Floydm's blog

Sorry to anyone who received weird emails notifications today. I was doing a bit of housecleaning, which triggered comment notifications that I was not expecting.

This is worthwhile opportunity for me to share that I am finally working on upgrading migrating this site from the current software it is running on. 

I've had conversations with different folks about it over the years, but to recap: this site is running on the open source CMS Drupal. Drupal version 7, in fact. Drupal 8 was released over 8 years ago. But rather than being a minor upgrade, Drupal 8 was in fact a ground up rewrite of the system. The data structures and the concepts remained mostly the same, but the code was almost totally rewritten. Most pertinent here, there was no upgrade process offered for Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. You have to "migrate" your site to Drupal 8, which more or less means rebuilding the site and then slurping over the content of the posts, comments, and pages. It is a cumbersome process. I work with Drupal often in my day job and while I'm good at it these migrations are still a very time consuming undertaking. I've put off migrating TFL for years now, hoping a cheaper, easier, better solution would emerge, but I really haven't found anything that I thought was a better fit for this site (and my skills managing it). So I am biting the bullet and starting work on the migration here, which includes dusting some cobwebs off the existing site, which is what I was trying to do today when I triggered those notifications.

My first order of business is getting the content across and rendering OK in the new system. Over the years I've used a number of different tools to allow people to embed images and format their posts, so getting it all processed correctly and carried over is quite a bit of work. Once that process is in decent shape, I'll start building up the new site, which means making it look nice, have decent landing pages and navigation, getting search, messaging, and notifications working again, those sorts of things. When it gets to that point, I'll likely set up a new site/server and offer folks who want an opportunity to check it out and give me feedback before making the final switch over to the new system. I'm still at least a couple of weeks from having something to share though, more likely not until September or October.

I'm hopeful the new system will be cleaner and easier to use, particularly on mobile devices. 8 years ago about 25% of the site traffic came from people on mobile devices. Now it is over 75%. This site just isn't optimized for that.

Hey Loafers -

It has been an absurdly long time since I've changed the featured posts on the homepage. Like over a year, I believe. Please let me know if you see or make a post that it'd be fun to draw some attention to and I can update it.

My rule of thumb for the features is to try to highlight posts by community members that ideally include a nice image, a formula, and a bit of thoughts and discussion. Ideally the posts are for things that aren't too perfect or complex, as the goal here is to encourage newcomers to get excited about baking rather than intimidate them.

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I haven't been baking or posting often, but I'm still here every day. The spam has been pretty relentless recently but I haven't yet given up the fight.

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TFL turned 19 in January. Wild, isn't it?

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The site is long overdue for a technological revamp but I'm a bit paralyzed deciding what to do about that. I think it is safe to say if one were starting from scratch today it'd be unlikely that you'd build a site like this one is right now what with all the changes in technology and user expectation, but there is still a great community here that I don't want to disrupt. So I haven't. But that means the tools have gotten a bit old and funky here. It just isn't a great place to post from your phone, modify images, anything like that. Alas.

I hope folks here are all well. :)

The Fresh Loaf is 18 today! 🎂🥳

Hard to believe, isn't it? At least for me it is. Part of the reason I started the site (and baking so much) was because I had lots of time around the house when the babies were napping. Both of those babies are in university now.

I realize I have not been very active here for the past few years. The site needs to get a technology upgrade done in the near future. Yes, I've been saying that for a while now, but it is truer now than it has ever been. So you'll be hearing more from me about that before too too long. 

I do still enjoy seeing what people are baking and appreciate how you all help one another out. It is still a really neat community to be involved with.

-Floyd

I just finished reading an advance copy of Eric Pallant's Sourdough Culture, which is coming out in a couple of weeks.

There are a few different threads to the book. One thread is an attempt to trace the lineage of the Cripple Creek starter he was gifted and which sparked his emthusiasm for sourdough. The other works forward in time from the earliest known evidence of breadmaking in Egypt, through the Roman Empire into Europe, and eventually from Europe to North America. It includes quite a bit of recent research including information on the industrialization of breadmaking and the move from sourdough to commercial yeast, something Professor Pallant won a Fulbright scholarship to study.

The last history of bread I recall reading was 6000 Years of Bread, which was originally published during World War II. A lot of research has been done since then. Professor Pallant's book brings that history up-to-date with recent scholarship and science to provide a much more complete picture of the evolution of bread. If that sounds like your kind of thing, check it out!

I had never heard this origin story for baguettes: that they came about as an attempt to cut down on knife fights in Paris by creating a loaf that met weight requirements but didn't require a knife to cut like boules and miches do.

Wikipedia lists a few other possible origins. Regardless, it makes a good story!

The Fresh Loaf is on a new server now. Hopefully you'll all find your way here and the new server performs just as well as the old one.

Nothing significant changed from a user's perspective. The server is running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS instead of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The versions of PHP, MariaDB, and some of the other tools have been upgraded accordingly.

This paves the way for a site software upgrade in the hopefully not-too-distant future, but that is a bigger undertaking.

Please let me know if you notice any problems that might be related to the move.

Heads up that an upgrade to the server TFL runs on is coming up soon. It's actually a migration to a new machine, not an in place upgrade. That's a safer approach because if anything goes wrong I can bail out and leave the site and server as they are right now.

I'm hoping to take care of it tomorrow late afternoon Pacific time but it might not happen until later in the week. I'll post another announcement an hour or so before I start.

