Epic adventurer - Bread - Every day fresh loaf for one

One of the things I'd like to be able to enjoy on my planned epic River Murray adventure, is fresh bread.

I can make bread due to a previous enjoyed "Thing", but I cant make a small loaf for one on an open fire. Or at least I couldn't until today.

Every couple of years I get to hang out with two of the most interesting people I know, and at some point each time, we try to make bread on a camp fire.

It almost works a bit.

Sometimes.

Almost.

But not quite.

They tend toward atemptedbread made with chocolate, marshmallows, and M&Ms.

I tend toward trying to talk them out of it.

Sadly, and most enjoyably, neither approach seems to work better than the other.

In fact, I think the only loaf to have worked so far was an M&M/marshmallow concoction that tasted a bit like a bee rolled in flour might.

With this in mind I thought I should try a stack of different approaches to try to make a functional camp loaf for one.

I think I succeeded, and found a half decent way to make a reliable mini-loaf that can be easily made over an open fire.

I started with some salt.

Salt is really, really important. You really cant make bread without it. If you try, what you get is glue.

I'm making a small loaf so I'm using a small amount of salt.

Exactly one small amount.




I also added a small amount of sugar. Perhaps a 1/4 of a teaspoon.

I add some flour.

Around a third of a cup.

Next time I do this I will try a half a cup, because the loaf didn't quite fill my container.

And some water.

Also around a third of a cup.

And this much dry yeast.

I mixed it with the spoon handle in a way that I thought looked a bit like an automatic bread maker doing it's thing.

Basically I gripped the spoon in my fist, and forced the dough around a small bowl in a circular manner until it seemed a bit like dough.







I went with a very wet dough that I would only mix with a stick (in this case a spoon handle) rather than needing to knead. Kneading is way too tricky in a world without kitchen benches, and everything made in a camp kitchen, needs to be made in a single bowl to be practical.

Stir it like crazy, and it will work a treat.

I covered it with some plastic wrap, and waited until it doubled in size.

"Doubled in size" is a thing you hear a lot when your'e learning to make bread.









It's a very difficult thing to gauge. In my experence  most people (me included) tend to wait far too long, and end up having their loaf rise way too much. The best way to get the hang of this doubling business, is to leave the dough to rise in a tall thin container. Perhaps something like a spaghetti jar, or a measuring jug.  In a tall thin container, the only way for the dough to go is up, and as a result, it's very easy to see when a loaf has doubled in size.

Trying to determine when a loaf has doubled in size in a normal bowl is very hit and miss.

I quite like hit and miss, but if you want a good loaf, use a tall thin container to check the loaf has risen to double it's volume before you move to the next step.

Anyway...

After the correct amount of wait, the dough has risen what looks like only a tiny bit.

This tiny bit is really double it's original volume.

A cup 1cm wider than a different cup has a MUCH greater volume.

Doubled in volume looks like "a bit wider, and a bit taller"

If you can notice the dough is bigger, it's probably doubled.

Next, I rubbed butter all over the surfaces that the dough would come in contact with.

This cooking ... thing is something that's been in my family since I was a toddler.

I don't know what it's called, but I'm guessing the world knows it as a "waffle iron" or something like that.





It's normal use is to cook stuff between two slices of bread, buttered on the outside to stop sticking and burning.  Filling's include stuff with cheese, cheese, and more cheese.

I added the once risen dough, and searched around for a warm spot to set it for it's final rise.

The best spot is always a place that is wasting heat. In my home that's the wireless router.

It's always just lurking there bleeding heat out into the universe.

There always seem to be a lot of wires in the proximity of wireless things. And there always seems to be a lot of wasted heat as well.

Useful heat.



Bread rising heat.

It looked like this when it had doubled in volume again.

Most of the visual doubling is due to my moving the camera closer, but really, this has risen a lot.

Although It's possible I got the photo's around the wrong way.

Just remember that doubling in volume doesn't look like much has happened.



If it looks like a lot has happened, it's probably too much.

So now it's time to cook the thing.

It looked like this after a few minutes.

And this after a few more.













