For a party that has an elf and a half-foot, both races that seem to have very large ears, it was kind of surprising to see Laios be the one using his hearing to scout his way through the dungeon, but he was very good at it.

When it comes to eating monsters on the third level, when they mentioned skeletons, I was expecting them to make bone broth at some point, but perhaps undead bones don’t have the same kind of flavor/marrow that non-undead (dead?) bones have. Instead, we get to see how Senshi farms using golems. I think my favorite part of this sequence was Marcy’s farming style, it reminds me a bit of Bakarina when she is farming.

The orc attack came out of nowhere, but it did provide the first hints at how to proceed with the ostensible goal of killing and eating a red dragon rescuing Falin. Making bread from a sourdough starter like they show here is a lot of fun, but I totally get the kid’s question of if they are playing with mud. Sourdough starter like that looks and smells pretty bad unless you are used to it.

One other thing about making bread from a sourdough starter is that the bread has a lot of complexity of flavor due to the natural yeast, but conversely, it rises super slowly. Commercial yeast that you buy in the grocery store is super optimized to start fermenting quickly and to ferment at a very rapid pace. The natural yeast in sourdough is much slower and less efficient. However, it results in more complexity and variation of the fermentation output.

My point in bringing this up is that they definitely had a bit of a time skip there while the bread was rising. For context, my sourdough recipe that I use my starter for, has a total rise time of 3 hours and 20 minutes spread across a couple steps. This is the reason most recipes you look up for sourdough bread use starter, but then they also use a packet of commercial yeast as well, it dramatically reduces the time it takes (example from King Arthur Flour that cuts about an hour of time off of my recipe).

I have had a number of instances lately in which I have been able to try to spread the gospel of breadmaking. First, I talked about shokupan in 'Tis Time For Torture Princess, then I ran across a manga series recently about making bread in a brick oven. I hadn’t realized until the past month how much bread knowledge I would be able to apply to anime/manga.