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Breakfast Focaccia (à la Emeryville Arizmendi)

An aside: everyone hates recipes that have pre-ambles, so mine has end-notes instead.

First, you need to make the dough. The recipe is from Jeff Hertzberg’s Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, and is an olive oil dough suitable for pizza or focaccia (I think Hertzberg even uses it for naan). I’d say it makes on the order of 5 pizzas or 8 breakfast focaccias¹.

Olive Oil Dough

Ingredients²

1¹/₂ Tablespoons of yeast
1¹/₂ Tablespoons of salt
1 Tablespoon of sugar
2³/₄ cups of warm water (you can even do hot water, but not too hot to touch)
¹/₄ cup of olive oil
6¹/₂ cups of flour

Directions

add the yeast, sugar, and salt to an empty container that you want to store the bread dough in. (One with a lid will work well – I have a 6 quart food storage container that I use for this purpose.)
pour the water over the yeast. I usually reserve the oil at this point and wait for the yeast to bloom, so that on the off chance that my yeast has gone off, I’m not wasting any olive oil.
add the rest of the olive oil and water, and stir to mix³ things together.
add the flour and mix. Usually I stir with a wooden spoon a couple times as I add the first few cups, and then I add the rest of it and just get my hands in there. Add more flour if you need to – the dough should want to stick to your hands a bit, but it should want to stick to itself more.
Let it rise for about 2 hours with the lid on but not sealed, then seal the lid and throw the whole thing in the fridge

Breakfast focaccia

Ingredients

olive oil dough from the previous step
around a teaspoon of olive oil
an egg
other toppings if you want them (cheese? olives? something yet fancier? there’s a section below the directions on toppings)

Directions

Start preheating the oven to 400 °F
Pull off a chunk of dough about the size of a large orange⁴, and roll it around a little in your hands. Put it onto silpat (or parchment) on a baking sheet and flatten it into a round sized so that it looks like a raw egg would fit in the middle⁵
Let the dough rise while the oven is pre-heating⁶
Once the oven has come up to heat, prepare a weight for the center of the focaccia by filling a glass or a cup⁷ with something that’s got some weight but is safe to be baked⁸
Put a little olive oil on your hands, rub it onto the dough, and rub it onto the bottom of the glass/cup, where it’s going to be in contact with the dough. Then put your improvized weight into the middle of the dough and press it down to seat it.
Bake with the weight in there (no filling yet!) for about 15 minutes at 400 °F. The dough should be barely starting to get a little color at this point⁹.
Take the half-baked focaccia out and, using oven mitts or whatever things you have around to not burn yourself with, gently remove the cup from the middle. It’s fine if a little of the dough sticks to the cup.
Add fillings! Somewhere in there, you want to crack an egg into it. Some notes follow below about fillings that work well or work poorly in my experience.
Return to the oven and bake until the egg is set to your liking or the dough is acceptably finished – usually 15–20 minutes more.

Notes about toppings

Toppings that I have tried that have worked without any hassle:

cheese on top, but not that much of it (about one grate on the cheese grater)
one or two olives, diced up and mixed in
a slice or two of red onions on top

Toppings that I have tried that have not worked as great, but which I am determined to try again:

spinach tossed in with the egg, which released a lot of steam and prevented the egg from cooking as much as I wanted

¹ I actually don’t have a good sense of that because I generally make some of one thing and some of another.

² Hertzberg gives a ratio of “6:3:3:13” (cups of water-Tablespoons of yeast-Tablespoons of salt-cups of flour) as the “master recipe”, so I tend to remember this as “that, but halved, and with a quarter cup of oil substituted for the water, and with a tablespoon of sugar”. It helps me, but it’s a footnote because I noticed as I wrote it up that it sounds like a very circuitous way to remember something.

³ oil and water are notoriously immiscible, so the pedant in me needed to comment here. You’re not trying to get an emulsion, mostly just to keep it from being a clean thin layer of oil on top of water that's sitting on top of mostly undissolved yeast and salt and sugar.