It sounded hollow when it was tapped, so I figured it was probably cooked.

It looked like this when it was cut in half, and it tasted just like bread.

A totally successful method of creating a mini loaf for one on an open fire.

The openness of my un-open fire is obviously something I'll need to deal with, but with a bit of practice, this system will definitely work in the real world on a real open fire.




I'm calling this a total success, and over the next few months, I'll be perfecting this method to the point where I can rely on my ability to make a perfect(ish) fresh mini-loaf of bread every day with only minimal effort.

Next time we make camp bread, we might actually get to eat some.

Perhaps now, the haunting, ethereal voice I heard at the last camp, wafting over the bread/chocolate/marshmallow smoke filled site, and endlessly in my nightmares, ...

"Dont pay attention to [Bullwinkle]"
"He knows nothing"
"He doesn't care"

Can finally be put to rest.

The next time I share a camp-site with these young bakers will see real M&M, marshmallow, and chocolate bread, baked in the waffle irons they forced their parents to buy.

It will be a truly great day for bee flavoured bread.




120 Things in 20 years - Reinventing ancient technology again and again in spite

Aquaponics - Tomato in PVC

It's been a while since I used PVC in a novel way, so I thought I'd cut all the leaves off my tomato and ram the stems and roots into a PVC pipe.

It seems to have worked.

I like to think of it as a solution.

I started with four tomato plants that have been happily growing with their roots just dangling in my fish tank.

That's them after I fulled them from their comfortable home and lay them on top of the fish tank. They are around a metre long from root tip to top.

They look healthy, and have a stack of clusters of flowers and little fruit forming all over the place.



They were a bit bushy to fit them into a PVC tube with a 90 degree angle and it was going to be way too difficult to jam all that foliage through the pipe, so I trimmed some of it away.

Trimmed.

Now it fit easily into the pipe so that the tips were peeking out of one end, and the roots hanging out of the other.











The only thing now is to see if my aquaponics system will be a nice enough place for it to live that it bounces back from my cutty mistreatment.

I'm willing to bet this experiment will work quite well.

One potential problem I can see is that it will still try to make foliage in the pipe, and as a result, the conditions in the Tube will be damp and still, and that might lead to disease.

If that looks like being the case, I can always simply cut the PVC away with scissors.

It only has to last long enough for the tomatoes to reach outside and concentrate their growing out there.

Once there is enough foliage outside, and if I do have to cut the PVC away, it should be easy enough to keep the stems inside the grow house free of new growth.




120 Things in 20 years - only time will tell if my aquaponics PVC tomato works. It should be just a few weeks before I know.

Aquaponics - Training tomato plants

I'm trying to teach my tomato a lesson.

I'm tring to teach it to play outside.

It's way too crowded inside my growhouse for a tomato plant, so I've decided it has to go outside.

There's a small triangle space that's near the top of the fishtank, which should alow for enough space.

To force it to grow that way, I thought I might try just leaning it over, and covering it.

The roots have come a little way out of the fish tank as a result of leaning it over, but there are still a lot that make it into the water.

It's been like this a few days now, and I think it's working.

Maybe.

The tomatoes do seem to be ignoring my wishes and growing up, but that might just be from habit.

It's hoped that they will find their way out of the corner and then down the side of the growhouse, but it might take a while.















120 Things in 20 years thinks the secret to training tomatoes is a firm but calm voice, and patience ... and an aquaponics system... and a blue tarp.

Aquaponics - Nebuliser

We don't like zeds in this country.

That's why we spell words like "nubulizer" with an "s".

I pretty much spell how I think words should be spelt, and let Ubuntu take care of the rest.

But...

This bit is the bit of a medical nebuliser that seems to make the fog.

As far as I can tell (I unplugged the hose when nobody was looking) the rest of the device is just an air pump like the kind people use in their aquariums or aquaponics systems.

The medication is in liquid form, and sits above the aqua disk. That's aqua the colour, not aqua as in Aqua-Man.

From what I can work out, the liquid spills under the disk via the tiny grooves you can see in the side of it, and then runs into a stream of air that employs standard magic to make it into fog.

