Southern Bread Blog

I’ve been tinkering with bread baking for a couple of months now and I’ve honed in on the perfect bread loaf recipe. I’m going to show you how to make it, but be warned. If this is the first time you’ve made bread from scratch then just go ahead and expect to mess up a bit. Bread making is one of those things that is really easy to show and teach, but very difficult to explain in print. I’m going to do my best here, but you might want to watch some youtube videos. That will help you get an idea of what “smooth” dough actually looks like and other things like that.

Also, I want to mention that the technical part of this bread recipe can be made in one of two ways. The modern version that’s fast, or the totally from scratch pioneer version that will blow your tongue off. It’s up to you which route you go. I’ll explain the modern variant in this post and the totally(and I mean totally) from scratch version in the next post.  This is the version I’ve settled on for awesome sandwich bread, but this recipe is very, very changeable.  It’s a great starting recipe to use and adapt to make all different types of yummy rolls, bagels and french breads.

The Modern Version:

Dry Ingredients:

• 2.5 Cups of Wheat Flour
• 1 Cup of Bread Flour
• 1 TBSP of Salt
• 2 tsp cocoa powder

Wet Ingredients:

• 8 oz. warm water
• 5 oz. warm whole milk
• 1 oz. of vegetable oil
• 2 tsp Instant Dry Yeast
• 1 TBSP Sugar

Instructions:

1. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl.  Don’t add the yeast or sugar to the dry ingredients.
2. Mix the water, oil and milk together in a large cup and warm it up a bit.  Not hot, just warm.  A little more than luke warm.  You don’t want to kill the yeast.
3. Now add the dry yeast and sugar to the warm liquid and stir it around with a fork vigorously until all of the sugar is dissolved.
4. Now walk away and let the yeast liquid sit and fester for about 15 minutes.  The yeast is going to get really active and start to party.  Don’t crash it.
5. Come back and dump the liquid/yeast mix into the dry ingredients.
6. Get your hands wet with some water and begin to mix.  You will get messy, but it’s worth it.
7. When everything is mixed thoroughly, flour the countertop and dump the dough out onto the flour.
8. Knead the dough for  6 minutes until smooth, adding plenty of flour as needed.  Don’t skimp.
9. Now stretch and shape the dough into a ball with the seam at the bottom.
10. Clean and dry out your mixing bowl and then spray it inside with cooking spray or wipe it with oil.
11. Drop your dough ball into the bowl seam side down and shoot it with a light shot of cooking spray also.
12. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a hand towel and let sit for an hour until it at least doubles in size.
13. After it doubles, uncover and punch down the dough to get all the air out.  Don’t punch it hard, just make sure it’s deflated good.
14. Now turn it out on the floured countertop again and knead it very lightly for about a minute.  You just want to work it a little to get it back to a good shape.
15. Now, crisco the inside of a loaf pan.  Use plenty of lard/crisco.  You don’t want the loaf sticking to the pan.  That’s a disaster.
16. Cover and let sit again for about 30 minutes.  It will rise quite a bit, but don’t let it get too big where it’s ballooning out over the sides of the pan.
17. Lower your oven rack to a little below center and put the pan on the rack.
18. Set the oven to 400° F and set the timer to 30 minutes.
19. When the timer goes off the bread is done.  Let it cool on a wire rack for about an hour.

That sounds like a ton of steps, but it’s really not that hard.  Try and make it a few times. You’ll get better each time and it tastes delicious. You’ll never eat sandwiches with store bought bread again. Once you’ve nailed down this recipe, you’re ready to kick it up and go old-school.  That involves hand grinding your wheat flour, using home cultured yeast and making a pre-ferment.  I’ll show you how to do that next time.

I just listened to Ron Paul’s speech from the Mises Circle in Houston. He talks about his Haiti Aid vote, homeschooling, the prospects for liberty, his Currency Competition bill and the Hot Air hit piece labeling him as a conspiracy theorist. Listen and enjoy.

