How to make the most of your bread machine: some pointers toward healthier, nuttier and raisin-packed bread

The instructions that came with my wonderful Japanese bread machine turned out to be overly cautious, though basically helpful in determining hackable parameters. Here are a few time-saving pointers that might help others make even better bread with confidence. They are arranged from simple to risky and nuanced.

1) Is your bread too dry? add extra water, about 10cc more than recommended to start with. Adjust after a vote. (If it is unbaked, too much was added; if it doesn't make you want to tear a piece off and lay it across your tongue, try adding more.)

2) Add extra yeast when the weather is colder or you add exotic low-gluten ingredients (such as soy flour, whole wheat flour, oats, anything). (You may also use high-gluten bread flour to offset the difficulty in using whole wheat flour, though I know I'm not swimming with the tide on this one. In Taiwan, we actually each pickled gluten with peanuts. Try it, if you are allergy-free on this one.)

3) Is your bread texture or taste too boring, too bland? Or do you want to sweeten it up? Add one or more of the following ingredients, or mix and match (heck, add them all, to taste: go for it--it won't be the end of the world--you might be pleasantly surprised!):

Bland-busting options:

• finely shredded coconut (not too coarse, not coconut flour)
• really makes it more filling (stick to your ribs) as well as offer a second texture
• cinnamon (at least a tablespoon and you won't regret it)
• nutmeg (be more cautious with this one)
• I destroyed a pie once by adding the recipe's standard dosage. It all boils down to respecting freshly ground nutmeg, whether slivered off the nut or spooned out of a tin.
• chopped or slivered almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds
• dried fruit/raisins: grape or cranberry raisins; chopped figs 

The sweetening subset:

• vanilla
• cocoa powder (to taste: two tablespoons to a quarter cup)
• extra butter (double or triple your bread machine's recommended amount)
• If you go too far with the butter, hold back on adding extra water will help keep the dough from becoming dense and uncooperative with the yeast. 
• extra sugar (cane sugar recommended) (double, triple, or quadruple bread machine's recommended amount)

4) When to add the extras like nuts and raisins? While coconuts flakes, soy flour, cocoa powder goes in with the mix from the get-go, the big stuff comes later. My machine beeps and gives me a couple minutes to dump in a measly 50g of it--intolerable and defeating the purpose of having a bread machine! Instead, in order to make as healthy, moist, and nutritious as one dreams, I suggest adding the extra big stuff about 10 or 15 minutes after pressing start--the ball of dough should already have been formed and smooth. Dump it all in, and before it rattles around too much, with a sturdy spatula press down on the ball so that it is torn from below by the moving blade (be careful and use judgement). Repeat this until most of the dry extra big stuff is on its way to being integrated in the ball of dough. Don't worry; it will still rise (fingers crossed).

5) Don't forget salt! I'm not a fan myself, but you need it for bread to stay tasty, and the yeast needs it (for whatever yeast do with it when they aren't gorging on the sugar).

--------
Disclaimer: Though I've used the above techniques dozens of times, I don't know your bread machine, so I can only offer a few ideas about what makes for great bread for me and my family. What works for me might tank in your machine for all I know. Use your own judgement as I take no responsibility for mishaps or damaged teflon.

"Quantum Dialectics" (essay) open access at Philosophy Today

Philosophy Today

DOI: 10.5840/philtoday2020128311
Quantum Dialectics
PDF opens in new window

Dean Anthony Brink

Quantum Dialectics

Philosophy Today, Volume 63, Issue 4 (Fall 2019).
Pages 1069-1080

Abstract: This brief examination of treatments of nothingness-oriented dialectics in Kyoto School philosophers Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime engages questions of space from Hegel to quantum mechanics. It begins to situate their work in light of Emmanuel Levinas’s writings on empty space and as overlooked contributions to the philosophy of science.

Key words: Kyoto School, quantum physics, space

Three Penny Space Opera in print

My Threepenny Space Opera, a libretto in mostly poetry/song, though in need of being put to music, is now out thanks to Jennifer Lee Rossman and Brian McNett:




Or on my Amazon author page:
https://www.amazon.com/Dean-Anthony-Brink/e/B07PP1HQ3G?ref_=pe_1724030_132998060

Three Poems (somewhat satirical with respect to John Ashbery) first appearing in Exquisite Corpse (May 2008)

Three Poems, selected by Andrei Codrescu for Exquisite Corpse (May 2008), with these lines set off:

As you become your friends your furniture must become you,
stand for the real you, and something on each shelf
and wall so the friends feel friendliness.