With me blowing through it, it creates a spray rather than a mist, and it's not even close to a fog.

That's it working in my hallway.

It wasn't as bad as it looks on camera.

So I'm guessing the pump can dump a lot more air pressure to it than I can.

That, or the medication isn't water based. But I don't think it is anything other that water, because an angry nurse once told me it was drug laced saline [solution].

Up close it looked like this.

Not very foggy.

Even as it is, it might make a useful aerator.

There are a lot of different thoughts out there as to how aerators work in a fish tank, and I wish someone with an oxygen probe would just do a few simple tests and prove what's going on.




Oxygen (and other gasses) are soluble in water. A lake gets it's oxygen from the bit that meets the air. That's all good and well for a lake, but people like to keep more fish per cubic metre than a lake, so we need to add air. The air only dissolves into the tiniest depth of the top before that bit gets saturated with as much oxygen as it feels like carrying, and leaves the rest to float around, way up in the sky.

Unfortunately there is a lot of poor science out there telling us how and why water and air does all this. Actually the science isn't all that poor, but tends to relate to sewage treatment rather than fish tanks. And then does some dodgy science as well, but I digress.

1. Some say the air bubbles from an air pump in a fish tank simply increase the surface area exposed to the air. The fish tank surface, plus the surface of each of the many bubbles equals lots of surface.  It definitely does that, and there is the added benefit that the air is under pressure. The deeper it is, the more pressure there is. It turns out air under pressure likes to squirm it's way into water a bit more than usual.

2. Some say oxygen uptake is mostly done as the bubbles hit the surface. Something about the large increase in surface area as the bubbles break and splash around all over the shop.

3. Still others think that all that other stuff is happening, but the main thing the bubbles do is drag water up with them as they rise, and as a result, create a current in the tank, and constantly expose new lump of water to the air.

4. Many combine any number of those and some add some stuff about breaking surface tension. Some quote other people saying stuff about breaking surface tension being important, and get that mixed up with number 2 above. Others think that breaking the surface tension just means you don't get a sheet of water that keeps being the topmost layer because surface tension looks a bit like it might be a separate bit of water doing the surface tension thing, and it might not be moving much.

5. By far, the majority of people don't care because they don't have a fish tank, and the most intelligent of us that do, tend to ignore the entire debate and just stick an air stone into our tanks and attach it to an air pump.

Sadly I don't belong in that last category.

I care.

I've cared since I was a lad.

I had some guppies once in a five foot fish tank.

They all got out and went for a walk on the carpet.

They took all the water with them.

But luckily, a nice farmer took them all to his pond where they lived forever as far as I know.

Anyway...

I tend toward argument 3 with perhaps a little 4, but definitely aiming for 5.

I have only two fish in 1000 litres of fish tank, so there isn't a lot of competition for air, but I also have worms living and reproducing all completely under water. Two of my grow beds are run as constant flood beds. This means that they are always full, yet my worms don't drown.

This is a good indication of well oxygenated water, because it turns out that worms only drown when the water they are in doesn't have high enough levels of dissolved oxygen. Most aquaponics systems end up full of worms, even if you don't add them. I added some adult worms to my system ages ago, and regularly find adult and baby worms when I pull up a plant.

I have no idea how much dissolved oxygen worms need to thrive, and I cant find the answer anywhere, so if you know a student that needs an experiment, make them do it.

But get them to tell me the results.






120 Things in 20 years, I'm not really sure what this aquaponics nebuliser post was really about in the end, but I for one feel more informed as a result of having read it to check it to make sure not too much of my head fell out.

Aquaponics - Absurdly low energy system test result

I rigged something of a test to see if I could use my powerhead to create the zero head system I keep banging on about.

I'm not sure what the results mean.

It's very difficult to measure the flow when you can lift the pipe out of the water to check, but I think the test went some way to proving the concept.

When I turned on the pump I got around a 2.5 cm difference in water level between the grow bed and the the fish tank. I think that means that If I have a pipe joining the two, I should see all that head equal out. As it is I did have a pipe, but I suspect there was some air in it and I'm not sure how effective it was, but there was definitely flow.

