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Baking in the Time of Covid
I've been working from home for almost two weeks now. The house hasn't magically become clean, and although I've done a bit more weight-lifting than usual, I am not suddenly buff and the usual stream of mail-order packages coming in the front door has increased only slightly. I did bake a good-sized loaf of sourdough bread last Saturday, and since we're both at home, we're going through bread faster than usual so I baked bread again yesterday: mixed flour and water at dinner-time Wednesday, added starter before bed, added eggs, salt, and more flour Thursday morning, formed a loaf Thursday afternoon, soaked the Romertopf, moved the loaf into the Romertopf and put it into a cold oven, and turned the oven to 475F while preparing dinner, setting the timer for 50 minutes.
And then the thing that we haven't been preparing for in the current epidemic happened: the power went out. More precisely, the power went out to some of the outlets in the house and not others. Still more precisely, the refrigerator was still on (yay!) but the oven and microwave weren't, nor the Wi-Fi router, nor the desktop computer, nor the bedroom overhead light. I checked the circuit-breaker box, and everything was still in the "on" position; I flipped the breaker for the oven-and-range circuit off and on just to make sure, but no dice. Called Con Ed and talked to a robo-phone-tree for a minute or two. Fortunately, the oven had already come up to its desired 475F before losing power, so I figured "I've baked bread with retained heat in a brick oven before: I just won't open the door for a while." Of course, my kitchen oven is NOT a brick oven, and is NOT designed to retain heat, so I gave it more time than I had planned, while making the rest of dinner on the stovetop (it's a gas stove, and we have matches).
After an hour and a half, I opened the oven and took the lid off the Romertopf. The bread looked kinda done, but not quite. So with no real alternative, I quickly put it back in the oven and prepared psychologically for the possibility of throwing away a loaf of half-baked dough.
And then Con Ed showed up. The workman asked whether anybody in the house was sick before crossing the threshold, and I assured him we had only the same sniffles we'd had since December. With some misgivings, he went to the circuit breaker box and started detaching things. There was some confusion when detaching the meter didn't cause the remaining lights to go out: apparently when the solar panels were installed years ago, the installers installed a new meter outside but left the old one inside, disconnected from anything. But after a minute or two the Con Ed guy found that a different circuit-breaker was flipped, just not visibly so; he flipped it off and on, and things came back to life. I asked how I could have diagnosed this myself and saved him the trip.
"Yeah, you could try flipping each switch off and slamming it back to on. Other than that, without this meter..." indicating his impressive, rugged, professional-looking voltmeter.
"You know, I have a VOM, but I don't know if it could handle household current." So I found my much-less-impressive, much-less-rugged, Radio Shack VOM in a hardware drawer, he tried it and confirmed that in the AC 500V setting, it gave a correct reading of 120V between ground and the hot side of each circuit breaker.
"That works fine. If you see anything below about 111V, something's wrong."
I thanked him for the help and wished him a "stay healthy" on his way out the door.
Then turned the oven back on, to 350F for another 20 minutes or so, before taking the now-browner bread out of the oven and setting it to cool. We had some ice cream and brownies, walked the dogs, and sliced into the bread just before bedtime. It looks and tastes fine, not undercooked. And they all lived happily ever after.
And then the thing that we haven't been preparing for in the current epidemic happened: the power went out. More precisely, the power went out to some of the outlets in the house and not others. Still more precisely, the refrigerator was still on (yay!) but the oven and microwave weren't, nor the Wi-Fi router, nor the desktop computer, nor the bedroom overhead light. I checked the circuit-breaker box, and everything was still in the "on" position; I flipped the breaker for the oven-and-range circuit off and on just to make sure, but no dice. Called Con Ed and talked to a robo-phone-tree for a minute or two. Fortunately, the oven had already come up to its desired 475F before losing power, so I figured "I've baked bread with retained heat in a brick oven before: I just won't open the door for a while." Of course, my kitchen oven is NOT a brick oven, and is NOT designed to retain heat, so I gave it more time than I had planned, while making the rest of dinner on the stovetop (it's a gas stove, and we have matches).
After an hour and a half, I opened the oven and took the lid off the Romertopf. The bread looked kinda done, but not quite. So with no real alternative, I quickly put it back in the oven and prepared psychologically for the possibility of throwing away a loaf of half-baked dough.
And then Con Ed showed up. The workman asked whether anybody in the house was sick before crossing the threshold, and I assured him we had only the same sniffles we'd had since December. With some misgivings, he went to the circuit breaker box and started detaching things. There was some confusion when detaching the meter didn't cause the remaining lights to go out: apparently when the solar panels were installed years ago, the installers installed a new meter outside but left the old one inside, disconnected from anything. But after a minute or two the Con Ed guy found that a different circuit-breaker was flipped, just not visibly so; he flipped it off and on, and things came back to life. I asked how I could have diagnosed this myself and saved him the trip.
"Yeah, you could try flipping each switch off and slamming it back to on. Other than that, without this meter..." indicating his impressive, rugged, professional-looking voltmeter.
"You know, I have a VOM, but I don't know if it could handle household current." So I found my much-less-impressive, much-less-rugged, Radio Shack VOM in a hardware drawer, he tried it and confirmed that in the AC 500V setting, it gave a correct reading of 120V between ground and the hot side of each circuit breaker.
"That works fine. If you see anything below about 111V, something's wrong."
I thanked him for the help and wished him a "stay healthy" on his way out the door.
Then turned the oven back on, to 350F for another 20 minutes or so, before taking the now-browner bread out of the oven and setting it to cool. We had some ice cream and brownies, walked the dogs, and sliced into the bread just before bedtime. It looks and tastes fine, not undercooked. And they all lived happily ever after.
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No sourdough here until after Pesach. While we will undoubtedly have to make some accommodations this Passover, I will not go so far as to overtly nourish leavening during the week. Afterwards, though, I really look forward to making some sourdough.