The secret to baking good bread is that there is no secret. Bread is simple: water, flour, yeast, salt, and energy (kneading and baking). The only “trick” is getting the ratios correct for the type of bread you want to make.
If I wrote a book on sandwiches it would start with that simple advice and a basic sandwich bread, baked in a loaf pan. Probably enriched with milk and butter.
There are techniques to learn and mistakes to be made. You’ll have to underproof a few loaves and overproof a few loaves before you get it right. You’ll have to struggle with kneading a loose dough or wear yourself out on a stiff dough. You’ll burn some bread. You’ll under-knead (if you’ve ever made bread the chances are extremely good that you’ve under-kneaded) and you will almost certainly not over-knead (I’ve tried to do it on purpose using a KitchenAid and got bored before turning the machine off). You will probably forget an ingredient. I forgot yeast on more than one occasion.
I don’t know if I would even bother giving you a basic recipe. 65% hydration. Start there. How much flour? For a single loaf, a boule, 400g. How much yeast and salt? The same as everyone else does in the whole world, 1% and 2%. You trying to make this complicated? What temp to bake at? Oh, I dunno. 220C. Something like that. Remember, people made bread in clay ovens, wood fired. Was the temp magically always the same every time? Probably not. They were pretty good at getting near a temp and that’s all that mattered.
Now, I’m not saying that you can’t get super into bread and bread science. There are a lot of wonderful nerds out there who worry about enzymes and additives and whatnot. But for the average person, the person who just wants to make their first loaf of bread, just concentrate on the basics. Our ancestors probably didn’t worry about enzymes. Heck, people didn’t even know what gluten was until 1728 and they probably thought that fairies gave leavened bread its rise.
I took a week off and went to Oregon with Avie. We bought pottery and looked at lighthouses. We ate some cheese curds and saw some elk. So many elk. Elk up close. They are big, like horse big.
One thing I found very strange was the appearance of a box store park outside of Astoria. Just across the bridge, there’s a flat little town with a population of 6,500 called Warrenton. Somehow that little burg has just enough people to keep every single one of America’s most basic of box stores open and running smoothly. They had a costco and a Fred Meyer, a Home Depot, a Walmart, a US Foods Chef store, every one of the chain fast food restaurants (Taco Bell, etc), a Petco, Ross, Big 5, Joann’s (which we stopped at to get some pencils and they had like 5 people working there), Harbor Freight tools, a Dollar Tree, many Starbucks (we saw a Starbucks food truck near another Starbucks which was inside a Safeway), several mattress stores – a phenomenon I find very odd – and of course the obligatory 10 or so brick and mortar banks that you weirdoes always seem to need. What is up with that? I have been into a bank ONCE in the last 10 years and that was only because I absolutely needed to open and deposit my mom’s trust.
It was strange. Like some giant eagle had shit out America’s consumer corporate landscape on a sleepy little Oregon town. And I assume everyone in Warrenton works in one of those stores. They must. Heck, they had 4 people pumping gas at the Costco (you’re not allowed to pump your own gas in Oregon).
We stopped in Seaside and rode the bumper cars. We played some video games and tried to buy a Def Leppard tee shirt (or a Motley Crue shirt, all proceeds go to get the lead singer out of jail) but they didn’t have any. They did have a bunch of shirts that said SEASIDE on them. Which was boring. Tillamook creamery was incredibly crowded and I didn’t know that you have to book the tour in advance so we didn’t get to see much. There was a little town called Nehalem where there were three pottery shops, though just the one was open. Of course we saw Cannon Beach as well.
But vacation is over and I have to go to work today. And I come on here, read the comments, and you guys are still arguing the same stuff. Man. Don’t you get tired of it? Arsenal are playing well. We won this weekend and after the first two goals it was actually a boring match which was a nice change of pace! I’m used to biting my nails for 80 minutes as Arteta went full turtle. I’m glad he doesn’t do that anymore.
It’s just like baking bread, you have to make some mistakes before you get good at it. And even when you’re good at something, you still make mistakes. I still to this day mess up my breads. And then I laugh about it.
There will be bumps ahead. Injuries or other problems are going to crop up. But for now, it’s been a great start to the season and the guys are getting a lot of well deserved praise which will help them build confidence. 35 more games to win, then we can have the perfect season.