Ron Paul – Mises Circle 2010:

This is what happens when the state reserves the exclusive right to legally use physical force on it’s citizens:

PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh police Chief Nate Harper said three plainclothes officers have been reassigned during an internal investigation into the beating of an 18-year-old student violinist from the city’s Creative and Performing Arts High School.

Police charged Jordan Miles, 18, with assault and resisting arrest Jan. 11 because, they said, he fought with the officers who thought a “heavy object” in his coat was a gun. It turned out to be a bottle of Mountain Dew.

Miles said he resisted because he thought the men were trying to abduct him and didn’t identify themselves as police.

Miles’ family and attorney said he was hit with a stun gun and hospitalized after the violent Homewood struggle during which a chunk of his hair was yanked out and a tree branch went through his gums.

“I was accused for something I never had anything to do with,” said Miles, an honor student at CAPA. “I was completely innocent. They couldn’t find anything.”

Police took Miles to a Pittsburgh hospital for treatment. The student said he had to go back after he was released from custody.

“I want my son’s life restored, that’s all,” said Miles’ mother, Terez Miles. “I just want his life to go back to the way that it was before.”

City officials are conducting a full investigation, spokeswoman Diane Richard told Channel 11 News.

Reportedly the officers identified themselves as police. According to officials, the officers have been moved from plain clothes detail to uniformed duty.
–WPXI News, Pittsburgh

Notice that they still charged him with resisting arrest and assault even though they couldn’t find anything he had done wrong. Things like “resisting arrest” are complete fabrications made up by the state police machine to be a catch all in case they screw up and try to arrest the wrong guy. Anybody in their right mind that isn’t guilty of any crime would resist being forcefully marched to jail. It’s legitimate human nature.

Now, if instead of being beaten almost to death, he had actually walked up to the cops and asked them for help he most likely would have been told to get lost. The best way to get a cop to leave you alone is to ask him for help. The best way to get beaten to a bloody pulp is to mind your own business. The fact remains though – now days we have to protect ourselves from the police and from criminals. Which is which can be hard to distinguish sometimes. When the state gives itself a total monopoly on the use of force it’s inevitable that the people who get to legally exercise that force will eventually become corrupt and drunk with the dishing out of physical power.

The libertarian cry that there is no difference between the two parties couldn’t be more obvious now. Noam Chomsky famously said that what we have in America isn’t a two party system. It’s one party with two factions. We must keep that in perspective now days. For those that rejoiced when Scott Brown was elected the other day, here is the wakeup call:

This guy voted for state-run healthcare in Mass. and Mitt Romney (another Republican) signed it into law. I’ve been telling people for months that Republicans have no interest in stopping health care legislation. People like Rush Limbaugh have marveled out loud about why Congressional Republicans aren’t being more vocal and active in opposing it. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for that. Because they don’t oppose it, as is evidenced in the above video. The only reason they have given passive resistance to it for the last few months is that it’s good positioning for campaign donations and re-election.

You have to begin looking at all politics from the angle of “who wins? who loses?” So let’s do that. If health care passed right now, would the Republicans lose? No. They’ll just claim that they tried hard to fight it, but didn’t have enough numbers on their side. They will still be re-elected and Democrats will get hammered in November. Plus, now they can enjoy the same benefits the Democrats wanted. Namely, large new campaign contributions from the healthcare lobby. That’s a win for them.

So, what if health care doesn’t pass. Do Republicans lose? No. They still get re-elected in November on the idea that they defeated the bill, and Democrats get hammered. They also still get massive campaign contributions from an energized base. That’s a win for them also.

See what I mean? That’s how politics works. Smart politicians always set themselves up to win on both sides of potential legislation. Values and ideology in Washington are like unicorns and fairies. They don’t exist.

