Zoning out

Those are fine looking loaves, Mr. Beagles.  Based upon my very limited experience I would say that, crust-wise, it's a temperature issue.  Home ovens lack the thermal mass of commercial units and will lose a lot heat once you start filling up the racks.  I use a thermometer in the oven rather than trust the dial; just because the dial is set to 350 degrees does not mean it's actually 350 degrees.  Hell, the thermometer could be wrong, too.

Have you ever gotten the crust you seek?  Do you measure ingredients by volume or by weight?  I've read that measuring by weight is best for most consistent results, but you know what you are doing and I don't.  Uncle Ken isn't the only one who can talk out of his ass.

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The concept of time zones may have been my earliest exposure to an abstract concept except for religion and Santa Claus.  It was a wacky notion that if you cross a certain imaginary line you can gain or lose an hour.

A few countries today have time zones that are offset by thirty or forty-five minutes, but I don't know how well that works out for them.  Maintaining schedules must be a bitch.  Then there's China, which has only one time zone, which is odd for such a large country; everything is on Beijing Standard Time.

When we think of Chinese people, we usually think of the Han ethnic group, but there are other groups in China, especially in the western provinces.  Those folks are often Muslim, and don't think much of Beijing Standard Time and use their own local time for scheduling.  Maybe everybody wears a couple of wrist watches lest they run afoul of the authorities back east.

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So, what's the deal with chicken?  You can preserve other types of meat using methods such as smoking, drying, salting, and pickling.  Dry aged beef, I'm told, yields the best steaks but I've never heard of dry aged chicken (or turkey). We have beef jerky but not chicken; what makes poultry different, is it all due to salmonella?  Raw beef and fish are often safe for human consumption, but never chicken or other poultry, to the best of my knowledge.  Perhaps humans lack a certain gene which allows other predators to chow down on birds with so much gusto.

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Green must have been a popular color in the early fifties.  I remember when my father picked me up with his brand spanking new '53 Chevy with a two-tone green paint job, the height of swank.  Not just green, but two-tone green.  The car was so new it had brown paper on the seats to protect the upholstery during shipping, but I thought it was a really cheap car to have paper covered seats.  Nice car, very reliable, but it rusted out before I learned how to drive.  It lasted seven years, which was considered a long time back in the day.