World is actually a better place when arsenal win. Not getting carried away but I do like what I see. Long may it continue.
Lovely piece, Tim. Great analogy and superb ending.
One of your best Tim, sums up Arsenal win by putting it in perspective.
What a nice way to describe it. Nothing is perfect from the beginning and the team is growing in confidence and belief by the day. Long may it continue!
Thanks for the post Tim! There’s a new baby in the Dr. G household and I’ve been required elsewhere, but still getting my Arsenal fix if only on a mobile stream while burping our infant.
I confess I’ve been dying to say a few Arsenal related things. At night after we put him down finally, my brain reels with things and despite being exhausted I can’t sleep. These are some of those things.
– The All Or Nothing documentary was a good idea.
Not only did the club make money off of it, but I’ve seen a good bit of noise about how folks respect MA even more having seen it. For my part I already had a borderline crush on the man but having seen him with his family and how much he cares about the work he does, I only respect him even more now. I mean, who says things like “I’ll spend 15 hours on that tomorrow”? Super Mik Arteta does. Oh, and we both have a son named Oli.
– How good are Arsenal this season, really?
Defensively, the foundations that were laid last season stand firm, and adding Saliba only solidifies that, with exhibit 1A the containment of not only Zaha but also Vardy. Offensively, our current 3 goals/game clip is not sustainable, but the ability to turn nervy 1-0 or 2-1 wins into handsome 4-2 and 3-0 ones should not be underestimated. I worry about the team’s mental fortitude in high stakes matches and about our proclivity to sit back on leads a little too much. I also worry about any injuries to either Jesus or Partey. But overall I think we are going to get to watch the 3rd best team in the league this season, neck and neck with Tottenham and at least a half a length ahead of Chelsea.
– I like our timeline.
Watching some of the other top 6 teams reminds me of what Arsenal used to look like. Arsenal are set to peak with this group just as some of the best players on our direct rivals enter their twilight. Names like Salah, van Dijk and Firmino, Son and Lloris, de Bruyne and Gundogan are all over 30 now. Kane is 29 but has a lot of mileage having played top flight football and every major international tournament for over 10 years. Our rivals will of course spend and reload, but you can’t just replace players like that, not just their individual quality but their relationship with the club and its fans, their timing and cohesion on the pitch and their camaraderie off it. Arsenal meanwhile are building a group that will solidify a little more with every season which should coincide very nicely with the attrition our rivals will inevitably experience.
Congrats, Doc! Pix of the new Gooner in Arsenal gear are fully expected, fyi. Hope everyone is well and sleep is not a completely foreign concept.
Thank you! The Arsenal onesie arrived even before the baby did but it’s a 1 year old size so we have to wait a bit before he can rock his Arsenal pride 😀
My partner used to bake me all varieties of bread as an act of love. She’s a superb baker. I’ll show her this post.
Unfortunately, my doctor saw evidence of an insulin resistance inheritance from both sides of the family, and ive had to severely cut back before the big D comes for me. It’s whole wheat now, and other kinds of bread only now and again.
Why’s all the good stuff bad for you? 😊
I haven’t seen more than the first 15 minutes of episode one of the Arsenal: All or Nothing docu-series.
I don’t want to get sucked in and have to relive the end of last season. I’m having too much fun watching these current buns coming out of the oven.
If there’s one moment from All or Nothing that sticks out for me above all is Arteta, his face close to Nuno’s, screaming “do you want to play in the f****** Champions League”, till he lost his voice. Screamed till he went hoarse.
Inspiring it was not. Tactically brilliant it wasn’t. It was a manager losing his control.
I realise that docs wouldnt show all his well laid tactical plans, but there was way too much of Arteta yelling and getting angry for my liking. And his sketches were cringeworthy stuff. WTH, man? There’s not one moment I looked at the doc and thought, “ah, there is the wunderkind coach we were hearing about”. In fact, it confirmed some of my prior reservations.
Many of the folks I hear saying that they came out of watching it with enhanced view of the coach were people who already supported him, or were predisposed towards doing so. He reminded me of every bad boss I ever had. Long on yelling, hectoring and blaming; short on inspiration. Often, the look on the players’ faces when he was yelling registered something approaching fear. Obviously some people are going to thrive in an environment like that. Xhaka did. Ramsdale did. Holding did what he had to.
