what I was looking for: sheets of pre-stamped gears and all the essential pieces to assemble a clock made almost entirely of wood, along with a very well-illustrated booklet detailing each of the many steps in the process. [I should point out that this isn’t a paid advertisement and I don’t know the guy who runs the site.]
This isn’t a weekend project – I anticipate it’ll take me a few weeks of occasional work sessions. It’s far beyond any similar kit-build anything I’ve worked on before. As a kid, I reluctantly assembled model planes from kits provided by a family friend who felt my boyhood was missing this crucial pastime. The results were not airworthy in appearance. They weren’t even desk-worthy. I believe I may have blown the worst of them up with fireworks provided by another, far less responsible family friend. So the idea of a complex kit that’s supposed to do something and not just sit there looking forlorn, the child of a lesser kit-builder, is daunting. The kit, however, is a thing of beauty unto itself, planks of Baltic Birch wood laser-cut into improbably thin gears bristling with fine teeth. It’s impressive that this two-dimensional package could be reconfigured and fussed into a functioning clock, but I’m still at that early stage in the expertise curve when it seems possible, even easy; the first few pages of the kit booklet will no doubt cure that sentiment.
rudimentarian 