Dave Miller on Baking with 100% Whole Wheat

January 21, 2014

...just on the fly. Whole wheat flour soaks up a lot of water. The recipes we used called for over 100% hydration. Miller bakes in a hot oven to get loaves that are very dark. With the exception of the rye bread Miller made, the wheat breads had a similar method: Starter was added to flour and water to build up a levain. This was allowed to ferment for three hours. Miller likes a long autolyse. Flour and water for the final dough were mixed and allow...

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Searching for Energy Vampires

Mr. Homegrown

April 27, 2017

Water and Power

13 Comments

...used it to test most of the gadgets around the Root Simple compound. I focused on the stuff that’s plugged in all the time to see if I could discover any hidden energy vampires. Unsurprisingly, the refrigerator uses the most power and costs around $81.67 a year to operate. At the risk of turning this blog post into an exercise in appliance virtue signalling, that’s not too bad. We keep the freezer full which helps conserve a small amount of power...

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Build a Solar Dehydrator

Mr. Homegrown

October 1, 2008

Appropriate Technology, Preparedness, Solar

22 Comments

...plywood and consists of a heat collector containing a black metal screen housed in a box with a clear plastic top. This screen heats up on a sunny day and feeds hot air into a wooden box above it. Vents at the bottom and the top of the contraption create an upward airflow through natural convection (hot air rises). You put the food on screen covered trays in the upper box. With sliced tomatoes it takes about two full days of drying and you have to...

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Let’s Get Biointensive

Mr. Homegrown

October 16, 2009

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

11 Comments

...avons’ book How to Grow More Vegetables. Jeavons dislikes rows and instead uses the triangular spacing of the French biointensive method. You can view a nice diagram of biointensive spacing on the LandShare Colorado website. And see some images of the way Jeavons’ spaces his garden on This Girl’s Gone Green. Triangular plantings squeeze more veggies into small spaces. The tight spacing, with leaves allowed to just touch each other when the plant i...

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Cooking Bread in a Dutch Oven and Alternative Steaming Techniques

Mr. Homegrown

February 12, 2013

Bread, Food

14 Comments

...expand gracefully during baking. Jim Lahey’s popular no-knead bread recipe uses a dutch oven to emulate steam injection. The Dutch oven method seals in the moisture contained in the dough during the first half hour of baking. It works great and I cook all my bread this way. That being said it can be tricky to plop a loaf of wet, sticky dough into a 475º F Dutch oven without either burning yourself or messing up the dough. I’ll note that even when...

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