Having recently started my "gardening leave" between positions, I have some more personal time available. I'm planning to stay productive, contributing to some open-source projects, but it also occurred to me that despite [talking about](https://speice.io/2018/05/hello.html) bread pics, this blog has been purely technical. Maybe I'll change the site title from "The Old Speice Guy" to "Bites and Bytes"?
Either way, I'm baking a little bit again, and figured it was worth taking a quick break to focus on some lighter material. I recently learned two critically important lessons: first, the temperature of the dough when you put the yeast in makes a huge difference.
Previously, when I wasn't paying attention to dough temperature:
Now, the recipe normally calls for a Dutch Oven to bake the bread because it keeps the dough from drying out in the oven. Because I don't own a Dutch Oven, I typically put a casserole dish on the bottom rack and fill it with water so there's still some moisture in the oven. This time, I forgot to add the water and learned my second lesson: never add room-temperature water to a glass dish that's currently at 500 degrees.
I've been writing a lot more during this break, so I'm looking forward to sharing that in the future. In the mean-time, I'm planning on making a sandwich.