Brilliant as usual:

A good post over at the Bound Dragon:

God is infinite or omnipresent. The State is truly everywhere. At my birth, the State was there to legitimize my birth with the issuance of a birth certificate. Throughout my infancy and my time as a toddler, the State was there to ensure I remained “healthy” through necessary vaccinations. During my formative elementary years, the State was there to enforce my compulsory education. As I grew into a teen, the State was there to license me to drive. Upon my graduation, the State was there to assure me that my post-secondary education was accredited and met its rigid standards. When I fell in love, the State was there, permitting me to marry my bride with a marriage license. When my children were born, the State, ever-vigilant, was there to legitimize their births. And when I grow old and feeble, the State will be there providing me with security, social security, as I attempt to provide for my comforts.

–Matt, The Bound Dragon

I think it’s also fair to note that the church, for it’s part is trying to mimic the state in this endeavor. The church wants to get into every aspect of people’s lives – offering programs and activities that could fill up a person’s entire week. I was eating dinner with a friend the other night and we were talking about this very thing. The church is too visible. Historically, the Christianity has been most vulnerable when it’s the most visible. With mega-churches sprawled out all over the country and multi-million dollar parachurch ministries all over, it’s hard to say that the church is in any way hidden today. You might think that’s a good thing. I think it’s not. Whenever the church pushes into the public square in a big way, it always seems to end up bad.

The flip-side to what I’m talking about is the church as a hidden, personal body. A body committed to ministry and personal relationships. I don’t think that you can say in any way that being more public and visible changes more hearts. As a matter of fact, whenever the church has been the most hidden and the most persecuted is when it has flourished. Just look at the Chinese church today. It’s solid and growing in the midst of fierce persecution. By contrast, the American church is wobbly and stagnant.

So, last time I outlined the initial thinking that led us to begin paying our kids for their school work. We started paying our kids because we thought it was our obligation to pay our children for their labour. But, a logical question is why we would feel it necessary to pay them for school-work, but not for chores. In fact, most families do the exact opposite. They pay their kids for chores in the form of an allowance, but don’t pay them for school work. Why is this not kosher you ask?

I have come to the conclusion that this setup of paying for chores is sort of odd. Think about it for a minute. Who pays you when you do chores? Nobody. You do chores because they are the daily ploddings of life that all people must do. You don’t get rewarded, or reimbursed for it. You do, however, get reimbursed for the time and labour you spend at your job. The reason is that, in your job function, you are representing a capital labour investment for someone else who pays you for his use of your time and effort. To put it more simply, you don’t do somebody elses chores, you do your chores. But, at a job, you do someone else’s work(the capitalist’s or entrepenuer’s) for them. And they pay you for it.

Now, if the ultimate goal of raising our children is to prepare them properly for life as an adult, then we need to mirror as closely as possible the real world that they will be living in. Remember, that’s why we homeschool to begin with – because real life doesn’t resemble the fake world of government school classrooms. At your job, you don’t get segregated into age-peer groups, so you shouldn’t be grouped that way when your raised either. Now, import the concept of wages into this same scenario. It wouldn’t fit to pay your child for doing chores, but not for their job(school). When we do it that way, we are unwittingly teaching them a fallacious, labour theory of value. We are teaching them that you get paid based on how hard you work. That’s not true.

We get paid, not based on how hard we work, but on how productive we are. Let me demonstrate. Imagine you have five employees that all do the same job(just make up something, like data entry). Two of them are extremely fast typists, and it only takes them an hour to input 50 documents. The other three are slower and it takes them an hour and a half to input the same 50 documents. In this scenario, the second, slower, group works much harder than the faster group to achieve the same results. But, you would think it silly to say that the second group deserves higher wages than the first. In fact, the first group should be paid more, because they are more productive. This enhanced productivity brings a higher return to the capitalist(you), so you can pay them more.

If we pay our kids for their school work, it reinforces the correct idea that wages are a marginal product based on how productive they are. It’s not enough to just put a bunch of junk down on the paper. They have to get the answers right and do it in an ever-increasing efficient manner. If they don’t, they don’t get paid. What matters is output, not labour or even effort. Some kids are naturally gifted in a certain subject like math. That is a benefit to them. The fact that getting the right answers comes easily to them is irrelevant. As long as our kids get the answers right, and show a pattern of solving the same problems quicker over time, they get paid 10 cents per lesson, because that is evidence that they are learning what is being taught. And that’s their job right now.