Another major problem with my test is that I didnt want to break apart my powerhead. If I broke it and put the impeller into a tight fitting tube, I think I would move a LOT more water. As it was there was an inch of free space around the impeller where water could flow back past it the wrong way.




This video shows the pump being turned on at around 5seconds into the video, and it shifting 1cm deep of water from a completely full half blue barrel in 20 seconds.

So I think if I break the case off and commit to the design, I should be able to double my flow.

I made that double number up. Really I have no idea.

I think the flow I got was around 800LPH from a 12 watt powerhead, but as I said, there is a lot I can do to make it better.

for one thing, using a corrugated pipe is a bad idea, as is using siphons to go up and over rather than using bigger pipes directly connected. These were necessary because I didn't want to drill holes in the grow beds as I plan on using them differently.

I'll do some more tests, but for now I want to do a system expansion, and make a decent sized system that will feed us.



120 Things in 20 years, where we have industrial design standards, above which we will not go.

Aquaponics - Powerhead zero head test

The absurdly low energy aquaponics system I've been working on, will probably use a power head to shift water between a fish tank, and a constant flood grow bed, both kept at the same water level so that the pump can run at it's most efficient.

To this end, I put a powerhead in a 90mm pvc pipe to see what kind of flow I can expect.

It definitely looks like being viable.

With only the tiniest head, the thing moved a lot of water. With a head of more than 2 cm, almost no water flowed at all, but I'm hoping to make a zero head system so it should work fine.

It's difficult to see the flow because I cant raise the pipe very much at all without stopping the flow altogether, but there is quite a bit of water fowing over the edge.

I would guess around 2000L an hour.

The flow at zero head with the pipe submerged is a lot more than this picture with a little head to overcome.






120 Things in 20 years, Aquaponics - Powerhead zero head test. I have an ear ache.

Entomology - Buzz pollination via electric bee

According to this reliable source , buzz pollination is something blue banded bees do, and is something tomato plants like.

I've only seen one blue banded bee in my aquaponics system, and that's the same one I've only also seen in my life*, so I thought I'd do a bit of dodgy science.

I've arbitrarily divided my system into electric bee buzz pollinated , and not. The right hand side will be buzzed, the left hand side, not buzzed.

I'll buzz it every day for a few weeks with what we electric bee experts like to call an...

 "e l e c t r i c   t o o t h b r u s h"

My trial involves resting the end of the electric bee buzz pollinator on the branch near the flowers and activating the device for a few seconds.

Science can be complicated.




I'll only buzz the right hand side of my tomato plants and see if there is any increase in the fruit setting rate. I'll be a bit vague about it, because if the difference isn't obvious, it's not really worth doing, so I think I'll judge it by counting the number of flowers that fail to be pollinated as compared to the number that succeed.

I'll start the count in say10 days and run it for another ten where I count. That way I wont be counting existing flowers.



120 Things in 20 years, Where else would you find equipment as complicated as an entomologist's buzz pollination electric bee?




*I've read that a few times and I'm pretty sure it means something

Aquaponics - Bean density experiment - Opps

When you pack up and go fishing halfway through some science, your desire to catch protein can ruin your experiments in growing protein.

It can still be possible to draw some conclusions about the experiment.

a. The 1,2*,4,8, and 16 bean pots all seemed to grow at around the same rate. The 32 bean pot lost 3 plants when they were already quite established and healthy looking (but not as big as all the others), and also was the only pot that looked like it suffered from insect and disease attack. The others seemed fine.

b. Sometimes fishing makes bean plants go all crunchy.




*In the pot with 2 seeds, only one sprouted.



Protein:- Grow it or fish for it. All the big questions asked, but often left un-answered here at 120 Things in 20 years 

Aquaponics - Bean seed density experement

As mentioned earlier I thought I'd see how densely I could plant bean seeds before they started to suffer.

To this end I've planted different numbers of bean seeds in plastic cups to be grown in my NFT tubes.