⁴ roughly spherical, about 3″ in diameter

⁵ about 1″ tall, about 4″ across? I don’t know, numbers are hard.

⁶ or, if you have an oven that’s more efficient than mine, pretend you have a worse oven and let it rise for around 15 minutes.

⁷ I use a handle-less teacup but one of those nice juice glasses would probably work

⁸ I use soybeans cause they’re what I have on hand. If you’re cool like the folks at Bon Appétit Test Kitchen, you might use ball bearings instead.

⁹ It’s okay to experiment here, and I’d recommend over-baking over under-baking. Over-baking in this step leaves you with either a tough crust at the end or with an under-done egg. Under-baking in this step can lead to the dough continuing to rise significantly after an egg has been added, which once made the egg slither out of my attempt.

As an experiment, I am trying posting here instead of tweetstorms. If you really prefer tweetstorms, let me know (probably by tweeting at me)! If you prefer this format, also let me know (also tweeting at me about that works fine, but you could comment here too)!

When I hear people voicing their concerns about the silencing of others voicing hateful ideologies, it strikes a sort of resonance in me with a worry that I have, and so I imagine that I understand them a little. The worry goes something like this: “I think that my positions are acceptable, and pretty moderate, but I know some people disagree with me. What’s to stop me from being the next one silenced?”

At times like this, I remember: if I would like to see the end of hateful ideologies like white supremacy, then my silence does not serve me. Silence normalizes, and in this case, it normalizes in a very specific way: when I remain silent because of these worries, I equate the mistakes I have made in my life as I try to come to wiser conclusions with deliberate and hateful rhetoric, which looks like such an odd equivalence to me that it encourages me to wonder where it comes from.

When I examine its source, I find that the people who support these hateful ideologies also have an interest in stoking this worry in others: they defend themselves by comparing their actions (for example, a dozen-page manifesto on the biological inferiority of other human beings) to our actions (for example, an ignorant and embarrassing statement about a friend’s racial background). They allow us to attribute their words to accidental ignorance because then, in order to defend our own egos, we will defend them – or at the very least, feel very worried about the consequences of their deliberate hateful actions.

A little earlier, I phrased the worry that I have as a question. I like questions: I think we could all use more questions in our lives, so long as we approach them with curiosity (what a friend of mine would call “interested non-attachment”) and not with dread of what answer we might find. Lately I’ve also been thinking about another question: “Why is free speech important to me?” I found the essay Tolerance is not a moral precept a thoughtful exploration of this question, and if you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to do so! I would love to discuss it with you.

Current Mood: indescribable

I’ve done a fair amount of experimenting with vegan and vegetarian cooking, and seitan has always caught my interest. I had an initial good experience with a chicken-style seitan recipe, but something about the taste turned me off from it after the second or third time making it. Fortunately, I later found a recipe for Italian sausage from the Post-Punk Kitchen, and I’ll reproduce the modified recipe I use, with more of an herbs-de-provence flavor:

ingredients

wet ingredients
- 1/2 cup chickpeas (or another type of bean; see notes below)
- 1 cup vegetable broth
- if you're using home-cooked beans, you can cut back on this and use some of the water the beans were cooked in
- if you're using veggie broth powder like I do, feel free to use water in place of veggie broth here and add the proportional amount of veggie broth powder with the spices.
- 2 Tbsp. soy sauce or Bragg’s liquid aminos
- 1 Tbsp. oil
dry ingredients
- 1 1/4 cup wheat gluten
- 1/4 cup nutritional yeast
- spices:
- 2 Tbsp. granulated garlic
- 1 tsp. dried oregano
- 1 tsp. dried savory
- 1 tsp. dried rosemary
- 1 tsp. dried sage