They don’t co-exist very well. I just got this notice in a weekly email newsletter from GunBroker:

Firearm Sales Up as Murders Drop

The FBI recently issued its preliminary 2009 crime report, showing that the number of murders in the first half of 2009 decreased 10 percent compared to the first half of 2008.

If the trend holds for the remainder of 2009, it will be the single greatest one-year decrease in the number of murders since at least 1960, the earliest year for which national data are available through the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Also, the per capita murder rate for 2009 will be 51 percent lower than the all-time high recorded in 1991, and it will be the lowest rate since 1963, a 46-year low.

Final figures for 2009 will be released by the FBI later this year.

According to gun control supporter dogma, “more guns means more crime”, the number of privately owned firearms must have decreased 10 percent in 2009. To the contrary, however, the number rose between 1.5 and 2 percent, to an all-time high.

For the better part of the last 15 months, firearms, ammunition, and “large” ammunition magazines have been sold in what appear to be record quantities. And, the firearms that were most commonly purchased in 2009 are those that gun control supporters most want to be banned, AR-15s, similar semi-automatic rifles, and handguns designed for defense.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation already estimates record ammunition sales in 2009, dominated by .223 Remington, 7.62x39mm, 9mm and other calibers widely favored for defensive purposes.

Looks like the lowest crime rate in 50 years just so happened to come about during the highest level of personal gun ownership in history. Hmm.

This is priceless:

It’s actually a poster you can buy at this guy’s site:

http://web.mac.com/moistproduction/Moist_Production/MicroSchematic.html

I know that when you read this you’re instantly going to think that we’ve gone insane, but I promise you that my mental faculties are just as sound as they’ve always been (that probably won’t have the effect that I hope it does). We decided a couple of months ago to pay our kids for the time and effort they put into doing their school lessons. It was a complex decision and took a while to figure out whether it was the right thing to do or not, and then how much and in what way to administer the wages. I’ll do my best to describe the details of the decision to you.

First, why pay kids for doing school work? It seems like such an odd thing to do. After all, we didn’t get paid for going to school. We just had to grin and bear it. But, as we should all keep in mind, just because the majority of people do something a certain way doesn’t make it the best way to do said thing. We should always be on the lookout for ways to improve the things we take for granted. And, that’s one of the brilliant things about homeschooling. We get to experiment with all kinds of techniques to reach the kids with a greater level of educational realism. That’s what led us into thinking about all of this. A desire to make our children’s education have the most real, practical effect. We wanted the act of educating, itself to be instructive and realistic.

So, with that in mind we thought about how the modern educational process is treated so differently than every other real-world experience we have. Just think about it for a moment. What is primary education really saying to our kids? It’s saying, because you are young, you must go and work for 8 hours a day, plus nights and weekends(for homework) without pay for twelve years of your life. If you don’t do this, the state will do bad things to you and/or your parents. Now, can you think of any other institution that resembles this? I can. It’s called slavery.

Now, I know that your knee-jerk response to this claim is that I’m crazy, because “this is different.” Or, “they’re getting an education.” Or, “it’s for the child’s own benefit.” Or, “education has X number of external benefits, so it’s worth it.” I could probably think of a dozen other statements like this that people would probably think of when I claim that mandatory elementary education is just like slavery. But, I hope that you will stop and think about it for a moment and realize that all of those statements are true for slavery as well. You could say, “they’re learning a skill.” Or, “they’re getting three meals a day and shelter.” My basic premise is that no matter how you try and make mandatory education different than slavery, you can’t. It all ultimately boils down to forced labor.

This is the premise we came to the table with. We thought in this way: if we force our children to do work, the moral thing to do is pay them a wage for that work. Work without pay is slavery. Remember, though, not all pay comes in the form of money. When I talk of paying them a wage(10 cents per lesson in our case), that wage could come in another form also. It could come in the form of food, play time/free time, getting to stay up a bit later before bed, etc. In fact, that’s going to be the subject of the next post.