Dancers Winding Down

They just want balanced diets
my friend’s wife points out
adding: if I don’t get cable how can I level the playing ground?
I’m tired of always keeping up so that the horizon doesn’t get to me.
That’s what the new burgers are all about for instance.
Says he can’t even smell microbes anymore
though others say they find their way into ducts and canals
he leaves the stray door ajar
and hopes a breeze ‘ll kick in uncontrollably flushed,
Brownian motion or at least whiffs of osmosis on their way.
One of the two will be the planet’s undoing.
If we talk it through, what more to discover
in the visible world after the third grade or so,
but get a load of those quanta rest notes
filling in where others left off in a huffy—
Bach’s fugues so marvelously Marx Brothers, basements of footnotes
and clunky dice reduced to the usual runways
thanks to Pythagorean theorems and an aviary of recorders.
The radius of loses still subtracted from the gravity of wombs,
and the magic that plumps an ark threatens the land with colonies of flowers
busy undergirding planks tendered firmly in our way.


E Pluribus Bananas

Choosing the right pieces to surround oneself is an ongoing burden.
As you become your friends your furniture must become you,
stand for the real you, and something on each shelf
and wall so the friends feel friendliness.
Then striking poses comes naturally too,
people love you for the real you
and all the clippings and bookmarks to back it up.
These days fashion is brushed metal bending over us
from the steel toes of laboring hours
on up to the finest platinum barrettes on daughters,
the clean future foretold in sci-fi misses us,
the very moral impulse to tweak the onrush lost
in a dampening of fun, as focused hording,
while our main product - simple, disembodied gore –
is censored courtesy of servants embedded in a Westward caravan
ticking off each peak of bison leveled to pass further
from memories off camera, tossed
into the much-feared salads of history, kooky beyond all bearings
of automated feelers our men sent out last week,
let's count sales and consumer confidence
after the initial one was rolled out, spells roping it back.
It’s anyone’s guess who quoted what; what said not important as
we - so far - always duck in in time,
jets angling favorite songs from hi-tech heated toilet seats
so that steering down here finds a modicum of comfort in all the effort.

Twilight of Good Graces

Across the bay, helpless neighbors snarl the commute
and moodiness lowers the general bar
to shoulder-padded mumbles—
who rules, who shows who.
Air superiority is the talk of the town.
Waiting for them we head off
to see herring feed themselves to seals—
riveting kersplashes in a hierarchy unseen since
since ape stood up in the evolution to man,
only a bony tail there, a patch of fur here,
vegetarians and hawks—the idea of balance
     indelible in the circus.
Wells dropped to hit-and-miss after the heat,
then summer showers kicked in minimally.
The only real hope lie in alien saucers
forming a holding pattern over Mt. Rainier,
smoke-signaling rain—
even my green Oma from the lovely Schwarzwald knew
days blue enough to send us to the lake in the foothills
and sit in the sun until a freckle spread
and we felt like a Nutty Buddy after the hard work of splashing around half naked.
The onslaught of cumulonimbus hardly crossed our minds,
was something cyclical, shapes in the sky barometric.

Although hard to prove, John Ashbery seems to have written “Upstate Dancers” (collected in Planisphere, 2009) as a bitter reply to someone emulating him. He even includes the line "Sometimes a stench decides everything", an image that indeed closes the second poem above.

Exquisite Corpse (which closed shop in 2015) seems offline now, so I though I'd put the poems up here.

"True East" (poem) appearing in Cordite Poetry Review

My poem was selected by the guest editor for a no-theme issues of Cordite Poetry Review, Claire Gaskin.

"True East" is probably my longest published poem, divided into three sections.
It is dedicated to John Ashbery (though written before he passed away that year, 2017, when I was Utrecht for a conference. 

I has a lot of Ashberyesque one-liners and couplets, such as:

The zabuton is just a pillow to sit on,
nothingness just the Eucharist unplugged.



I saw the boy slinking first
and the board was on it.


May his face shine upon you
so of course they smile.

And:

Grab the bar at the back of the bike, not me.

Marriage lasts lifetimes of untimeliness
set up, more if you think it might pan out.

http://cordite.org.au/poetry/notheme8/true-east/

Roman Pasca's interview with me about Japanese Poetry and Its Publics now on New Books Network

Thank you Roman!

please click image or link below to visit site

https://newbooksnetwork.com/dean-anthony-brink-japanese-poetry-and-its-publics-from-colonial-taiwan-to-fukushima-routledge-2018/

SF short story "The Scarlatti" now out in Helios Quarterly

I am thrilled that my story "The Scarlatti" is appearing in Helios Quarterly with some great contemporary short story writers: H. Pueyo, D. A. Xialin Spires (and with a story set in Taiwan!), and Lee Forsythe. 