directions

In a large bowl, mash the beans until they're a bit mushy; add the other wet ingredients and stir to combine.
In a separate bowl, combine the dry ingredients and mix to combine.
Mix the dry ingredients into the wet, and stir with a spoon if you like. I usually get right in there kneading with my hands since that’s how it’s going to end up anyway.
Mix/knead the dough until everything is incorporated. The dough should hold together pretty well, with a sort of play-dough consistency.
Make a long, log-shaped loaf out of the dough and roll it up in some aluminum foil (or in a clean kitchen towel, secured with twine)
Steam the seitan sausage to set it:
- using a pot of water on a stovetop with a steamer basket in it, this takes about 40 minutes. I have a problem with it tending to boil dry during this relatively long cooking period, so I add more water as the boiling continues.
- using a (stovetop) pressure cooker:
- put the seitan in a steamer basket, with several cups of water (but not so much that it's going to get the seitan wet in the basket)
- seal the pressure cooker
- turn on the heat to medium-high or high (about 8 on my [electric] stove)
- once the pressure cooker pressurizes, turn the heat down to medium (about 5 on my stove)
- cook for 15 minutes at pressure
- remove from heat and let the pressure cooker depressurize on its own — no quick-release needed
Unwrap (but be careful, it’s hot!) and store in the fridge until you want to use it. My preferred method of cooking it is sautéeing with some onions and garlic to make a filling for tacos, but it could also work well in, e.g., a stir fry

notes

After cooking this recipe a few times and feeling wasteful with the amount of foil, I bought a couple of plain flour sack dish towels from Amazon, as well as some reusable silicone kitchen zip-ties. These have worked really well for me!
I regularly substitute the beans and spices, so feel free to be creative! Combos that I’ve tried have included:
- soy beans + garlic powder and sesame seeds
- black beans + chipotles en adobo, cumin, and a little turmeric

A quick brain-dump of some thoughts brought up by a post from Jayarava’s Raves, Rumination, the Stress Response, and Meditation:

Death is something we want to face with grace. It's the ultimate test of our test of our faith. We can feel good about ourselves if we face death with equanimity. Depression and other forms of psychological problem seem to be something we don't want to face at all. Since happiness is said to be the result of being a Buddhist, then a Buddhist suffering from distress is a kind of anathema. The reaction seems to be to pull away and isolate the person, perhaps with a sense of preventing the spread of the negativity contagion.

Responding to discomfort that we do not understand in others by turning away from it strikes me as at once understandably human and terribly misguided (especially for practitioners of Buddhism). When talking about the first noble truth (which I would paraphrase as “suffering/dukkha exists”), the Saṃyutta Nikāya says that “this noble truth of suffering is to be fully understood”. I can’t understand something by averting my gaze when it’s uncomfortable. If I regard suffering and malady as something that doesn’t happen to Buddhists, I think that I have confused human Buddhists with Bodhisattvas, and in so doing, I have limited my ability to perceive and address suffering. Indeed, if I already didn’t experience suffering, I wouldn’t really have much need for Buddhism, would I?

What’s more, if I see negativity as a contagion that I need to defend myself against, I think I display a lack of confidence in my own practice. While certainly I would be well-advised not to throw myself into strongly negative situations to test the strength of my practice as a Buddhist, avoiding them when they arise in my daily life feels like I’m treating my practice as fragile, needing protection from those around me. In so doing, it feels like I’m writing a big asterisk on “the cessation of suffering”, and writing a paragraph of fine print about the specific external situations that need to exist for this promise to not be void.

endnotes:

“I am not exempt from illness” is noted as one of the five themes for contemplation, which can be found on SuttaCentral or Wikipedia.
I initially wrote up these ideas in a comment on Jayarava’s blog, and then lost them because statefulness in Internet things is hard, especially when they involve a POST request to try and get a preview. Maybe this can serve as a useful lesson on impermanence.

