Wild Yeast

Yes, this is a cake. And on this blog, a cake can only mean one thing: it’s Daring Bakers challenge time again.

Morven (Food Art and Random Thoughts) selected Dorie’s (as in baker/author extraordinaire D. Greenspan) Perfect Party Cake for this month.

I made the cake for my own birthday party. This got me slightly in trouble with my family, who have a notion that one should never make one’s own birthday cake. But this is Birthday Rule #2. Rule #1, which always trumps Rule #2, is that the birthday girl gets to do what she wants. They knew I had them there, and they were just going to have to get over it. As you can see if you count the candles carefully, this was my 20th birthday. Sure it was.

I wish I had an amusing tale to tell about something going horribly wrong but salvaged in the end by my brilliant ingenuity and intrepid Daring Baker spirit. But no. This was, in fact, a piece of cake from beginning to end. This is a testament not to my mad cake-baking skills (ha! not!) but to the true perfection of Dorie Greenspan’s recipe, from her book Baking From My Home to Yours.

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A number of people left comments or sent email saying that they found Part 1 of my Baker’s Percentage Tutorial helpful. Thank you for that! And now that you know what baker’s percentage (BP) is, you might be wondering what you’re supposed to do with it.

In addition to flour, most bread contains three other basic ingredients: water, yeast, and salt. One thing BP is useful for is allowing you to look at the amounts of these ingredients and get a rough idea of the kind of bread the formula will make, and whether the ingredients are balanced.

Water

Bakers often talk about the “hydration” of a dough. Simply stated, hydration is the amount of water in a formula, relative to the amount of flour. That’s exactly the definition of the BP of water. Look at this dough formula:

• Flour 100%
• Water 66%
• Instant yeast 1%
• Salt 2%

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If you bake bread, sooner or later you’re going to encounter (cue ominous music) Baker’s Percentage. Did I just strike fear in your heart? No doubt about it, this can be confusing, even scary, stuff. But it really doesn’t have to be.

My first brush with Baker’s Percentage (BP) came a few days after baking my first loaves, as I was perusing my newly-acquired copy of Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I saw these weird sidebar versions of all the recipes in which the total of the ingredients always added up to more than 100%.

My first thought: Huh? Wow, this fellow really needs a math lesson.

This was followed pretty quickly by a second thought: Mr. Reinhart is a rock star baker and he’s managed to get quite a few books published; just maybe he knows a little more than you do about this, my dear. Maybe he’s on to something.

Lucky for me I had that second thought. It turns out that this convention, which to my knowledge is unique to bread bakers, is both straightforward and useful.

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One of the first nursery rhymes I remember learning was Hot cross buns! Hot cross buns! One-a-penny, Two-a-penny, Hot cross buns!

When my mother was ticked off about something, she always said she was “cross.” So when I sang the rhyme, an image of grouchy buns languishing in summer heat would paint itself across my mind’s little eye. I suppose I imagined they were cross because wasn’t being hot (in those days when that wasn’t a good thing) enough to make anybody cross?

I’ve understood for quite some time that “cross” refers to the buns’ decoration and not their state of mind, but it was only recently that I learned that hot cross buns are a traditional spring celebration bread.

Although hot cross buns have been associated with Easter for several centuries, they probably predated Christianity. Small cakes or loaves adorned with an equilateral cross were offered to deities in ancient cultures such as early Egypt and Greece. The feast of Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring (from whom Easter derived its name), was celebrated at the vernal equinox. The cross on the sacramental cakes eaten during the feast may have symbolized the balance (between light and darkness) of the equinox, the four quarters of the moon, or the symmetry of the seasons.

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Did you know March 11 is Johnny Appleseed Day? When I was small, every school child in the United States was taught about John Chapman, the nurseryman who traveled the early 19th-century American frontier planting apple trees and distributing seeds to the settlers and Native Americans. We learned that “Johhny Appleseed” was a conservationist, humanitarian, herbal healer, and philanthropist.

What they didn’t tell us in grade school was that the apples that grew on those seed-grown trees were much too sour for snacking or baking a pie, too sour for anything except turning into hard cider. As Michael Pollan put it, Johnny Appleseed was popular and legendary with American frontier settlers because he was “the guy bringing the booze.”

So for Johnny Appleseed Day, I had it in mind to bake an apple sourdough that included hard cider. I did use hard cider the first time I made it, but I like this version with sweet cider a bit better. The dough is still plenty sour from the high proportion of sourdough starter. The sweetness of the chunky walnuts and cider-soaked dried apples is a welcome contrast.

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Helen (Food Stories) tagged me for “7 Random Facts” a few weeks ago. Then Laura (The Spiced Life) did the same for “5 Facts.” Thanks, both of you, for thinking of me. I hope it’s not considered cheating to combine the two. And despite my educational training (see #3, below), I’m letting 7 plus 5 equal 7 today.

1. I have the world’s best dog. Yes, this is a fact.



2. I wear sandals year-round. True, I would probably not do this if I still lived in Vermont. Even so, northern California winters are rainy and cool, and people ask me if my feet aren’t cold. No, they’re not. My hands do get cold pretty easily, though.
3. My undergraduate degree is in mathematics.

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