As a piece of corporate PR, though, it worked. I heard lots of chatter that “we finally saw what went on behind the scenes”. As if, my friends. As if.
I can hold this view and simultaneously be excited by the team that he finally created and the football they’re playing. I can hold this view and simultaneously think, “whatever you’ve done with Granit (his Swiss role with add ons), that was a clever piece of coaching. Well done”.
If Arsenal continues to play like this and if we are anywhere near where we are at season’s end, Arteta will have won over even his skeptics, including me. For this one, All or Nothing wasn’t it.
It’s too early to draw definitive conclusion, but Im loving the trajectory and direction of travel. The fans are happy, there is connectedness between field and stand, and feelgood is off the charts. But these things are often correlated with success. I want to see how consistent our fanbase is, when we hit a sticky patch.
The yelling seems to work. Nuno is going to play in CL this season.
LOL!
And we won the game!
Very fair. We all bring our own biases to the table. If you disliked Arteta before AON, you will hate him. If you liked him, you will love him. Totally agree you have to take it with a very large grain of salt, but even these highly curated glimpses behind the scenes are a window into the club we haven’t had before. I can see how some see passion where others see emotional immaturity, or decisiveness can be read as inflexibility. What I don’t think anyone can argue is Arteta’s love for Arsenal, and how tirelessly he works to make the club succeed.
I’m just trying not to get too giddy after only 3 games. We have one thing that seems to be lacking for the other top clubs – youthful energy. Last season that was a big liability down the stretch. Now it seems like we have the legs and the hunger that some of the other clubs seem to lack. (That team up the road seems to have the hunger too, btw.)
Fighting your way to the top is a different mentality than trying to stay there. The team doesn’t carry the same weight of expectations that a perennial 1st or 2nd finisher does. Sometimes teams at the top show battle fatigue. Winning regularly and convincingly is all new for the players and the team. The possibilities are infinite and exciting. Fans forgive mistakes.
When Zinchenko reacts that way to a goal, when Jesus waves his arms in glee when Ode all but steals a goal from him, when the fans endlessly sing their songs, there’s a joy of discovery that can’t be replicated. As I’ve said before, it’s the becoming, not the being.
3 games only. I repeat: 3 games only.
Yes, it’s only 3 games man, but enjoy the hell out of it. Enjoy our football. Enjoy Xhaka. Enjoy Jesus. Enjoy MO8. Enjoy Saliba, a world class talent that’s been hiding in plain sight. Enjoy Mikel basking in a 3-0 start, rather than an 0-3 GD -9 one.
My church elder alwaya talks about not letting anyone or anything steal your joy. We felt like crap collapsing in the last 4 games; enjoy flying out of the traps in the first 3.
So from what I’ve seen I agree with this. I accept it’s easier to edit to show a hardman big bollock coach then a detailed tactician, but I didn’t like that very much.
I thought that bit with Nuno was over the top from him as well. I think it showed a whole season’s worth of frustration with the player in the context of the precarious situation: 1-1 away from home with CL in the balance. In fairness he felt bad about it and tried to address it (jokingly) with the player to let him know there were no hard feelings. But I’m not surprised we made it such a priority to find an alternate LB and that Nuno was sent out on loan this season!
Tim, have you ever baked with coconut or almond flour?
Almond flour, yes. In Macrons.
I can’t believe I just failed to make edible almond flour pancakes. How the hell am I gonna get to making a Macron???
But if United can pull off a result like last night, then anything is possible right?!
Great post Tim.
First place with 9 points with the best goal differential in the league. Who would have believed would have been possible just 1 year ago. History teaches us the way to improve a team is to spend a lot of money on good players and we are another example. A team can’t play great football and finish in the top 4 when the players are not good enough. Full credit to our management team for having the patience and vision to make this work and especially our owners who also had to be patient and fund the spending spree.
The schedule has been favorable and we are in a great run of form right now and everyone on the team looks great. We always tend to get overly excited during the good runs and overly negative during the bad. Clearly the schedule will get tougher and history tells us that no team can play its best football for 38 games. a run of bad form will hit us at some point so I still think it’s going a dog fight for the 3rd and 4th spots but so far
“A team can’t play great football and finish in the top 4 when the players are not good enough.”
Manchester United finished 2nd with what is almost literally this exact team that was bottom of the table until today.
I think sometimes you speak in absolutes when they aren’t warranted.
