Wild Yeast

The June 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Dawn of Doable and Delicious. Dawn challenged the Daring Bakers to make Chocolate Pavlovas and Chocolate Mascarpone Mousse. The challenge recipe is based on a recipe from the book Chocolate Epiphany by Francois Payard.

When I was in school, we made a Concorde cake: layers of chocolate meringue and chocolate mousse, encased by and topped with chocolate meringue “logs.” My classmates and I agreed it was delicious, but we were hard-pressed to understand how the 8-inch cake could be gracefully cut into individual servings. The idea of single-serving-sized desserts came up.

This month’s Daring Bakers challenge — individual chocolate Pavlovas (meringue shells) topped with chocolate mascarpone mousse and drizzled with mascarpone cream — seemed like a good candiate for a Concorde-style interpretation.

All of the challenge components — meringue, mousse, cream — are here, with just a couple of tweaks to the original recipes. In the mousse, I replaced the Grand Marnier with 4 tablespoons of Chambord. And to give the mascarpone cream more body, so it could be used as a top layer rather than a drizzling sauce, I cut back the crème anglaise in the recipe to one cup, and whipped the finished cream to soft peaks.

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See this week’s yeast spottings…

Okay, I know this is not a very appealing photograph. I do like it, though, because it illustrates a few things.

See the ultra-shiny crust? This illustrates what happens when you steam your bread too much. It’s like shellac. Not really the effect I was going for.

See how dark the crust is? This illustrates what happens when you don’t really remember how to operate your oven (this would be your occasional oven, not your most-of-the-time oven) and the oven display is broken so you have no visual clue that you’re operating it incorrectly, and you haven’t really turned the temperature down when you think you have. The very learned Raymond Calvel said it is nearly impossible to overbake bread. Maybe I should gain some satisfaction in knowing I nearly accomplished the near-impossible. (I say nearly because the crust did not burn. It’s just very very dark. Again, not the effect I was going for; merely very dark would have sufficed.)

See how the resolution of the photo is not very good? This illustrates what happens when you do something brainless, the details of which you’d rather not get into at the moment, and end up wrecking your DSLR camera, and have to use your little point-and-shoot (and then have to crop the photo so the really dark parts of the loaves are conveniently omitted).

Okay, lessons learned: Don’t pour too much water into the steam pan. Read The Fine Manual (and better yet, call the oven repair guy). And don’t be stupid. Simple enough.

Now consider this photograph:

I like this one because it illustrates that even when a few things go wrong, you can still end up with a pretty nice, 50%-whole-grain, fruit-and-nut-laden, pleasantly-dense-and-chewy, thinly-sliceable, great-on-its-own-or-with-soft-cheese kind of loaf.

So there.

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See this week’s yeast spottings…

Packrat (n): a collector of miscellaneous useless objects.

Now I’m not saying I fit this definition. Decide for yourself. Let’s say you came to my house and poked around in my cupboards and drawers. Let’s say you found, among many other things, four empty shoeboxes, a deck of 49 cards, the cannon from a Monopoly game that was shot to hell long ago, and seven returnable ceramic yogurt jars. Let’s say you made a judgment. I’m not saying you’d be wrong. There is evidence.

However, if you looked on my counter, and thought to include, in your body of evidence, the end or two of stale bread that is likely to be hanging about… well, I’d have to object. Stale bread ends are not miscellaneous useless objects — they are bread crumbs waiting to happen. And bread crumbs are plenty of deliciousness waiting to happen; as evidence, I offer fig upside-down bread pudding, ajo blanco, steamed ginger-persimmon pudding.

And, of course, gazpacho. You read that right, chilled soup fans, gazpacho has bread crumbs in it. At least it does when it’s prepared the traditional Andalucian way. True, this gazpacho based on cantaloupe and honeydew — and no tomatoes — can’t exactly claim to be traditionally Andalucian, but it can claim to be a savory, refreshing summer soup that gets loads of body, not to mention flavor, from a hefty dose of dried out sourdough bread reduced to kibble in your trusty food processor.

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The piece of gorgeousness you see here is the cover of a brainy new cookbook — and I’m in it!

Thinkfood is a collaboration between Posit Science and 50 food bloggers, each of whom has contributed a recipe featuring an ingredient known to improve memory, concentration, mood, or other brain-powered functions. With foods like flax seed, almonds, tuna, spinach, cinnamon, and more — doing their brilliant thing in everything from snacks to side dishes to main courses to desserts — you can eat smarter to be smarter.

You’ll have to stay tuned to find out what recipes I and the other bloggers contributed, but I think you’ll agree that the list of blogs is pretty damn impressive, so you just know the recipes are going to be wonderful.

The hard-cover book will be available in July, but you can start cooking more cleverly right now by signing up for the Thinkfood Recipe of the Week. Beginning today, one recipe will be distributed by email every Wednesday for the next 50 weeks.  You’ll have free access to the printable version of the recipe, which includes more information about the brain-healthy ingredient.

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