Wild Yeast

This is a bread we made in class (way back in the halcyon bread days, before butter and sugar commandeered my educational life).

I modified the formula to use liquid instead of stiff levain. I removed the small amount of instant yeast, and increased the fermentation and proof times accordingly. I used a different seed mixture and slightly increased the amount of whole grain flour. I added an autolyse (rest period after fours are mixed with water and starter).

So is this the same bread we made in class? Here I turn to G. W. F. Hegel, who said, “Identity is the identity of identity and non-identity.” That clears things up nicely, doesn’t it?

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One of the questions people ask me most often is why you need to discard a portion of your starter every time you feed it. The answer is — you don’t; you can bake with it instead, if you’re in a baking frame of mind. However, as far as perpetuation of the starter is concerned, you’d better be taking some of it out regularly, or you’re going to be in trouble fast.

Think about what happens when you deliver a meal to those microorganisms — yeast and bacteria — that live in your starter. They gorge themselves on flour and then go about the business of procreation. Now they’re out of food, but there are even more mouths to feed. Unless you expeditiously dispose of some of those little mouths — into a bread dough, the compost pile, the trash can, whatever — you will need to bring in exponentially larger and larger meals for them, and your little dinner party party will become seriously out of control within a matter of days.

To illustrate: say you have a rather small amount of starter, 60 grams. At each feeding, you need to feed in proportion to the amount of starter you start with, around three times the flour and with an equal amount of water. If you kept feeding without taking any out, after one feeding you would have 60 g starter + 180 g flour + 180 g water = 420 g of fed starter. After the second feeding you would have 420 g starter + 1260 g flour + 1260 g water = 2940 g of fed starter. After three feedings, 20,580 g.

After just three days (six feedings), you would have 7,058,940 g of starter. You’re going to need a pretty big jar, not to mention a pretty big budget to afford all that flour.

This is not to say you must always take some out. If I have 60 grams of starter at night and plan to bake bread the next morning, I would keep and feed the entire 60 grams, giving me 420 grams. This is enough to bake a few loaves (in a few hours, once it has a chance to become hungry again) and still have 10 grams left over to keep the starter going.

See this week’s yeast spottings…

Walk into any Mexican panadería, and there are plenty of them around here, and I guarantee your eye will be caught by a colorful array of conchas. This sweet roll, whose name derives from its sugar-paste topping scored to resemble a shell, is the most visually fun, and maybe the best-known, pan dulce of all.

You might notice that the colors of my conchas are more muted than those you often see. Not being a big fan of food coloring, I experimented with more natural ways of coloring the topping. I used (clockwise from upper left) coarsely ground cacao nibs, dehydrated raspberries and blueberries (finely ground in a spice mill along with a bit of granulated sugar to keep them from clumping), and acai berry powder:

This is how the corresponding finished conchas looked:

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The February 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession.

Although admitting it may well get me thrown out of baking school, out of Daring Bakers, and quite possibly out of the entire human race, I’ve never been a big fan of tiramisu. It’s really the only dessert I ever flat-out said I didn’t like. I know, I know. I love coffee. I’m not averse to spirits. But lady fingers sodden with same and buried in acres of creamy creaminess… it’s just never tweaked my biscuit.

Well, consider my biscuit tweaked. I changed things up just a bit by adding fresh raspberries between the layers, skipping the espresso, and instead soaking the lady fingers with cake syrup flavored with just a hint of citrus liqueur. Now there’s a dessert I can love to eat. And eat… and eat.

The cream in this — a mixture of whipped cream, mascarpone, pastry cream, and zabaglione (all made from scratch) — can be summed up in three words: A. May. Zing. I didn’t have marsala for the zabaglione, but white port made a fine stand-in. Since I didn’t know how much I would end up needing for my 7-inch round tiramisu, I made a double batch of the cream — which was pretty much exactly double what I needed, but I can testify that it’s delicious over fresh fruit. (It might even be wonderful as spoonfuls stolen right from the mixing bowl, but I plead the Fifth on that one.)

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See this week’s yeast spottings…

Last month, my 18-year-old daughter M, recently back from school in Europe and living with me while looking for an apartment and taking classes locally, nervously approached me. “Mom, I have to tell you something, and you’re not going to be happy about it.”

That right there was almost as thrilling as the time I got a phone call from a man identifying himself as a Highway Patrol officer and wanting to know if a certain young man was my son. He was (and still is)… but let’s not dwell on the past.

In the first few seconds, my thoughts ran something like this: I see no bruises no broken bones no scratches on the car   she could be failing her classes but probably not she’s bright and usually does her homework   god help her if she broke my oven but it was working last I checked—

Oh. OH. No. But what else? Realization settled in: patter… of… little… feet. Oh my. Well. Hm. No. No no no no no! OK, let’s not panic here. She can still finish school, she can still—

Little feet, indeed. Moms always know these things.

“I got a dog.”

Like I said, she’s a smart one. Anyone who can elicit the words “Oh, thank GOD, you got a DOG!” from my lips, when the words “What the hell were you thinking?” rightfully belong there, is no dummy.

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See this week’s yeast spottings…

On a Friday night in late January, when most normal baking students might be relaxing and recovering from a hard week of cakes, buttercreams, meringues, and more cakes with a nice dinner, a bottle of wine, and maybe a movie, I had something else in mind. I caramelized eight bulbs of fennel,

and toasted more pine nuts and fennel seed than I’ll use all at once ever again. I fed my starter, building it up to over one kilogram, and called it a night.

On Saturday morning, I was back at school bright and early, adding my carefully-prepared elements to the mixer along with exactly the right amount of flour, semolina flour, olive oil, water, and dried currants to make 7.1 kilograms of bejeweled and fragrant dough.

Three hours or so later, I shaped the bejeweled, fragrant, and now very lively, fermented dough into fourteen pointy batards, tucked them snugly into their linen beds, and bid them a chilly good night at 46F.

I wondered nervously if these pointy batards could be trusted to settle down to a long, slow proof like they were supposed to. Would I return early Sunday morning to find them plump and energized from a peaceful nap, or would they be spent and deflated after a night of wild yeast partying with the loaves of six of my classmates in that unchaperoned retarder? And would they bake up into the deeply-colored, crusty-outside-soft-inside, savory-sweet loaves that I envisioned, or fall flat under the pressure?

The short answer is that when I pulled these loaves  out of the oven at 7:30 a.m., I was very happy, and satisfied that I was ready for battle in the form of SF Food Wars: Yeast Affliction!

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The 2010 February Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Michele of Veggie Num Nums. Michele chose to challenge everyone to make mezze based on various recipes from Claudia Roden, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.

Once in a while, it’s nice to catch a break.

I do love challenges, I really really do, honest, but sometimes it’s okay, when you realize that it’s the day before Daring Cooks posting day and once again you’ve procrastinated the month away, sometimes it’s okay to be able to say to yourself, “Relax, these are things you’ve made before. Stop hyperventilating, why don’t you, and just make supper.”

So, pita bread and hummus. Delicious and familiar. Does it count as Daring that I mixed it up, just a little, by throwing a roasted red pepper into the hummus, making half the pitas with sourdough starter instead of yeast (best pitas I’ve ever made, by the way), and adding some za’atar-spiked olive oil and my favorite middle eastern dip, baba ghanouj, to the platter?

No? Well, it was good, anyway.

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