Another record week for YeastSpotting! Awesome, people.
Next week will mark the one-year anniversary of YeastSpotting, and I’m hoping that it will be the most well-attended edition ever. So don’t be shy, please share all your yeasted masterpieces. Everyone is welcome!
The May Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Linda of make life sweeter! and Courtney of Coco Cooks. They chose Apple Strudel from the recipe book Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague by Rick Rodgers.
I have a large piece of natural linen that until this week had been sitting around waiting for me to cut it into pieces for lining proofing baskets, or maybe sew a pair of summer pants. Not any more. Thanks to this month’s Daring Bakers strudel challenge, this linen is now designated as my Official Strudel-Pulling-and-Rolling Cloth.
Because I’m sure I’ll be making strudel again. Who knew gluten without yeast could be this fun, this easy, and this good?
The only problem with the cloth is the color; it exactly camouflages the strudel dough, making it impossible for me to show off my tissue-thin sheet. See what I mean?
Although I can’t say I haven’t succumbed to the Amazon juggernaut on a few (too many) occasions, my heart belongs to small, independent bookstores. Nothing compares to meandering through hand-picked books old and new, ogling their lush photographs or unique typography, feeling their heft in your hand, leafing their crisp and stiff or dog-eared and supple pages, inhaling the sharp scent of fresh ink or the musty one of antique cloth, discovering the treasure that was meant to go home with you that day.
Last week I visited a new store that became a fast favorite: Omnivore Books on Food in San Francisco. It is, to my knowledge, the only culinary bookstore in the Bay Area, and it features both new and vintage books. If you like to read about growing, foraging, cooking, or eating food, or if you’re beguiled by culinary history or literature, the store will leave your appetite well-satisfied.
Have I mentioned lately how much I love my sourdough starter? This baby is a trooper. Raising breads day in and day out, especially loaves with a goodly proportion of whole grains, is not easy, but it’s up to the task pretty much every time.
When our children were small we used to tell them, “You’re better than a pet.” Sometimes I want to tell my starter, “You’re better than a kid.”
OK, not really, but when my starter graces me with bread like this, and doesn’t talk back in the bargain, you know, sometimes it’s kind of a toss-up.
Yesterday I seriously thought I had died and gone to hell.
I had a lovely weekend in Seattle, but the minute IFBC was over it was quite downhill from there. The 18 or so hours before I would arrive back in California involved an excruciatingly painful event (think childbirth) that left me sleep-deprived and limping, an airport clock that was exactly one hour behind (come on people, Spring Forward!), and close encounters with staining liquids (both the hot and cold kind).
Normally this is not, to put it mildly, the sort of day that makes me want to be bold and adventurous. It is the sort of day that makes me want to seek shelter under a nice ample rock. Certainly not the kind of day that typically makes me say to myself, “This seems like the perfect time do the thing you’ve never done before because it terrifies you more than just about anything else in the world! Why not just go ahead and Deep Fry Something?”
What’s the coolest thing about Carol Peterman of TableFare being the winner of the Bread Science book giveaway? I’m hoping that for Carol it will be reading and learning from Emily Buehler’s great book (available here, if you’re not Carol). But for me, it was that I had actually met Carol in person only a few hours before I did the random drawing, at the International Food Blogger Conference in Seattle.
It was a weekend filled with speakers, food (bread above by Bakery Nouveau), and wine, all of which was lovely. But the thing that stood out the most for me was meeting some terrific people with terrific blogs. Check these out; I can tell you that they are written by winning people:
1 Family. Friendly. Food • 100 Miles • Adventures of a Hungry Girl
Brownies For Dinner • Cooking With Amy • Eating Out Loud
Fork This • Gardeners Like Us • Hedonia
Little Brown Girl 2.0 • Lovely Olio • Passion 4 Eating • Phoo-D
Pinch My Salt • Plumpest Peach • Simply…Gluten Free
Sticky, Gooey, Creamy, Chewy • TableFare • The Daily Spud
The Recipe Girl • The Well-Tempered Chocolatier • Wright Eats
I am pretty much a one-trick pony in the kitchen. If it has yeast, I’m good. Which is not to say I don’t have my share of failures and faux pas with bread, but I’m not afraid of it.
About a year and a half ago I joined the Daring Bakers, which once a month takes me out of my yeast-bound comfort zone and into the world of cakes, pies, and other foreign objects. Sometimes the results have been quite lovely, sometimes not so much, but I always learn something, and I have to say I have felt pretty damned proud of myself for being so damned Daring twelve times a year.
But at least with Daring Bakers, it’s, well, still baking. Now I have a whole new reason to hyperventilate:
Daring Cooks.
If it’s true that I don’t bake cakes, it’s doubly true that I don’t cook. Therefore, there is only one way to explain my willing membership in this new cadre of Daring, knife-wielding people: I am insane. Either that or I can’t stand the thought of not being part of this action, as fear-inspiring, embarrassing, and painful as it is bound to be.
I really hope our fearless leaders Lis and Ivonne don’t decide to start the Daring Sword Swallowers any time soon.
If your high school science classes were anything like mine, they were never like this.
The Krebs cycle, hydrogen bonds, osmosis, asexual reproduction. Does the mere mention of this stuff make you start to hyperventilate? Or fall on your knees and thank all that is good and powerful that you will never have to endure those fathomless lectures again?
If it does, then it’s a shame Emily Buehler wasn’t your teacher, and Bread Science your textbook.
Buehler, a PhD chemist who turned out to have a calling as a professional baker and baking teacher, gets down and dirty with the science of why bread works. What is fermentation, exactly, and why does it make bread taste good? How does the seeming magic of gluten development really occur? What makes those atoms want to nestle together in just the right way to produce a lofty loaf? Buehler tells and illustrates all, more clearly than any teacher or textbook I have ever had.
But even if you don’t think molecules and reactions are at all your thing and you just want to know how to bake better bread, read the book. You can defer Chapter 2, the hard-core science chapter, until you’re ready for it, and skip ahead to the chapters on the how-to of bread baking. No recipes here (well, maybe one or two), but tons of good information on the why and and the how of preferments, mixing, shaping, proofing, and baking.
Because she is generous in addition to being smart and talented, Emily Buehler has a signed copy of Bread Science to send to one of you seasoned or budding bread scientists. A comment about your best or worst science class memory gets you a chance to win. The deadline to enter the random drawing is 11:59 PM PDT on Saturday, May 16; international entries welcome!
RSS Feed