Daily Learnings: Thu, May 16, 2024
There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest. — Confucius
Notes on Baking
Over the past week or so, I finally got back into baking sourdough bread. More specifically, I started up a new starter, and baked with it for the first time yesterday, into today.
As expected, the loaves turned out alright, though not great. I believe that my starter wasn’t quite strong enough for a really big oven spring, and I think that I was too loose with my schedule, resulting in a bit of an over-proof.
I’m happy to be baking again, for sure. This experience encouraged me to also set up some “infrastructure” to easily track and review my baking adventures. I’ll expose them on this site (really driven by my second brain in Obsidian). Some of this setup includes the following:
- I moved my base sourdough recipe into Obsidian, which I’ve been meaning to do
- I’m setting up a series of notes using YAML frontmatter to track my experiences baking, along with times and measurements, to be more accurate on the schedule I’m following in my bakes, and their results
- I made these as an internal Obsidian-based dashboard note that uses the fantastic Dataview plugin to visualize my baking experience entries in a table, rendering out some frontmatter that I’ve standardized
- I really like this, but I’m not going to expose it on my personal site, as I don’t think that it’d be helpful, and the table won’t render outside of Obsidian, unless I put some more work into my Obsidian -> Personal Site application