I think if I were to cut out all the side dishes – the press conferences, the reporting, the horrible ‘documentary’- I would enjoy the bread a whole lot more for what it is.
Maybe I need to go on a diet.
Btw, the AON thing. A lot of wtf moments there which imo don’t make the club or the manager look good. Although that is probably not how they see it and it appears many agree. But what I hated most about it (beyond the fact it was commissioned) was that it couldn’t resist ending on making explicit the whole point of its existence. As a PR piece saying how last season was a huge success blah blah. I hate that kind of self (un)aware exposition.
I agree, the bit with Vinai and Josh at the very end were a tad cringey. You get why they said it and they had to say it but still.
Don’t you think we made progress last season though? Maybe not massive but certainly notable in my book.
If they positioned it that way, sure. 5th is better than 8th. More points, more goals scored. But that’s not what they were doing. they steadfastly refused to set a public target for the team until February, until it seemed very possible they’d get top4, and then pretended that was never really the target.
Watching the show I also felt again that it was a mistake offering Arteta that contract while the season was on. Well, only if they really wanted that top 4 though. I get why they did it. Vinai himself said it sends a message. Good for this offseason. But I feel like it contributed to our collapse.
For all the talk of ‘the culture’ where no one is comfortable any more, I think it just extends to the players being bullied while the management can get by. they are so afraid of failure. It honestly makes me a little sad for us.
But we are here now, and we’ve started well. I’m ready to be all in. Like I said, maybe I need to stop paying attention to everything but the football.
I don’t want to tell you how to live your life but I don’t listen to any of the noise. I don’t listen to Arsenal specific pods, I don’t read any of the blogs (Arseblog if it’s a really good article), and I have muted all but a few Arsenal accounts on Twitter (typically people I like).
I steadfastly disbelieve all transfer links until they are reported in the Guardian and during the open window I mute any account on twitter who participates in transfer gossip.
I will not be watching All or Nothing for a number of reasons.
First, I’ve seen these shows before and apart from the Sunderland one they are typically just corporate PR. I couldn’t stand the Juventus one and turned it off after 1.5 episodes. I wouldn’t believe a minute of any one of these shows as “reality”. They are scripted and edited un-reality shows. Hyper un-reality to borrow a phrase from the post-structuralists.
Second, I do not give Geoffrey Bezos my money and no longer subscribe to Amazon Prime.
Third, if I want someone to piss down my leg and tell me it’s raining I’ll just read the stuff they put out on the dot com. Which I do from time to time.
Anyway, I do think that disconnecting from the non-stop media machine that surrounds Arsenal is a healthy thing to do. There are a lot of books out there that you could read instead. That’s what I do!
I certainly don’t want to bury Liverpool (or even Man United) this early in the season, but: I think they miss Mane’s direct play, physicality and aggression in forward areas, not to mention his long cultivated chemistry with Salah and Firmino. Louis Diaz is wonderfully skilled but a very different sort of player. I think they are depending on too many players who are either leaving their prime or not yet in it, i.e. 36 year old James Milner, 32 year old Jordan Henderson, 31 year old Thiago, and 19 year olds Harvey Elliott and Fabio Carvalho. I think they’re shaky at CB and even van Dijk doesn’t look like himself. I think they have a lot of so-so players on their roster who they can’t really rely upon without the big boys out there with them. I think Darwin Nunez is a good player but has a steep learning curve in this league. Hot take: Are Liverpool IN TROUBLE?
William Gallas said Liverpool won’t finish top 4. they almost dropped out of it 2 years ago as well. It’s not that much of a stretch to think they could have a bit of a down season while other teams step up.
that said, we made 5th last season after being 2 points worse off than them, and we had to self sabotage and collapse to not get top 4.
There was a good Freakanomics or Malcom Gladwell podcast about all the mattress stores (can’t remember which) in smallish towns. But if I remember correctly, the volume of people moving (apartments, buying houses, etc) correlates to the number of mattress stores. I guess most people toss them instead of moving mattresses because they’re so large. I’ve always moved with my mattress, but maybe I’m the freak.
Long time reader, first time poster. Just had to chime in!
Planet Money
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/676543180
Oh wait, you’re right. Freakonomics did an episode.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-we-in-a-mattress-store-bubble/
That’s the one!
Excellent piece, maestro. Nice turn at the end.