How to Bake a Traditional German Rye Bread

...00% whole rye sourdough loaves. I’ve used as my guide a nicely illustrated book How to Make Bread by Emmanuel Hadjiandreou. His specialty is just the sort of rustic German style breads I’ve always wanted to learn to bake. What I love in particular about his caraway rye sourdough loaf (pictured above) is the crust. Unlike most other breads you don’t slash it before tossing it in the oven. The goal is a kind of perfect imperfection–a hard, thick cru...

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Apron Contest Winner

...ooks of tasty treats. In addition to cooking she notes, “I am also in printmaking, so this apron can come with me to my art classes to make the bindings for the recipe book for the recipes that Apron and I were JUST working on! It is an artistic, apron-centric circle of life.” Congrats, Katie. I’ve got a batch on jam on the stove, so I’d better finish this post and get to canning. I’m putting on my apron now….the jam is peaches with ginger, zero w...

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When the Crate’s Better Than the Chair

...hooses the crate rather than the piece of furniture.” You can bet our next book will have some Rietveld inspired DIY designs. In the meantime, for the industrious makers out there, the chair above would be a cinch to back-engineer with pallet wood. Rietveld sold pre-made kits for the volk to assemble themselves. You can still buy a crate chair kit for $450 produced by Rietveld’s grandkids, but a few hours with a sawzall, drill and some screws and...

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Out Of The In Box

...available as a pdf for free here along with a couple of other interesting books from the period. Above is Isaac’s clever cube crapper. Not much headroom in the head, but what a nice view. Isaac’s work has a playful plywood-meets-the-moon lander vibe. I think I would have loved this modular bunk bed as a kid. Dwell Magazine did an interview with Isaacs recently: After I complained about hippie aesthetics in a previous post, an astute reader counte...

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Happy Halloween!

...Halloween greetings from all the denizens of the Root Simple compound, living and dead. (I believe this lovely old photo that I found haunting my hard drive is from the book Haunted Air a collection of old Halloween photos. Halloween used to be homemade–and a lot more scary.)...

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