Wild Yeast

Hola y Feliz Año Nuevo from Oaxaca, Mexico, where we’re enjoying a few days of warm winter sun and New Year’s festivity. There is so much wonderful food and drink here!

A specialty of the state of Oaxaca is mezcal, a spirit made from the native agave plant and a cousin to tequila.  In Santiago Matatlán, a few miles east of Oaxaca City, artisanal family mezcal distilleries are everywhere, and we enjoyed the opportunity to see how mezcal is made.

The spiky leaves of the agave plant are chopped off, leaving the heart, or piña (“pineapple”):

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I served this semolina crown with cranberries, pine nuts, and fennel for Christmas dinner. It’s a variation on a favorite of mine, Semolina Bread With Fennel, Currants, and Pine Nuts. The crown shape and substitution of dried cranberries for the currants make it a little more festive for a holiday dinner. (OK, so I’m a little late posting this in time for Christmas. But it would be lovely for New Year’s dinner, too.)

With a cross-section similar to that of a baguette, a crown is a delight for crust lovers. To maximize crustiness, make sure you bake the loaf until it is good and dark. Any leftover bread can be sliced thinly and baked in a low oven until crisp for some toasts that are wonderful with your morning coffee or after dinner with a smear of goat cheese.

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I’ve been doing lots of baking this week but haven’t managed to post about it. Thank you so much to everyone who not only did both but took the time to send your excellent holiday breads and other fabulous loaves to YeastSpotting!

See this week’s yeast spottings…

I just wanted to remind all you procrastinators that time’s running out to get your Menu for Hope donations and raffle bids in. If you haven’t put a ticket in for my King Arthur Flour $100 gift certificate (prize code UW04), now would be a good time. How about a couple of brotforms, Hamelman’s Bread (my favorite bread book), or a digital scale?

Now I have a little hope of my own: that some of you kind people will steer me in the direction of a foolproof recipe for boneless leg of lamb, which I have never cooked before but somehow thought that Christmas dinner would be the ideal time to learn. At least it seemed like a good idea last month when I put the lamb order in to my meat CSA. Because, you know, the holiday shopping and decorating and baking and partying don’t occupy nearly enough of my bandwidth, and cooking the second most important meal of the year for three times as many people as I usually cook for is always the best time to try new things, and waiting until the last minute to figure this sort of thing out is just… well, it’s just me.

So here’s a deal for you: the first ten commenters to give me a recipe link or constructive advice for “lamb for people who don’t know how to cook” by noon (PST) tomorrow will get one extra virtual Menu for Hope raffle ticket, on me. Just indicate the 4-character code of the prize you’d like it to be for (prize codes are here), and I’ll buy a ticket for it, and if I win it, it’s yours. (But please make it something other than my prize, because I don’t think I should bid on my own.) Check out the list of prizes if you don’t have all the codes committed to memory by now.

So how about it? Will you help make Menu for Hope, and my Christmas dinner, a success?

This week Mary from One Perfect Bite gave me a Proximity Award specifically for YeastSpotting. I am honored, and it really is all of the people who submit their amazing baked things each week that make YeastSpotting. So I am supposed to pass this on to eight people, but I’m taking the liberty of making that 72 instead: everyone who has sent something to YeastSpotting this year. Thanks so much to all of you!

On another note, I now have an online form for submitting to YeastSpotting. Thanks to people who already used it this week, and to everyone in advance for using it from now on. I hope you think it’s easy to use, and it really simplifies my life on Thursday night when I am putting these roundups together. There’s a link to the form on the YeastSpotting page.

If you’re celebrating any holidays in the coming week, may they be filled with light, love, laughter, and leavening.

See this week’s yeast spottings…