My first attempt to get better tears, ears, and loaf aesthetics is to determine if the skin of the dough created by the proofing container changes whether it is cloth lined or not.  I have bannetons as well as some other containers that I use to make loaves. Sometimes I just dust a cloth with flour and use that (although I probably need stiffer clothes to do that for real.  I sometimes get ears but mostly don’t.  This experiment is to look at whether there is a measurable difference in the loaves by comparing one proofed with lining an one proofed directly in the container.  Ideally I would be doing this with identical containers, but since I only have one of each oval and rectangular that will have to do.  My hypothesis is that not using the liner will make the skin slight thicker since it won’t retain as much moisture and therefore I will get more tearing and ears (the good kind) without it.

Today was the day that health related podcasts come up on my listening roll as I drive around running errands.  In that podcast there was a discussion with a vegan about what kind of vegan she was.  There was a good half hour discussion of the ins and outs of the different kinds of vegans (who knew), and that a relative of her was really a vegan except for one or two things she just had to eat.  I ended up being done my errands half of the way through, but the entire dialog was exasperating.  I’ve never labeled myself by any particular eating style, if for no other reason than I don’t subscribe to one for any particular length of time.  But it did make me wonder why would anyone do that?  What are the advantages?

When starting off on this alternate day fasting experiment, I was expecting fasting days to be brutally difficult.  I’m a person that often can’t go more than a couple hours without putting some kind of food in my mouth.  It’s like a reflex.  When I’m being healthy it may be carrots, cucumbers, grape tomatoes, or other healthy food.  When I’m not, it’s mini-candy bars, pretzels, candy, and other sweets.  Breaking that cycle was one of the main things I’m trying to accomplish with the alternate day fasting experiment.  While there is a longing for indulging those impulses I’m not feeling true hunger, but when was I ever really?

I guess this week will be the official start of this fasting experiment. Last week I got one day in, and it went a lot smoother than I thought it would.  But travel and a family wedding made carrying it through unrealistic.  This week I have no such constraints, but allergies and self-sabotage were definitely lurking behind the scenes.

I’ve been fixated on fasting a lot over the past year.  This isn’t some starvation diet fixation, although it can be used for losing weight too as I am about to lay out.  This is on the potential health benefits of doing moderate fasting, intermittent up to a few days, for things like cutting cancer or diabetes risk.  A month ago I ended my “exercise only” diet experiment with good results on changes in body composition and biomarkers.  Unfortunately the intervening month I didn’t continue the plan at all so I backtracked a little . Wanting to try to jump start things again I’m looking at doing an experiment that ties in fasting as a regular protocol.

I’m one month into my exercise isolation experiment to see what would happen if I really crank up my crappy exercise regiment (which means not exercising at all) while holding my pretty decent diet pretty static.  Over the month I’ve seen some good changes, but some other things stayed more static than I was expecting.  A full writeup of my experiment methodology is here.  I’ll do a full break down later, but I wanted to do a quick summary with the last day done.

While it may seem anti-healthy to some people, especially Paleo-inclined people, one of my hobbies is bread making; specifically sourdough bread.  In order to do that you need a starter for leavening of that bread.  it is the equivalent of yeast in a traditional recipe, but it using wild yeasts.  One of the downsides to this is that you have to feed it every week or two.  The question then becomes one of what to do with all of the excess every two weeks.  Pancakes are a great option, but one that I recently made and am sharing is a recipe for sourdough English muffins.  I got the original recipe off of a website, but I’ve since lost track of it so can’t give them the proper references that I would like to. The below recipe makes about a dozen muffins.

After my extra long spat of running over my 4 miles this weekend I gave myself an extra day of taking it easy, light cycling and what not.  I was curious to see how well I did on my treadmill intervals this week over last and wanted to add one extra two minute running interval.  I couldn’t be more pleased with the results!