Helios Quarterly is available here:
https://aurelialeo.com/product/2572150x06152019/

Eroticized Materiality and Postcolonial Agency in Pierre Guyotat’s Algerian Works, in Erotic Literature in Adaptation and Translation

Juniper Berry Oatmeal Cookies with Cranberries, Raisins, and Almonds

These are the best cookies I’ve ever baked, though they definitely have an adult tinge to them. My other half wants me to bake a big batch for Chinese New Year at her folks—something to talk about.

Preheat oven to 350°F/170°C (more or less, with some of these computerized ovens, not much choice).

INGREDIENTS

A-Mix (dry)

First combine in mortar and pestle:

• 2-3 tablespoon juniper berries
• ¾ cup / 100g cane sugar

Begin with small amount of sugar to use as a grinding powder for the moist dry berries.

Then mix together with:

• 1 cup / 125g cake flour
• 1 cup / 125g quick oats
• 1 cup / 125g slivered almond
• 1 cup / 125g roughly chopped cranberries
• ½ cup / 60g raisins
• ¾ teaspoon salt
• 1½-2½ teaspoon cinnamon

B-Mix (wet)

Whisk until opaque and almost fluffy:

• 1 egg (medium-large to large) beaten
• 1 cup / 125g olive oil
• 1 teaspoon baking powder

Mix A-Mix and B-Mix with a strong big spoon (I used a steel ladle-like one to press down on the oat-and-flour mix to make sure the olive oil is absorbed).

Squish tight into balls (of equal size) for coherency and squish down on buttered cookie sheet or baking paper.

Bake for 10-15 minutes, depending on the size of your cookies, until slightly brown or to taste.

Cool on rack.

(References: https://sortedfood.com/recipe/12862/ and https://prettysimplesweet.com/chewy-oatmeal-cookies/)

After over a decade of missing genuine stollen (German Christmas bread) I made it with the help of a Seiko HBK 151 breadmaker from Japan

It tastes great, and has the texture of stollen my oma made (store-bought stollen never gets this aspect right, in my experience).

Here is the recipe (slightly modified), translated to English from the Chinese version of the manual:

Ingredients

milk 100ml
egg 50g (1egg)
high-gluten flour 160g
low-gluten flour 160g
sugar 64g
salt 2g
butter 90g
ordinary yeast (dry instant yeast) 8.4g
cinnamon 1g
nutmeg 1g

Beat the egg and mix it with the milk, then, right before pouring the mix into the machine, mix it altogether with the dry ingredients and butter using a soft spatula that you can use later if any batter sticks beyond the reach of the flapper at the bottom of the machine mixer-container. The milk, egg, and butter should all be set out or heated to room temperature so that the yeast can get to work right away. 

Nine minutes after pressing "start," a buzzer will beep, and then add a mixture of nuts and dried fruit:

sliced almonds 50g
I used freshly slice-chopped unsalted almonds. All the nuts and fruits were from health food stores here in Taiwan.

raisins 180g
dried fruit mix 80g  
For the fruit, I followed the 180g of raisins, and divided the other dried fruits between dried figs (30g) and dried cranberries (50g). The figs came through, with the fresh nutmeg, glorious.

I didn't have the optional rum on hand, so had to skip it.

Modifications to recipe:
I used freshly grated (on a Japanese metal grater used usually for fresh ginger) cinnamon and nutmeg, and reversed the suggested proportions; there is more cinnamon than nutmeg. (I once rendered inedible a pumpkin pie by following the recipe to the letter.)

powdered sugar (to smother over it while it cools down on a rack)
 Additional note:
I followed the recipe, and it tastes great, but with the HBK 151 breadmaker you probably need to pull it out ten minutes or so earlier than the final buzzer (test with toothpick first). I pulled it out 8 minutes early, and note carefully in the picture it is a bit too browned on the edges, and the lower third of the cake is just slightly overdone (for my taste).

Essay in Mosaic special issue on scale: Nuclear Hegemony and Material Indices: The Satirical Verse Boom in Daily Newspapers after Fukushima

Following Alain Badiou’s modeling of change in relation to events, this study engages New Materialist issues of human-nonhuman relations and ontologies so as to situate satirical poetry appearing in Japanese daily newspapers and tweets after the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster as challenges to government and media obfuscation, thus broadening roles for creative writing in ecocriticism.
Available in Project Muse (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/703317) or email me (interpoetics at gmail dot com) and I would be happy to send a pdf.

