Wild Yeast

See this week’s yeast spottings…

Today I started the professional baking program at the San Francisco Baking Institute. For the next six months, I will spend six hours a day allowing the good and talented people there to mix, ferment, shape, proof, and bake me into the best baker I can be. I will be drilled on dough, tutored on tarts, coached on chocolate, lectured on lamination, guided on gateaux. (Yes, that’s right. I am paying good money to be forced to bake a cake. And they are breaking out the ice skates in Hades.)

Now if you’re anything like me, you may be thinking, how nice for you, Susan, but what is in this for me?

What’s in it for you is a chance to win my textbook. Because I already own a copy of the excellent Advanced Bread and Pastry by Michel Suas (SFBI’s founder and president, by the way), my first-day-of-school-issue copy is up for grabs.

Interested? Of course you are. If you live in the US (sorry, my international friends, but this thing is damn heavy and I’m springing for the shipping), leave a joke here in the comments by 11:59 PM on Friday, September 18. I’m asking for a joke because I will need something to laugh about after springing for the shipping on this book.

I would like to thank this month’s Daring Cooks host, Debyi (The Healthy Vegan Kitchen), for not only offering such a tasty challenge in Indian Dosas, but also for reassuring me that if I can’t make it as a Daring Cook (and my utter inability to produce a round dosa definitely points in that direction), I may have a very bright future in psychoanalysis.

In my hands, these thin Indian pancakes are better than inkblots, don’t you think? Feel free to interpret them any way you wish and to leave your interpretations in the comments. Also feel free to draw whatever conclusions you like about me from my own perceptions of my edible little Rorschach tests, but please keep these to yourself.

And if my career as an analyst doesn’t take off, there’s always recipe translation work. I have a natural talent for this. For example, it was quite effortless for me to translate “ladle 2 tablespoons of batter into your pan until it is a thin, round pancake,” into “plop 2 tablespoons of batter into the center of your pan and swirl the pan around until the pancake looks like something the cat dragged in.”

If Jaws and Ms. Pacman had a child

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Once again, I am awed and inspired by the creativity, baking prowess, and generosity of everyone who contributes to YeastSpotting. You rock!

See this week’s yeast spottings…

How do you know when someone is a true friend? I suppose there are lots of ways, but here’s one that worked for me last week: I showed up at my friends Erika and Roger’s house for lunch with this plum-ginger upside-down cake in one hand and my camera in the other. They didn’t bat an eye when I said I wanted to get a photo of a slice of the cake once we cut into it. They didn’t say, “Susan, you are a pathetic dork.” They didn’t say, “Put the damn camera down and let us eat our dessert.” They didn’t say, “What do we look like, Olan Mills?” Just, “Which would you prefer, a white plate or a patterned one?” And on top of that, Erika let me win at Upwords. You guys are the best.

I bought the plums with the idea of making some sort of upside-down cake, but I was prepared to have to search for a recipe. As luck would have it, Mimi (Delectable Tidbits) posted a lovely fig upside-down cake that very day, and it proved to be the perfect starting point for my cake. I replaced the figs with plums, added some crystallized ginger to the dough (yes, it’s really more dough than batter, which of course suits me just fine), and scaled it to a 7-1/4-inch size. Now this is my kind of cake: rustic, fruity, swarthy (as Mimi put it), dense and moist. Mimi, you’re the best too.

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Do you eat rye bread? I didn’t, really, until I started baking and discovered that rye just tastes good. It is earthy and sweet, although sometimes its sweetness is masked by the spices that are often paired with it, such as caraway seeds. To be honest, I prefer my rye unspiced most of the time.

Rye is higher in fiber than wheat, which may explain why a recent study found that eating bread made with a combination of wheat and light rye flours for breakfast made people feel more full and less hungry through the morning than did bread with only wheat flour. Appetite was further decreased by eating bread with even higher proportions of rye bran. That just might translate into some very good news for my waistline, since I’ve been eating this 70% rye bread for breakfast all week.

Consider this bread for all your rye needs. It is based on the “70 Percent Rye with a Rye Soaker and Whole-Wheat Flour” in Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman. The original recipe calls for rye chops (chopped rye berries), which I don’t have, so I put in all the cracked rye I had (there is supposedly a difference between cracked and chopped rye, but don’t ask me to distinguish them in a lineup) and made up the rest with rye meal (very coarsely ground rye berries).

Rye is more difficult to work with than wheat. This dough has the consistency of thick mud. You just have to deal with it. You will not be able to do a windowpane gluten test on this dough. And when you shape it into a log, for God’s sake don’t think about it or you’ll go crazy. Just turn your brain off and use a quick, light hand and a good amount of flour on the counter. Remember: hands on, brain off.

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