Entries from April 2008
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- Ingredients
- 3 cups unbleached white bread flour (e.g., Whole Foods bulk item #5100)
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp (no mistake!) instant yeast
- Approximately 11 oz of water
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- Optional: cornmeal, bran, coarse or fine flour to sprinkle on top
Equipment
- 8-10″ wide round or oval pot, with sides at least 5-6″ tall, with tightly-fitting lid. Cast-iron dutch ovens work well
- Pizza stone, ceramic tiles, or bricks in the oven for thermal mass (I got two 16″ tiles from the Cupertino HomeDepot for about $7)
- Shallow roasting pan
In ceramic or glass mixing bowl, mix dry ingredients with a rubber spatula (or a wooden spoon). Add water and continue mixing to create a very wet dough that sticks to everything. If it seems too dry (more like a normal dough), [Read more →]
The search for the Ideal Wall system is the Holy Grail of the sustainable building movement. The Ideal Wall is cheap and easy to build with, needs little in the way of heating or cooling, has little or no embodied energy, and lasts for a really, really long time.
Increasingly, the concensus is that the systems we’ve been using for the last sixty-plus years don’t meet these criteria. Not only do they waste energy, but they’re only designed to last sixty years! What’s happened is that we’ve optimized residential construction to take advantage of [Read more →]
The Basics of Indoor Air Quality Part I
The use of “green” building products and design stems from two concerns: concern for the impact of our activities on our environment, and concern for the impact our environment has on us. Increasingly, people recognize that contamination of the air we breathe in our homes has significant consequences for our health and quality of life. Quite literally, some people’s houses are making them ill.
Indoor air quality (IAQ) related-illness is increasingly common in homes, offices, and commercial buildings, it even has a name: Sick Building Syndrome. It could be that more people are sensitized [Read more →]