Bitter Melon, Red Onion, Tomato Saute with Cloves (original recipe)

I was late to the health food store on Friday and didn't have much to choose from on the fresh veggies shelf. In fact, there was only a small package of near-organic tiny green bitter melons at the ridiculous price of about one USD. I looked online for recipes and found none that fit the ingredients available in the refrigerator. I did note the prominence of tomatoes and curries made with bitter melon and incorporated a dash of curry (my family is not as fond of spicy foods as I am) and the last sagging (perfect for sauteing) tomato. My gamble based on gut intuition (according to the recent science news that we have brains in our stomachs, and as the way to a family's heart is through the stomach) was to make cloves the featured sweet but punchy spice to pull off a delicious dish. To my own amazement, it worked!

Side dish size (serves 3-4 people).

How to Make It
   Wash and halve the bitter melons. Core them with a coffee spoon. Slice it to 1/4-cm or 16th-inch wedges around the cored melons.
   Peel, wash, and cut the red onion into just slightly larger wedges (which look like slivers from a distance).
   Wash and dice the tomato into one-centimeter or half-inch cubes (more or less).

  Heat up the flat frying pan or whatever shape of metal you prefer to medium hot (so the gas flame is tickling the pan but firing up its molecules so that it will burn the saute, which is not a barbecue).
  Add grape seed oil (enough to protect the veggies you are about to toss in) and olive oil (because it tastes great and add variety to the lubrication).
  The bitter melon is usually hard as Masonite, so toss it in first, followed immediately by all the spices (see below), then always (more or less, pause to let it brown a tad) keep scraping and stirring with a flat (and flat-edged) steel spatula. (This of course prevents organic materials from accumulating and burning.) After they look slightly in need of company, toss in the red onions, noting the beauty of the color combination and how long it must wait for the tomato--a very long time (at least ten minutes).
  It is at this stage that you may fear the saute in danger of becoming too dry and burning, yet the melon has yet to be fully cooked (I detest having to boil them ahead of time). Thus, here you need some form of liquid enhancement. Of course water is an option--no it is not; it would rob your dish of any hope of achieving panache and leave you miserable for the whole evening. Here you need cooking wine of some sort. I grabbed what I saw handy: bootleg clear liquor that the melons seemed to love. (Those of you struggling in 12-step programs, fear not, for the alcohol burns away leaving only a residue of the secret ingredient of all cooking: LOVE).
  Toss in the tomato. Stir for another 2-3 minutes.
  Add the brown sugar, stir in, and again after a minute, and it is done.
  Find a bowl for serving it (don't just leave it in the pan simmering into hellish sogginess).

Main ingredients:
Bitter green melons (4-6 tiny ones that fit palm of your closed hand)
Red onion (one small one will be enough)
Tomato (one medium-large one or two small ones, or perhaps a dozen halved cherry tomatoes)

Spices:
Fresh whole cloves (ten; fresh means that when you open the bag or container the smell knocks you over)
Curry powder (a teaspoon or to taste, depending on the curry powder you prefer; I usually use the one sold in most Vietnamese restaurants)
Fresh ground green cardamon (one teaspoon, peel them and grind the seeds in the pod, or pulverize them in a pestle/mortar)
Salt (one teaspoon; I can't recommend sea salt anymore since it is found to have plastic crystallized in it--even in Antarctica!)

Other:
Bootleg plain cooking liquor (optional; ask your Taiwanese friends)
Brown sugar (one and a half tablespoons or to taste; try to use organic or least processed)
Grape seed oil 
Olive oil


 

Toy Drone (poem)

Toy Drone

Full access:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/g5CWci6IsEbz56UdNwvW/full 

Postcolonial positioning and Japanese imperial affect in interwar Dada prose poems

This article supplements my book Japanese Poetry and Its Publics (politics), which mostly treats tanka, and some senryu. This piece focuses on Kitagawa Fuyuhiko's experimental prose poems. 

The book and this piece are all thanks to the encouragement of Phillip Darby, editor of the Postcolonial Politics book series and the journal Postcolonial Studies.

eprints (50 available) are here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/REX829fbATzExn89ddTn/full

email: interpoetics@gmail.com

Old-Fashioned Raisin Bars with Ingredients Available in Taiwan (Best Ever)

This afternoon my eldest daughter (kindergarten age) and I baked these bar cookies (standard 10X15 inch teflon baking pan--hard to tell from photo).
We followed the recipe, choosing to use olive oil, Taiwanese brown sugar, and mixed the spices using a ceramic mortar and pestle: half a dozen fresh cloves, fresh nutmeg shaved off with a paring knife (less than a teaspoon, as it was pungent and I was afraid it would be too much), and fresh powdered cinnamon. The pan was greased with butter, and we didn't have powdered sugar, so the photo lacks flair, but I highly recommend it. Thanks to my trusty Better Homes and Garden Betty Crocker knockoff dragged around for decades.