Scope Creep, 2024-07-19.

It's a Friday, late in July, and all I want is to find something to jump off of and something else to jump into. But first! Scope Creep.

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SCOPE CREEP.

• I'm trying pretty hard not to get into politics here, but I do think it's important for me to state clearly that I believe that brioche hot dog buns are bad for American food culture.
  
  My family's preferred hot dog bun contains a mixture of wheat and potato flour and is made by Martin's Famous. Martin's has factories in Chambersburg, PA and Valdosta, GA. Here's a tolerably cheesy video of Martin's corporate history, which does have some manufacturing scenes, and here's a video about the warehouse automation system at their Chambersburg factory. I struck out repeatedly googling things like "chemistry potato bread vs. brioche," and eventually I DM'd Larissa Zhou, who led R&D on Modernist Bread and later completed a PhD that focused on cooking in space. I asked her what makes brioche buns so inferior to potato buns; she poked at my question a little and then sent me this wonderful response:

Bread is flour, water, salt, yeast, fat. Tune the knobs on the quantity (including 0 in some cases) of these ingredients, and you end up with different types of breads.

Functionally, mixing water + flour creates a gluten network that is inflated by the CO2 secreted by yeast. Salt is there primarily for flavor. Fat gives bread more flavors beyond that of the flour but it interferes with gluten formation. This is important to know about potato rolls and brioche, because they contain fat, but in different amounts.

Traditionally, brioche is prized for being high in butter and eggs, both of which contain a lot of fat. The more butter and eggs, the "richer" the brioche. The high amounts of fat make the dough structure more viscous and less elastic. The dough flows more like a liquid, rather than maintaining its shape like a solid. The baked product is described as tender, meaning it's not chewy like a sourdough and melts in the mouth. You can imagine that this physical structure is ideal for some applications and not ideal for others. It pulls apart easily for munching on, but it's gonna get squashed when you pile a bunch of things like burger fillings on it.

Potato rolls have some butter but not as much, so they just have more structural integrity. They contain potato starch or potato flour, which, as I recall from working on Modernist Bread, helps to retain moisture because the starch was already cooked (i.e. pre-gelatinized) and holds onto water better and therefore has an anti-staling effect. There was a period where Japanese shokupan and all these Asian/French breads were really popular and always contained this step of cooking a portion of the flour to first pre-gelatinize it, supposedly because it's the key to give the bread that soft pillowy texture, and we wanted to understand how that could be. I don't think we/the bread science literature truly got to the bottom of it, but I do think we got some insight that's in the MB books.

• But seriously, politics is something that I have been stressed out about. Disengaging from social media has helped: I basically purged myself of both Instagram and Twitter a few years ago, and while I enjoyed both of them in previous periods I've found no downsides as a result of my departure. But I enjoy feeling like I understand how the world works, and I have a hard time not checking the Times' headlines multiple times per day. I'm working to better manage this impulse, and to modulate my emotional response to what I find in the Times' headlines. The broad and perhaps obvious perspective here is that outrage, activism, and even basic civic engagement are all probably more effective when they’re directed at issues that are as local as possible. So, I’ll benefit a lot when I water the plants on my block or make cookies for the neighborhood holiday party. I’ll benefit a fair amount, and won't risk too much, by showing up to a local infrastructure planning meeting. I probably won’t benefit much from being angry about NYC's failure to implement congestion pricing, but I do have some power there so it’s worth staying engaged and voting carefully. But national politics… well, I want to be careful about how much thought and emotion I put into it.
  
  You probably know all of this, though. Anyway: On the topic of being part of a community, I enjoyed this piece about the controversy caused by the author's decision to replace a dying privet hedge with a cedar fence. Communities are weird; I'm glad to be a part of them.
• For the first time in my life, I am engaging with pro road cycling in a fairly serious way. This started last year with the first season of Netflix's Tour de France: Au cœur du peloton, which translates evocatively to "at the heart of the peloton" but was renamed as Tour de France: Unchained in the US. The series has many of the features of a reality TV show, the most notable being a compelling but slightly unsavory personality speaking directly to the camera about how they're not really here to make friends, etc. This kind of drama doesn't typically do a ton for my tastes, but when combined with an activity that I can relate to it has proven compelling, and after finishing this year's season of Au cœur du peloton (which covers last year's Tour), Ada and I decided to watch both this year's Tour (which wraps up in a few days) and the 30 for 30 documentary on Lance Armstrong.
  
  Probably my biggest takeaway from all of these is just how underdeveloped the sport of pro road cycling is. Lance Armstrong's success at the TDF seems to have been totally contingent upon his unique abilities as an ambassador for the sport, partly as a result of his nationality (cycling was hungry for an American audience) and partly as a result of his personal narrative (regardless of his extensive cheating, the guy did, in fact, come back from cancer to become the strongest cyclist in the world). It took literally a decade for Armstrong to admit to doping, a period during which he was largely protected by teammates (many of whom spoke straightforwardly about how intimidating he was), rivals (ditto), and Tour leadership (which Armstrong equivocates about having had "in his pocket"). Everyone involved seems to have been fighting over table scraps from the bigger international sports leagues, and the way they saw it, the attention that Armstrong brought to cycling was worth the price of his relentless cheating and cruel attitude towards anyone except Jan Ullrich.
  
  I would like to think that cycling has matured since then, but watching the Tour today is not exactly the highest-caliber sports viewership experience. The highlight reels that NBC Sports puts on YouTube are cut together from the live broadcast, with big time jumps and little effort made to craft a continuous narrative. They also seem to have worse video and sound quality than the full stage broadcasts, which you can replay on-demand on Peacock but which lack any kind of chapter markers, "most replayed" notes, or even a continuous map view that would aid the viewer to skip ahead to a sprint or big climb.
  
  That said, I'm finding the Tour about as compelling to watch as Au cœur du peloton made it out to be — which is to say that I'm enjoying it quite a bit, and have been genuinely antsy to follow its progress from day to day. And I've even learned a few concrete ideas in the process, for instance the fact that a chicane is a jog in a racetrack, for instance a quick left followed by a quick right turn, employed to reduce speed or simply to make the race more challenging. The word derives from the same French word that gives us chicanery, and chicanes are in that sense tricks that course designers use to complicate an otherwise simple route.