I confess: I baked bagels twice this week, and I was disappointed both times, for different reasons. The first time because even though I was following my own, well-tested recipe, I also had Richard Hart’s recipe open at the same time, so I ended up underproofing and underbaking them.
The second time I erred in the opposite direction, and proofed the dough for nine hours, which turned out to be too long. Too bad, because that dough looked and felt so nice—light and airy and just a pleasure to work with. But overproofed meant they came out a bit flat and just weird to look at—still edible, but I’m not gonna show them either.
Nonetheless, I’ll make good on last week’s announcement, and use this to soft launch a section of my website I’ve been thinking about for years and never done anything about, mostly because of a certain tendency to overproof overengineer things before I even have content to post. “Soft launch” means that it’s not linked anywhere, it contains a single recipe, and all the fancy stuff I have planned for it is still only in my head.
The main rule I’ve set for myself is to keep the recipes and any stories I have to tell about them fully separate. A recipe can be long enough as it is, and that thing that people do on the web of telling their entire life stories before getting to the point just gets in the way.
Regardless of this week’s bagel disappointments, here it is:
And one of these days I’ll also write a story about them.
Notes and links
In the long shadow of Helvetica
An essay on Die Grotesk, a typeface designed, on the opposite side of the world, as a modern Helvetica, by someone who hates Helvetica—or does he?
From amphoras to the internet, the story behind that little snail on your keyboard
This is where I learned the word rollmops just today.Wiley Hodges‘ email to Tim Cook
It’s tempting to write an email like that, but if I did it would go straight to the trash. Hopefully this one didn’t.Write your name on the moon
Silly and interesting, all in a single package.Limberlost Place: Toronto’s timber tower aims high
There’s something oddly poetic about the expression “deep-lake water cooling”. But the entire project does sound super cool.
A cartoonist’s review of slop art
I haven’t read The Oatmeal in a while, but this is a good one.
Like I said before, the Anthropic settlement is a great start, but it’s also kind of a joke, and the convoluted criteria by which a book is included seem designed to reduce the impact—not on authors and publishers, but on Anthropic itself.