I've run the test migration twice already and the migrations have gone very well. Expect about an hour of read-only access to the site while I back up and copy everything from the old box to the new. 

Post-migration, hopefully the site just looks and acts like it does now. This isn't a software upgrade, though that is hopefully coming before too long too.

Apologies that I have been negligent about posting or updating much here. Pandemic has meant I spend most of my day at my desk, in my apartment, working with content management systems. After 8-10 hours of that I just can't bring myself to do much more of this in the evening or on the weekend. 

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I made the Tom Cat Semolina from the last Community Bake again. 

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Again I got the hydration too high so it spread pretty wide. It was good though.

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Oh yeah, I also made a batch of Banana Bread but forgot the bananas. We won't talk about that. ?

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On another note, I got a promo of a cute little Bread Baker's Notebook from Princeton Architectural Press.

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I laughed when I saw the line for "Your Starter's Mood" in the template for the journal entries.

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I know I run a website but I'm still very much a paper person and have a thing for note taking and nice journals, so, yeah, I really like this and could imagine giving it as a gift to an enthusiastic new baker.  

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The server that The Fresh Loaf is on needs to be upgraded soon, so a heads up that there may be a day or two bumpiness in late March or early April.

I'm also researching what to do with TFL in the next year or so as the CMS version that this site is running is being retired. I'm pretty confident that an upgrade will make the site easier to use on phones and tablets, which is great since that is what most people visit the site on now, but I haven't found replacements for all of the components used here. So I'm doing a bit of looking around, hoping to keep the upgrade from being too disruptive, and hoping to bring the site more up-to-date with today's web standards.

I'm sure you've noticed that bread baking has been a popular way for people to keep themselves busy while in quarantine. Sourdough, in particular, has been incredibly popular and driven a ton of new visitors to The Fresh Loaf, many of whom have joined our community. But there has been another bread related trend that has also been driving traffic to the site: frog bread.

As recent articles on Vice and Delish have explained, a month or two back someone on social media discovered a post I made back in 2005 about baking frog bread for my two year old son a few weeks after my daughter was born. People started recreating and sharing frog bread on Tik Tok, in Facebook frog groups like Frogspotting, and on Twitter and Instagram under the hashtag #frogbread. Both of my now nearly adult kids spotted frog bread on social media before I noticed it and had a quite laugh. 

It's great. I love that one of the sillier recipes on this site got popular and is encouraging people to bake for the sake of having a good time and not to worry about whether the end result comes out beautiful and Instagrammable or rather ridiculous. There are so many fantastic bakers on this site who turn out the most amazing looking breads now, but you don't have bake like that -- I don't -- to find joy and pleasure baking bread on your own from time to time.

So in honour of all the new frog bread bakers, today we baked frog bread again.

I used a slightly different dough this time, basically the dough I used for my Red Bean Buns with one egg and a bit of sugar in it. It worked great, though I lowered the temperature to 325 after 15 minutes because it was browning a bit faster than I wanted. But it came out great.

 After making the dough, I placed it in a covered bowl and let it rise for an hour, until it had doubled in size.

Egg wash came after 30 minutes of rising. I then gave it another 20 minutes before putting it in the oven.

Total baking time was about 50 minutes, with the first 15 at 375 and the rest at 325. 

Sweet froggy success. :)

Like everyone else, I'm baking sourdough breads, but among the things my kids mentioned missing during the quarantine were Red Bean Buns. I haven't baked them in years, but it is a relatively easy one to make -- assuming you have access to red bean paste (If you don't have access to red bean paste, pineapple buns are also reasonably simple to make). I recalled a recipe that was posted on this site years ago and have made them a couple of times in the past couple of weeks. They've been really good.

Baked Red Bean Buns (焗豆沙飽)

 Any simple sweet milk bread dough can be used for the wrapper. I've tried a dough using tang zhang, which turned out fine but didn't seem worth the extra effort. Today I used one with a little more fat and included an egg. They turned out fantastic. My dough was basically:

3 cups all purpose flour

1 cup of warm milk

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons sugar

2 teaspoons instant yeast

1 egg

a dash of salt (slightly more if using unsalted butter)

a bit of warm water, if necessary, to achieve the desired consistency. I added about 1 tablespoon.

Combine the ingredients in a mixer or mixing bowl and mix/knead well until the dough is well developed. I mixed mine in a mixer for about 10 minutes.

Shape into a ball, cover, and set aside until doubled in size. Mine took about an hour.

On a floured surface, divide the dough into smaller pieces. I divided it into 8 pieces today but you could divide them into 12 if you preferred smaller buns.

Shape each piece into a ball and them roll them out thin and flat.

Place a dollop of red bean paste in the center of each bun, then fold the dough up to wrap the red bean paste (more pictures of this process here). Flip the buns over.

You can stop there if you want round buns, but If you'd like to shape them like I did, use the cap from a small jar or container -- I think mine was from a tin of toothpicks -- and press a circle into the center of the bun. Then use a knife or dough cutter to slice slits into the dough.

Gently cover and allow the buns to rise for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes, start preheating the oven to 350 degrees and egg wash the buns. Sprinkle with sesame seeds or black sesame seeds, if you have them.

After 30 to 45 minutes the buns should look a bit puffy and have risen some. Bake them on a cookie sheet for approximately 20 minutes. Be careful about not over baking and burning the bottoms of the buns.

 Enjoy!