Kamirose

[Image decription: A round, light-reddish-brown loaf of bread on a wire cooling rack. There is a split down the center of the bread where it expanded in the oven while baking, called an "ear". The top of the bread is lightly dusted with flour except in the split area.]

I started learning to bake about a year ago with bread. Lately I've mostly been making cookies and recently been learning to make pie, but I felt an itch to come back to the basics.

Recipe:

• 400g bread flour
• 260g warm water (65%)
• 2g instant or active dry yeast (about 1 teaspoon) (0.5%)
• 8g salt (2%)

This bread was made with a poolish, not sourdough starter. A poolish is a preferment, and gives you a flavor similar to sourdough without the need to care for a sourdough starter. Poolish is the traditional way to make french baguettes, so if you know that flavor you know what to expect from a poolish.

Make the poolish:

• Mix 200g flour, 200g water, and a pinch of yeast (seriously, a tiny amount). Cover and let stand at room temperature for 12 hours. After this time the poolish should be bubbly and smell nice and yeasty, maybe slightly alcoholic.

Make the dough:

• Pour the remaining 60g of water into the poolish and mix to loosen it up. Then add the remaining 200g flour and mix thoroughly to combine. Let sit for 20 minutes to autolyse - this hydrates the flour and makes it stronger.

• Add in the yeast and salt and mix to combine. At this stage it's easiest to mix with wet hands in a pinching motion to combine in the salt and yeast.

• Optionally, knead for about 5 minutes by hand or about 3-4 minutes by stand mixer with a bread hook attachment. If kneading by hand, be sure to have a dough scraper handy, it will be sticky. You can skip this step entirely. Kneading will make it rise better in the oven, if you skip it may be a flatter loaf.

• Cover and let the dough stand in a bowl for 15 minutes, then stretch and fold it. Repeat, including the wait time, until you've stretch/folded 4 times total.

• Cover the dough and refrigerate for around 24 hours or up to a few days.

• About 1 hour before you plan to bake, take the dough out and shape it into a taut ball. Then put it seam side down into either a proofing basket or a mixing bowl lined with a well-floured kitchen towel. Cover with a damp towel and let rise. The dough should grow around 50-66% in size. When you firmly poke it with a damp finger, the spot you poke should bounce back slightly but still leave an indent.

• Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Place a dutch oven or heavy lidded pot in the oven to preheat it as well.

• Flip the dough onto parchment paper and slash it on top with a razor blade or a serrated bread knife to give it a weak spot to expand while baking.

• Bake in the dutch oven, lid on, for 30 minutes. Then remove the lid and bake at least another 15 minutes, or longer if you want a darker crust.

• Let cool for at least an hour before slicing - this is actually important, the inside of your loaf needs to finish baking from the residual heat when you pull it out! If you slice early it will wind up gummy

• Enjoy!

With the recent news that the r/blind community has migrated to a lemmy instance, I thought now would be a good time to post a quick PSA on image descriptions.

Blind and low vision computer users often rely on screen readers to navigate their computers and the internet. These tools work great on text-based platforms (when the backend is coded correctly to make buttons and UI elements visible to the screen reader), but they struggle a lot with images. OCR and image recognition have come a long way, but they're still not reliable.

On Lemmy, there's no way (yet) to add alt text to image posts, but one thing that we sighted folk can do to make the website a more accessible place for the blind/low vision community is to describe the contents of the image in text, so screen readers (or braille displays) can interpret the text for the user. This doesn't need to be anything fancy - you can see an example of me doing so in this post here - simply indicate somewhere that you are describing the contents of the image, and then do so in text. If you're transcribing text, it's best to do so as exact to the text in the image as you can (including spelling errors!). If you're describing something visual, it's best to keep it about the length of a tweet, but be as detailed as you need to be to give context to what you write about in the post.

If you'd like a more detailed guide on how to best do image descriptions and alt text, here's a site that describes more specifics - https://www.perkins.org/resource/how-write-alt-text-and-image-descriptions-visually-impaired/

Edit: You are able to add alt text to embedded images, as noted by @sal@mander.xyz here. This would only work for images within the text of your comment, not for image posts (topics which link to images).

Edit 2: @retronautickz@beehaw.org wrote a post on kbin on best practices in writing image descriptions and alt text.

List as many or as few as you like!

Hey Beehaw, whatcha reading right now?