I’d like to share some thoughts that I have on the topic of modifying the English language to improve its precision and usefulness, following in the tradition of an English-language modification called E-Prime.

To summarize the Wikipedia article I linked above, E-Prime eliminates the word “to be”. To me, this seemed at first blush (a) extremely difficult, (b) really fascinating as an exercise of thought and language, and (c) unnecessarily austere. I don’t think my mind has changed on any of these three points, so I’ll try to go through them:

I have a lot of difficulty speaking without using the verb “to be”. I find writing a lot easier, probably because my writing always involves some revision and rewording when I find a sentence doesn't flow the way I would like it to. Speaking seems more awkward, because it entails stopping mid-sentence to rephrase a sentence that wouldn't end well without the expected “is” or “was” or “am”. Still, I find it difficult, not impossible, and I sometimes have fun with it as a linguistic experiment.

I find E-Prime valuable and interesting because it effectively cuts away a lot of the dressing in our language that makes us seem like we speak objectively. In many cases, opinions become a lot more obvious as just that. In addition, I’ve found that sometimes it makes me uncomfortable to communicate in E-Prime among speakers of conventional English, because it sounds like I have some sort of massive ego: most of my sentences wind up starting with “I”, and often “I find”, or “I think”, or “I have the opinion that”. I don’t consider this aspect more of a problem than normal language usage, but I find it interesting in that it highlights the fact that when we speak, we speak from our experience. In my case, it makes me more mindful, which I think overall is a good thing.

I think, though, that in aiming for mindfulness and clarity, E-Prime uses an axe where a scalpel (or at least a knife) would provide more utility: E-Prime, as stated, would remove entire tenses from the English language: the progressive (“I was running”, “she’s eating”, “they’re going to Canada”), and even the often-disparaged passive, which I think can have a particularly mindfulness/clarity benefit in that it can reframe a sentence in terms of your experience. Additionally, eliminating “be” doesn’t help one of my large problems with modern speech, namely the use of “good”, “bad”, and other such overloaded terms. A friend of mine who I regularly discuss this with has counseled me that it might help our language to largely avoid all attributives, saying:

[…] almost always, even though it takes more words to describe effects that way, [doing so] clarifies my thinking about the subject in a way that justifies the extra words.

“Extra words” feels true to me especially after writing this email, but if I have one message to send today, try this exercise out! My modified E-Prime consists of:

avoid “to be” except in verbal constructions
avoid adjectives with fuzzy meanings like “bad”, “good”, “right”, “wrong”, and instead try to explain your meaning.
take care with your speech, and think hard

happy speaking!

I really like Python decorators. They provide a useful way to manipulate functions in a language that treats functions as first-class objects (i.e., a language that can pass around a function in the same way that you can pass around a string or an integer). They also provide a useful road into talking about some topics in computer science, namely closures and partial application!

But let’s start with the concrete, shall we?

Say that I’m working on an application that uses a database connection, and I find myself writing code that looks like this, using a global db variable:

def do_a_query(query):
    db.connect()
    result = db.query(query)
    db.close()
    return result

def execute_an_insert(obj):
    db.connect()
    db.insert(obj)
    db.close()
    return True

If you’ve got an eye for patterns, you’ll likely notice that I’ve re-used the same code in two places and will probably re-use it in more: opening and closing a database connection acts like a set of parentheses around my other code, and it seems tedious to write it again and again.

But here come decorators to the rescue! I can, instead, write:

def with_db(f):
    def _f_with_db(*args, **kwargs):
        db.connect()
        result = f(*args, **kwargs)
        db.disconnect()
        return result
    return _f_with_db

@with_db
def do_a_query(query):
    return db.query(query)

@with_db
def execute_an_insert(obj):
    db.insert(obj)
    return True

And it clears up a lot of the boilerplate. Fantastic! (Ignore for a moment those *args and **kwargs; we can come back to what they mean later. Suffice it to say, for now, that they pass along the arguments untouched.) I could even do something fancy, like extend my with_db function to re-use existing open connections:

def with_db(f):
    def _f_with_db(*args, **kwargs):
        try:
            result = _f_with_db(*args, **kwargs)
        except DBConnectionError:
            db.connect()
            result = f(*args, **kwargs)
    return _f_with_db

And the functions decorated with it shouldn’t care: it provides them with an active db connection that they can rely on, and that’s all they need to know.

