Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2010 December 31

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December 31

I'd like to employ someone with superior googling skills to help me find this mystery article. :)

i once saw an article online that i am now in desperate search of. if anyone with better research skills than mine (i've already tried really hard) could help me to track it down i'd be super appreciateve. i believe it was a summary or review or some such of michael pollan's "in defense of food" and detailed the list of chemicals that could legally be reduced to "artificial flavoring" on the package of a british strawberry milkshake mix product. cheers! :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.9.248.197 (talk) 05:40, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

well until I get paid for my employment :p, I will only give you the the e-book: [1]

I couldn't find what you where talking about through a quick google search, and there is no 'find' tool to search through a google book as its merely scanned images. Passionless (talk) 06:58, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

For one article on the milkshake thing, google for The 59 Ingredients in a Fast Food Strawberry Milkshake. Not related to the book though. 88.112.59.31 (talk) 10:16, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Passionless, you definitely can search through a book on Google, if the pages are available. Sometimes for really old books it doesn't work, and it tends not to work for non-English books, but otherwise they are searchable. (Pollan's book cannot even be previewed, unfortunately, so we can't search that, or at least I can't.) Adam Bishop (talk) 22:10, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

I think I found what you wanted, matches every detail...but wrong book. [2]...it's in Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation.

Oh, and I see now where their search function is...I was trying to just use my browser's, thanks, oh and I could see about 60% of the pages in the book, and search 100% of the pages just so you know. Passionless (talk) 05:38, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Speediest home bread machine

My home bread machine takes, at its fastest setting, two hours and thirty-five minutes to make a loaf of bread. Are there any home machines that are faster? Thanks 92.24.176.169 (talk) 19:05, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Probably not. Bread takes time to make, and there are parts of the process which cannot be hurried. It takes a human something like 3-4 hours to make a loaf of bread, the machine is probably as optimized as it can be. this link contains a very basic recipe that would take 3 hours and 45 minutes from start to finish. There are steps, such as allowing the bread to rise, and "proofing", which is the process of allowing gluten formation, which simply cannot be hurried. If you add together mixing time, rising and proofing time, kneading time, and baking time, it just adds up. There are recipes for "quick bread", but these aren't really the same as yeast-risen bread, and you're going to get a very different product when you make quick bread. --Jayron32 03:07, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

I have a Breville "Ultimate Baker's Oven" model BB400 (which ironically, has been superseded by several later "Baker's Oven" models), which will cook a 500g or 750g (1, 1.5lb) "basic bread" (white) loaf in 1:59, on its "rapid" setting, using the same ingredients as normal. The result is definitely "bread", but it doesn't taste anywhere near as good as bread cooked on the normal settings, which takes 2:50 - 3:10 depending on how dark you like the crust. Mitch Ames (talk) 04:47, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure saving 36 minutes is worth exchanging bread for, as you put it "bread". If you need bread that fast, why not just buy it from the bakery? Homemade bread is divine, but like most things that are worth it, it cannot be hurried. --Jayron32 04:54, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Yup, what Jayron says. You don't need a faster bread machine, you need a slower lifestyle. AndyTheGrump (talk) 05:12, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Our Panasonic makes a loaf in one hour.--85.211.132.220 (talk) 08:11, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I'm trying to avoid shop-bought bread as it has a lot of salt in it. On the other hand, I'd accept the sodium in the baking powder used with quick bread because it has the advantage that soda-bread has less acrylamide in it, a chemical scientists think likely to be a carcinogen. I am not fussy about the quality of the bread - anything bread- or roll-like will do. 92.15.14.57 (talk) 15:24, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

While tasty bread, either handmade or in a bread machine, does need a good few hours, it doesn't actually take many minutes of your day. One of the great things about yeast bakery is that you can mix the stuff up, then leave it unsupervised for hours on end, and it only needs a minute or so of kneading: you do need to supervise the baking to an extent. A bread machine can be loaded before you go to bed, and be set so that you wake up to a fresh, finished loaf, or set it before you go to work and come home to fresh bread. With only a little forward planning, you can have delicious, fresh-baked bread at the cost of very little time. 86.164.67.8 (talk) 16:04, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

