Wild Yeast

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There are times when a toss-up is definitely not a good thing. The upcoming election, for example. You want your candidate to earn an unequivocal win, right? So get out there and vote on November 4, if you haven’t done so already. I’ll be really ticked off if I have to stay up until 6 AM while “too close to call” remains on the lips of every news anchorperson in the country, because you didn’t bother to vote. So go, no excuses. That means you!

This month’s Daring Baker’s challenge was a toss-up of a different kind. Our host Rosa (Rosa’s Yummy Yums) delighted me by choosing pizza, but terrified me by stipulating that we had to shape the crust by tossing it up in the air like a real pizzaiola. The last time any crust of mine was airborne involved a few choice expletives and a pretty extensive patch job. Thenceforth, until Rosa stirred things up, I resigned myself to being a more relaxed, if inauthentic, pizza crust roller.

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Pan de Muerto, the sweet bread traditionally made for Mexico’s Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), is typically shaped into a round loaf and decorated with huesitos (little bones). In a variation on the theme, I made this “bread of the dead” into individual bone-shaped rolls.

Because the dough is rich and soft, the shaping is a bit tricky. I suggest dividing the chilled dough into the individual roll portions, rounding them into balls, and chilling them again for an hour or so before the final shaping. Periodically cooling your hands on an ice pack while shaping is helpful.

The bones are shaped by rolling a log with knobby ends, then using a sharp knife to make a small cut in each end, forming the condyles (for all you anatomy geeks). I rolled my bones about four inches long; in the future, I would shape them longer and thinner, as they expand outward considerably (but not much lengthwise) during proofing.

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There’s a reason I don’t give dinner parties: I’m not a good cook. So I really can’t explain what possessed me to have a dinner party in honor of my husband’s birthday last year, especially since the guest list included a number of card-carrying gastronomes. Luckily, they are nice people too, and much too polite to do anything but dutifully eat the less-than-perfectly-done osso bucco that was put in front of them.

We did have some pretty good bread (because I do like to bake) and a perfectly serviceable salad (hard to screw that up) and a delicious pear cake for dessert (because I do like to bake), but I think the thing that really saved the meal was some little orange pillows of goodness and light. And believe me, no one was more surprised than I was that these sweet potato gnocchi turned out so well that people actually asked me for the recipe. I can’t remember the last time that’s happened with any non-baked thing I’ve made. Now that I think about it, maybe it’s never happened.

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See this week’s yeast spottings …