I started with six of my standard plastic drinking cups with holes drilled in the bottom to allow water to flow through. If you make some, don't forget you can drill a stack of ten at a time.

I added one, two, four, eight, sixteen, and thirty two seeds to each cup in turn.

They will grow to seedling size in my little seed raising grow house, until they are big enough that their roots will reach down to the water in my NFT tubes.

I tend to wait until the first signs of their real leaves rather than the two first leaves that the seed turns into. In previous tests where I've pulled up seedlings, I've noticed that by the time their first real leaves appear, their tap roots are well developed and reach the bottom of the cups. This seems to apply to every variety I've tested.

I guess roots are pretty important things to grow first. Plants manage for quite a while without light, but only hours without water.

With a lot of small seeds I don't bother covering them as their is a steady rain of water from the roof of my little grow house, but with the bean seeds I worry that they might dry out as they stand up much higher than the damp media, so I cover them with scoria.








I water them with fish tank water, and on this occasion I added a little seasol ( a seaweed extract plant tonic) because there are going to be a lot of seedlings and I don't want them begging for trace elements.

The fish tank water stands around an inch deep or a third of the way up the cups.

There is also a pot with my twice weekly lettuce planting, an experimental seed raising method that I'll talk about later, and also an additional cup with 20 pea seeds buried because I love peas.

I've only just done this, so it's going to be a while before I can report results.

Unfortunately this isn't going to be a case of "and here's one a made earlier".





120 Things in 20 years - Still trying to rob perfectly innocent giants of their golden egg laying livestock with Aquaponics - Bean seed density experiments in an attempt to build a better magic bean scaffolding.

Aquaponics - Raising seeds

My experimental seed raising system started nearly two months ago, and consisted of a small seed raising mini-growhouse with an inch of fish tank water in the bottom.

The little growhouse was filled with plastic cups with holes drilled in the bottom. These were filled with scoria as my grow medium.

For the first two months or so everything semed to grow well. I would just drop the seeds on the top of the media, (except for beans, where I added a layer of scoria over the top) and was seeing around 50% success in germination.

The condensation forming inside the mini-growhouse would rain down on the seeds and keep them moist.


Most of what I was growing was basil, and coz lettuce. As the plants got big enough that I thought their tap root reached the bottom of the cup, I'd move them into my NFT tubes.

The interesting thing was that the water stayed fresh.

Very fresh. No smell and it looked clear enough to drink.

Normally water left sitting for months would sour, but even though the water had fish nutrient  (the water was from the fish tank) it stayed sweet.

Pictured here is what it looks like after three months.

Its still surprisingly clear and still has no smell.











I plant coz lettuce every few days to keep a constant supply, but the last few batches haven't done so well, so I thought I'd inspect the growhouse a bit more closely.

It still looks pretty good, but there are some signs of the water going a little slimy. Keep in mind this is the original water.

It's possible that the slime is rotting the seeds before they can germinate, or perhaps it's just that the nutrient is depleted, but I thought I should was it down and start again.

From now on I think I'll clean it every month or so.

It's no great task to was it, but I wanted to see how long it would last. It seems that the cycle of evaporation, condensation, and dripping rain from the ceiling all within the little growhouse has in some way kept everything fresh.

The brown you can see is dirt on the bottom rather than slime growing or fish solids. Some of the original pots for the basil were not cleaned as well as they could have been.


All in all, it's been an interesting experiment, and I can see no reason why it shouldn't continue to be my way of growing lettuce seedlings on an ongoing fashion.

[Not all seeds took well to it. The baby spinach tended to rot before germination, as did larger seeds like rock melon, although both those seed types came from old packets, so it's possible the method had nothing to do with it]


120 Things in 20 years - where shortcuts and time saving, lazy methods of aquaponics, and raising seeds is a way of life.

Aquaponics - Stake 'n beans

I cant really see why a plant like a bean needs all the space the seed packet tells me it needs.

I figure instead of giving them some kind of string or stake to climb on, I'll just give them more beans to climb on.

With this in mind, I planted fifteen bean seeds in a single plastic NFT cup a few days ago.