I think anyone who's ever made any bread, machine or by hand, will already be aware of all that. 92.15.14.57 (talk) 18:02, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Then I struggle to see in what context you'd be planning to buy a machine to provide bread for yourself, regularly, and prioritise a baking time of less than a couple of hours. Unless you're eating so much bread that you've finished one loaf before the next had baked? Your question sounded like the sort of thing people ask when they have no experience of baking bread. A quickbread/soda bread is good, but requires you to move very quickly and have everything ready in place before you start, if you want it to rise well: if you have a large ovensafe bowl to upend over it, that will also help. What is the practical problem you are trying to solve? 86.162.68.52 (talk) 00:13, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm always entertained by how people here invent firmly-believed notions about the questioner which have no basis in fact. Does not my question plainly say that I have a bread machine and know its cooking time, with the strong implication that I use it to bake bread? Are you an artist? 92.24.185.225 (talk) 13:31, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Yea, it's more normal to put the ingredients in way in advance and then set the timer so that it starts baking so that the bread is ready right before your meal.

I suppose the question asker might be looking for a way to 'stockpile' a week's worth of bread by baking a bunch on the weekend. APL (talk) 02:03, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

I only eat bread ocassionally. When I fancy some bread, I'd rather not have to wait three or four hours for it. Let me re-cap: I do not buy shop-bread because it has so much salt in it; and freshly baked hot bread is nicer than cold. 92.24.185.225 (talk) 12:39, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

In that case, do you have space in your freezer? You can freeze part-baked bread (cooked long enough that it's risen as far as it goes, but not crusty), then cook it when you want it hot. I've also had some success freezing risen, uncooked dough, but don't have enough experience to definitely recommend it. Or, as others said, soda bread, although there is more of an art to that. 86.162.68.52 (talk) 21:22, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

If you eat bread only occasionally, why do you worry about the salt? --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:30, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

I think that would be practically impossible to do with a bread machine. There is a lot of salt in shop-bought bread - eating just a little would push my daily consumption over the 4g daily target RDA here in the UK, and certainly over the 2g or so that is believed to be optimal.

I'd be interested to read of any home machines that can do rolls in less than an hour, or any bread machines that can do soda-bread, as I think mine can only do yeast bread. Sorry, I do not have the patience to make the bread in an oven by hand - even weighing the flour and creating some tepid water is at the outer limits of my willpower. Thanks 92.15.31.128 (talk) 12:51, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Why would it be impossible with a bread machine? Stop it 10 minutes before it's finished baking (if there isn't a button for that, presumably switch it off at te wall), extract the loaf, let it cool completely, wrap it tightly in clingfilm or a sealed plastic bag with the air squeezed out. Place in freezer. When you have a craving for bread, heat your oven to 210°C (190°C for a fan oven), stick the loaf on an oven tray in the oven for, what, 15-20 minutes from frozen? Including time for oven to get up to temperature, you're eating hot, fresh bread 30 minutes after you got a craving. 86.164.58.246 (talk) 16:08, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

(obviously remove plastic before sticking in oven). I'd also note that salt actually slows the yeast down, so your salt-free bread should be rising more quickly. Whether you can get a bread machine to adjust for that, I don't know, but if you were baking it by hand that would significantly cut the time down. 86.164.58.246 (talk) 16:11, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

While I appreciate your trouble in thinking that through, that's a lot of extra work-time for a rather tacky frozen-not-fresh 1970s-style result. Besides which I do not have a freezer and do not like using the oven. 92.29.114.99 (talk) 21:05, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

I can assure you that the result is not tacky, but beautifully crisp, and tastes of lovely, freshly-baked bread. A much more tasty, more 'authenticly bread' result than is achieved by any process that takes less than 2 hours to mature the dough, and adds at most 5 minutes work-time. But if you have no freezer in this house-with-a-breadmaker, then you'll have to go with a more processed product. I don't know that you'll find a domestic breadmaker that replicates the Chorleywood process, but that's what you'll need for fast results. If you can bring yourself to press a button, you could try intensively mixing the dough in a food processor with a dough hook. I don't think you'll find a machine that makes decent soda bread. It really would be less effort to do this by hand, for what you want, since you could up the yeast and allow a shorter rise than the machine would. 86.163.214.50 (talk) 23:56, 3 January 2011 (UTC)