Art & Science – Page 3 – Mary C Simmons … Art and Word

Bread of Life, Bread of Art

Tis the Season!

…for bread baking.
And time for another short course on Sourdough Bread Baking at the Creamery Arts Center in Hotchkiss, Colorado. Each of will us feed a cup of hungry microbes—a.k.a. Sourdough Starter, while I ply you all with buttered slices of this freshly baked at the Creamery, slathered with a local jam, all the while regaling you with True Microbe Stories.

And, how to make and bake it.

Artisan Bread

That’s what they call it now, the bread of our ancestors. It’s a very simple recipe: flour, starter, water and a little salt. This is bread you can live on. A form of lactic acid fermentation (think: yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, kimchee…) sourdough starters ferment the grain in the dough, usually wheat, into more digestible food for us, and *BONUS* food for the good microbes that inhabit our guts and keep us healthy.

And, sourdough starters generate their own yeast, so you don’t have to add any. None. Zip. Nada. But you do need to let the dough rise for a much longer time than is needed for breads that use store-bought yeast. Eighteen hours is good. But sometimes the dough rises faster than that, so you just gotta bake it.

The granulated yeast in the packets and brown jars at the grocery store makes a passable bread–totally tastier than the mass-produced breads from commercial bakeries. But it is not as fabulous, nor is it evidently as nutritious to the human body as the wild yeast breads, aka those produced with sourdough starters.

As it turns out, sourdough starters are a microbial mixture of lactic-acid and alcoholic fermentation. Yeast microbes are alcohol fermentaters, and we need them to make the bread rise. Yeasty breads smell heavenly in the baking, but without the lactic acid fermentaters, the bread falls short in flavor. I’ll never go back to commercial yeast.

For the DIYers:

You can easily grow a starter yourself, comprising yeast microbes, which cause the bread to rise, along with three or so others that make the aforementioned very tasty bread. For more info on how to start and feed a starter (it’s easy, really!), go here: http://www.scientificpsychic.com/alpha/food/sourdough-bread.html.

Check out the link at the end about lactic acid fermentation, and Who’s Who in your starter, and what they eat, how they eat it. The beasties: yeast and lactobacillus…remember the fad some years ago, where Sweet Acidophilus Milk was readily available at major grocery stores? It was a good idea. A great idea.

Wonder why they stopped.

Lacotbacilli are not just good, not just great, they are essential to our health.

“Life without Lactobacilli is unimaginable”

Lactobacillus is a large family of rod-shaped microbes; several varieties reside in common foods we regularly eat, such as beer, wine, yogurt, sauerkraut, pickles, kimchi, and of course, CHOCOLATE! It’s the Lactobacillus sanfransiscus, the First Citizen of sourdough starters, that makes the bread fantastic. Yep, named after the famed Sourdough Bread of San Fransisco.

Mmmmm….microbes….how lucky we are to have them in our midst.

I love the microbes in my starter. I can’t see them, but I see evidence of them. The starter almost doubles in volume soon after feeding, as the microbes discharge CO2 while mawing down on the grain and sugars. I hear the CO2 bubbles snap and crackle as they pop. It makes me smile.

My little pretties.

BreadBowl3 — Sourdough Bread Bowl with Winter Squash Soup

Landscape Paint and the Chemistry Blues

Alchemy reigned at the time Johannes Vermeer painted Girl with a Pearl Earring in 1665. Back in that day, before the Periodic Table of the Elements—which didn’t show up in until 1869—painters made their own paints from the powders of ground minerals by mixing them with linseed oil.

The pigment in the blue scarf around the head of the Girl with a Pearl Earring, for instance, was made from lapis lazuli, a beautiful but rather expensive mineral to be grinding to a powder. Unfortunately, linseed oil made the fabulous blue color of this beautiful mineral a bit cloudy.

Linseed oil did that to most of the mineral powders, but there was no way around that in 1665. The mineral powders would be chalky-looking and would not flow onto the canvas smoothly without being mixed with linseed oil.

Better Living Through Chemistry

The Periodic Table going public in 1869 moved the job of creating paint from artists to the laboratory chemist. These days, few artists mix their own paints, or even know what’s in them. I’m a big fan of chemistry, for without it, there is nothing. No rocks, no clay, no paint. And I wonder how they make vivid yellow as well as intense red paint from the same thing. Not a mineral, but an element from the Periodic Table: Cadmium.

Modern painters can thank French artist, Yves Klein and a few French chemists, who created a rich luscious blue paint that retained the brilliant blue hue by suspension of the dry pigment in a synthetic resin, avoiding the murkiness of linseed oil.

They called it International Klein Blue. Yves Klein used IKB, as this patented pigment is known, to paint Blue Monochrome, part of a series of one-color paintings he had been creating for several years.

IKB represented something profound to Klein: le Vide-the Void. Not a vacuum or terrifying darkness, but a void that invokes positive sensations of openness and liberty, a feeling of profound fulfillment beyond the everyday material world. Standing before Klein’s huge canvases of solid blue, many report being enveloped by serene, trance-like feelings.

That’s how the Southwestern desert landscape makes me feel.

The iron-stained colors of my native land inspired me to make paint from it, in the old way—grinding the minerals to a powder and mixing them with linseed oil. Perhaps because these paints are made from desert clays (see my previous blog Desert Paintings), linseed oil did not make them murky.

35321_1346473504741_6813196_n — Crows Across the Sky, Mary C. Simmons, 2010

Rocking the Paint

Making Paint From the Rocks

I can easily lose myself in Earth’s landscapes, especially the rocky ones. The textures and colors tell a story of chemistry, weathering and erosion. And, if providing a scenic backdrop to my life is not enough, with these rocks I make pottery and glazes.

And paint.

The color palette is generally limited to oxides of iron: brown, reddish-brown, tan, yellowish tan, greenish tan–e.g. Earth colors.

Occasionally a little copper shows up, coloring the clay softly green or blue. Pottery glaze colors depend on these denizens of the Periodic Table. And so did paint, once upon a time before IKB.

I started with several gallon-size zip-lock bags of reddish, greenish and one highly yellow clay. The colors are the result of a certain degree of iron oxidation, and finely ground turquoise, which is a copper mineral.

I sifted out all the rocks, twigs, animal bones and other detritus, and let the colored clay settle in large jars of water. After siphoning off the excess water, I poured this clay slurry onto large pieces of gypsum board to dry. The mud cracks were amazing art pieces in themselves.

Painting with Clay

After the clay slurry completely dried, I crushed and sieved each into a fine powder. I added a little linseed oil to the colored clay powder and in a frenzy of inspiration, I painted

The Paintings

What else can I say? Inspired by rocks, enchanted by Earth’s landscape…

Follow this link to Desert Paintings…http://wp.me/P3Fsq9-in