Fourteen have sprung to life, and are looking good. It's still early days yet, but I suspect, with a plant like a bean, they will each find enough real estate to express their beanie selves, and will probably do alright.

That's them on the left, and right now they don't look like much, but it's either going to turn into a jungle, or some kind of rotten swamp in no time.

If it works, I doubt I'll get a harvest fourteen times as much as I would have with one plant, but I should do better than the single.

At the very least, it should be interesting.

I planted one or two in each cup in the previous batch, and unfortunately didn't count how many beans we harvested. This time didn't plant any cups with just a single bean to compare outputs with my fourteen bean cup, but that's my plan for tomorrow.

I think I'll do a test with different cups with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and if I have enough seeds left, I'll do one with 32 bean plants all growing in the same standard, small, plastic cup. I'll measure the output from each cup, and decide which is the beast way to go.




120 Things in 20 years, bringing you free, NFT, bean science, even if you don't want it.

Aquaponics - My first mature core sample

Sometimes science can be really boring.

Sometimes I like to blog about it.

I'll keep it short...

I pulled out my core sampler to investigate it's contents.

Emptied it onto a tasteful 70's tray to see what was inside.

And found a small amount of fish poop.

Mold making - My first casting

Casting is the process of sticking stuff in a mold and creating a copy of the thing the mold was originally made from.

I'll be using hot glue from a hot glue gun.

I spread a thin layer of soap over the mold to allow the mold to release. Using glue in something you hold pressed together for a while is perhaps a dodgy plan, but hopefully the soap will prevent it's sticking.

I filled both halves of the mold with glue, then pressed them together.

There was a bit much glue, and nowhere for it to go so the glue overflowed between the two halves of the mold.

In future it might be worth drilling a small hole to let out excess glue.

Other than that, it seems to have worked.

The excess was easy enough to trim with scissors.

Leaving a pretty good copy of the original.

Pictured is the copy after it had been heated with a flame to smooth it out a bit.









There were a few lessons learnt here.

a. If there is nowhere for the glue to escape, it attempts an escape between the molds.

b. If you try to mold hot glue in cold molds, it tends to set a bit too quickly mefore you can press the molds together properly.

c. a, and b above mean the copy can be taller than the original as the molds didn't press together completely and there was a gap. The resulting copy was taller than the original by the thickness of the overflow that had to be trimmed with scissors.

All in all a successful experiment.

Aquaponics - Home made media

I did an experiment last night where I mixed some clay soil from my backyard with some crushed up goat dung. The plan was to try to make something like scoria, for use as a home made media for a grow bed, but just to see if it could be done.

And voilà!

First, I spread some whole dung out on a tray. Then I made a mixture of clay,water, and powdered goat dung. My theory was that the powdered goat dung would create thousands of tiny holes in the finished product. This would create some happy housing for the nitrifying bacteria required by aquaponics.

I then poured the mixture over the tray of whole dung. The design behind using the whole dung was an attempt to make it break into irregular shapes later on in the process.

Next I set it out to dry. If I was making an amount greater than this tiny test, I would have poured it onto the ground in the sun. But it was raining so I put it on some foil, and dried it on the fire. DONT DO THIS AT HOME! It can smell a little agricultural. When the yelling stops, you know your tile is dry.

Lay it out and build a fire over it. You want your fire to be 900 deg C or more. Clay will undergo a permanent chemical change at around 600 deg C (don't quote me on that number) where it becomes no longer possible to wet it back down to clay. The physical water steams off at 100 deg C, but at those higher temperatures its not just drying the clay, it's actually changing it into something else.

I actually fired mine in my living room wood burning heater, but to make it properly you need the kind of temperature that makes iron glow bright cherry red (~900C) It's quite doable in a decent fire.(a match burns at around that temperature).

A normal pot would crack if treated like this but because there is so much organic matter leaving the clay body porous, we can get away with it. It doesn't matter if it cracks anyway.

Next. Smash it.(see)

Its done (see top pic)

Delicious.

I have no idea if this is practical or useful in any way to anyone, but it was in my head so it had to come out.