Wild Yeast

During the baking and serving of this Filbert Gateau, the July Daring Bakers challenge hosted by Chris of Mele Cotte, it seems there were a few concepts I was a little unclear on:

Concept #1: Your husband is allergic to hazelnuts so don’t count on him to help you eat this cake. How did I not know this? Have I really not made anything with hazelnuts in the more-than-half-my-life we’ve been together? Oh well, I suppose it’s discoveries like this that keep a marriage alive.

Concept #2: Do not bake jewelry into the genoise. Especially earring studs that have potential to do serious bodily injury. Luckily I discovered it before our dining room turned into an ad hoc piercing parlor.
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For sandwiches, sliced bread is great, soft rolls are wonderful. But sometimes nothing but a crusty roll will do to make you feel like you’re holding a meal in the palm of your hand. And sometimes it just needs to be a ciabatta roll, with those nice big holes to harbor whatever filling is your pleasure of the moment..

But I confess I had more than good eating on my mind when I made these particular rolls. The high-hydration (i.e., wet) doughs that produce those accommodating holes can be especially difficult to handle, and I’ve always relied on my trusty mixer to see me through. I was curious to see, here in this bare-bones kitchen where all the mixing is by hand (and all the yeast is wild), whether I could pull it off.

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This tart was inspired by two things: the lovely sourdough plum cake I spotted a couple of weeks ago on Steffen’s Dinners, and the abundance of blackberries that grow all over this wild little town I have called home for the last two weeks.

The plums are just beginning to ripen, too. The red and purple ones I used for this were just this side of still-hard, so they made for a nicely tart tart. I also used a few wild fennel fronds to scent the blackberry filling.

As with all doughs here in this minimalist kitchen, I mixed by hand. The dough has very little sourdough starter in it, so it takes a long time to ferment. I mixed it the night before and had the fresh-baked tart for breakfast. The dough doesn’t proof a second time after shaping the tart, so the crust is dense and crisp, almost like a cookie. Good for standing up to juicy berries.

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If you’re looking for a reason why we must save our oceans and open spaces, may I suggest Point Reyes National Seashore? Tule elk graze on bluffs above the rocky shore, wildflowers brighten even the scrubbiest windswept terrain, and if you believe in God you’ll surely feel you’ve been granted privileged admission to one of her personal favorite stomping grounds (to which my photos don’t begin to do justice).
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See this week’s yeast spottings …

After way too much fretting that the corners of the firebricks for my oven hearth aren’t perfectly square (and how many things in life are perfectly square?), there was only one thing to do: get over it and get on with it. So task number one yesterday was to lay the hearth no matter what. It’s a little gappy at those pesky corners, but it will do.

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After a day of trying to lay my oven hearth, and ending up with very little to show for it, I went to forage a few early blackberries. They wound up in this bread pudding, along with the last of my (now 3-day-old) sourdough. Now I am fortified for another day of oven-wrangling.

Click to see the recipe…

See this week’s yeast spottings …

Combine two-day-old bread with a craving for a cold, light summer soup, and what do you get? Gazpacho, of course! (Did you know that stale bread is a defining ingredient of original Andalucian gazpacho? I didn’t, until a year or two ago, although I’ve been making “gazpacho” for years.)

I have no tomatoes, but I do still have half of the best watermelon ever. Watermelon gazpacho it is, then. We ate this light, bright, refreshing soup with grilled flank steak for the perfect summer supper.

The bread I used was a fairly sour sourdough. If your bread is less sour, you may want to increase the amount of vinegar. Of course, all of the ingredients are to taste anyway.

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I can’t figure myself out sometimes.

The smallest of tasks, such as hanging pictures, can get me so bogged down in analysis paralysis that they often languish for months or even years on my to-do list, while I try to decide the position of everything to the last sixteenth of an inch, and just what size nail would be perfect for each one.

And yet I’m apt to dive into more involved projects with only the barest hint of an idea of what the hell I am doing. For example, I now find myself muddling through in a fairly clueless sort of way, here at my home-away-from-home, the construction of a wood-fired mud oven.

Not that I’m flying completely blind here. I do have both inspiration and direction from the definitive book on the subject, Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer, and from very helpful photos and advice from several oven builders around the internet.

But have I ever built anything? Not unless you count my toothpick model of Plymouth Plantation in fifth grade. Am I strong enough to be hauling 50-pound buckets of dirt around? Barely. Have I ever even baked bread in a wood-fired oven? Well, now that you mention it, that would be a no. Am I completely stupid? Quite possibly.

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