Dream dough

A waking dream this morning about kneading some bread dough which had gone wrong. Somehow, a lot of the dough has got out of the mixing bowl. Some of it having got under the rim of the bowl, some of it having got further afield. But it has all dried out and I am having a terrible job kneading all the dry & lumpy dough back into something like properly soft & smooth bread dough.

A rather odd dream in that while, if the first rise has gone on too long and risen up and out of its bowl, one might have some dry bits, I do not knead the dough in the mixing bowl. Rather, the dough is mixed in the mixing bowl, then dumped onto the table for the first knead, then put back in the mixing bowl for first rise, then dumped back onto the table for the second knead. Furthermore, dry bits has never been a problem; they quickly knead back into the mass of the dough.

For some reason, in writing the first of the two paragraphs above, I associated to a striking sentence I read recently at the beginning of reference 1. I quote: 'Language is a central link through which we interact with other people. As a channel of communication it is limited by our physical ability to speak only one word at a time. The question arises therefore how the complex products of our brain are transformed into the linear string of words that comprise speech or text. Since our mental processes are far from being one dimensional, the use of memory is essential, as is the existence of some type of correlations in time'. Put another way, it is remarkable that the thoughts and images about the three dimensional outside world, a world which is continuously evolving in time, can so successfully be reduced to a one dimensional stream of bits, of zeroes and ones.

At a more prosaic level, I note that my most recent batch of bread was the 457th. 457 in the five or six years since I stopped cycling to the baker in Cheam because of back pains brought on by my cycling posture, hunched over the handlebars. For which see reference 2. Probably more batches of bread than an apprentice baker (if there still are such) would ever make by hand.

PS: checking this morning, it seems that what was a small baker in Cheam is now one branch of a three branch operation, an operation which looks much more fancy than the one I knew, so I must go and inspect. Is their white bread still up to scratch or have they sold out to fancy goods? In the meantime there is reference 3.

Reference 1: Hierarchical structures induce long-range dynamical correlations in written texts - E. Alvarez-Lacalle, B. Dorow, J.-P. Eckmann, and E. Moses – 2006.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=baker+cheam.

Reference 3: http://village-bakers.co.uk/.