nominative determinism
posts from 2025 / 08
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Fun page turner alt-history of an American dropped into a world without the west. Almost YA, and much of it’s time, and I’m unsure how it would survive critical analysis today, but I liked it.
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every time I walk past this house I’m like “Damn, I didn’t think people actually used More Windows (high color)”
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My third Waldrop collection, and as a completionist confonting a best-of, I ended up skipping a few stories I’ve already read in “Howard Who?” and “Going Home Again.” Still a must for Waldrop readers. I particularly enjoyed “Night of the Cooters” and “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll.”
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My first exposure to Waldrop, via a Kelly Link interview and small beer press opens with a bang, “The Ugly Chickens,” but I think my favorite was “Man-Mountain Gentian” about the Waldrop-invented world of profeesional zen-sumo wrestling. I immediately started to seek out the rest of his work.
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I particularly enjoyed “The Sawing Boys” and “El Castillo de la Perseverancia.” Waldrop’s unique voice has me working through all of his (often overlapping) story collections, and makes me wonder if I should start going to SF cons to hear the current generation’s readings of their own works.
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I also started the night with two 100% cold fermentation 18" NY styles for the kids. Both were supposed to be 90% bread flour, 10% whole wheat, but I forgot the whole wheat in one of the dough balls so I labeled the tub on that side to see what difference it would make. I do the flour split calcs just in time, so they both had the same flour by weight, the only difference is which kind.
Wheat made a big difference, look how big it is!
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it’s a running joke in chat that we don’t own mandolines and anyone who uses a mandoline needs to be wearing safety gloves the entire time they handle the things and I’m pretty damn accident prone so I simply chose to never own one.
Well, I really wanted to try take on this zucchini pizza so I bought a safe-design one ( https://bydash.com/products/safe-slice-mandoline) instead of a benriner and gloves.
It does the job! You end up with ovals where I guess you could get circles from a benriner. Oh well?
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Ah, jeeze, I see now that my take on the sweet corn pizza was missing thinly sliced (probably mandolined) red onion, that’ll totally fix it. Welp, I know what I’m doing next Friday!
Also, I made a batch a chili oil with simple red pepper flakes simmered in olive oil a while back and keep it in a deli container, it’s a big lift for anything it goes on.
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Had a bunch of people over yesterday and tried to replicate what we had at Oobatz. I went w/:
90% zero zero
10% whole wheat
65% hydration
1% sourdough starter
8 hour warm fermentation with bowl folds between meetings when I remembered
48 cold fermentation, 4 hour counter warm
the zucchini pizza was incredible (not Oobatz incredible but, close maybe?), the sweet corn was missing something, maybe simply parsley (I forgot it), unsure.
Fleur de sel on the crust is a pro move.
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bonus if you don’t follow the wheat producer link, this fun infographic of wheats in a population what that looks like a @paulrickards plotter postcard
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home again, researching Oobatz’s pizza maker, Dan Pearson, who took a neat path to Oobatz and in which I learned that I probably need to buy a mandolin to slice properly (boo, I’ll probably shoot my eye out), and that in addition to using 100% sourdough, he uses population wheat, which I’d never heard of, explained by this unrelated producer: https://wakelyns.co.uk/yq/
warning: apple podcasts link, linking only because it has a text transcript, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/106-the-american-baker-dan-pearson-behind-the-best/id1225708803?i=1000591392995&r=36
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had pizza at Oobatz ( https://www.oobatz.fr) in Paris this week.
Holy moly it was great, like, wow, maybe my favorite pizza ever? I’m definitely going to try these tooping choices at home.
we asked the server if they could give any hints at the what the “surprise” pizza tonight was, and no, they could not. great concept.