Closures

So, let’s talk for a moment about closures. A closure, simply put, is a function – or a reference to a function – with some additional state attached. In Python, this generally looks like:

def make_a_closure(seed_variable):
    state = something_generates_state_with(seed_variable)
    def _closure(other_arg):
        return do_some_things_with(state, other_arg)
    return _closure

We would then call make_a_closure(some_seed) to get a closure function seeded with some_seed. For example, imagine that we wanted to make a function that, given a Unix Epoch timestamp, would return some predetermined format of date:

def make_a_strftime_closure(format_string):
    def _strftime_closure(epoch_timestamp):
        return time.strftime(format_string, time.gmtime(epoch_timestamp))
    return _strftime_closure

pretty_date = make_a_strftime_closure("%A, %B %e %Y")
print "The unix epoch began on %s" % pretty_date(0)
# The unix epoch began on Thursday, January  1 1970
print "Beyoncé was born on %s" % pretty_date(368434800)
# Beyoncé was born on Friday, September  4 1981

Suppose, though, we want a standardized format of time for our logs:

iso_date = make_a_strftime_closure("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z")
print "The unix epoch began on %s" % iso_date(0)
# The unix epoch began on 1970-01-01T00:00:S+0000

To tie this back to decorators: if you notice, a decorator function is just a closure with the decorated function as its bound state:

def decorate_a_function(f):
    def _decorated(*args, **kwargs):
        return f(*args, **kwargs)
    return _decorated

Partially Applied Functions

Partially applied functions sounds kind of gnarly and complicated but describes a pretty straightforward concept: applying some arguments to a function ahead of time.

Imagine, if you will, our original example with do_a_query and execute_an_insert, but this time without a global DB object:

def do_a_query_with_db(db, query):
    db.connect()
    result = db.query(query)
    db.close()
    return result

If you find yourself writing a lot of functions with a shared argument (e.g. db), you could use a partial application to supply the db argument ahead of time, using functools.partial:

do_a_query = partial(do_a_query_with_db, global_db)
do_a_query(some_query) # equivalent to do_a_query_with_db(global_db, some_query)

Python’s own documentation calls out that partial() is a pretty simple decorator:

Roughly equivalent to:

def partial(func, *args, **keywords):
    def newfunc(*fargs, **fkeywords):
        newkeywords = keywords.copy()
        newkeywords.update(fkeywords)
        return func(*(args + fargs), **newkeywords)
    newfunc.func = func
    newfunc.args = args
    newfunc.keywords = keywords
    return newfunc

So there you have it: Python’s decorators not only provide a neat way to manipulate and use functions, they also provide us a foot in the door for some pretty neat CS concepts!

Tune in next time for a choice of:

Functional Python II: Decorators and Wacky Hidden Functions
Functional Programming II: Folding and Currying

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Breakfast Focaccia Recipe
about speech
Veggie sausage
thoughts on a post by Jayarava
On English-Prime
Decorators, Closures, and Partial Application

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joshu’s blog

Recent Entries

Breakfast Focaccia Recipe

Breakfast Focaccia (à la Emeryville Arizmendi)

Olive Oil Dough

Ingredients²

Directions

Breakfast focaccia

Ingredients

Directions

Notes about toppings

about speech

Veggie sausage

ingredients

directions

notes

thoughts on a post by Jayarava

endnotes:

On English-Prime

Decorators, Closures, and Partial Application

Closures

Partially Applied Functions

Profile

April 2020

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags