Wild Yeast

Walk into any Mexican panadería, and there are plenty of them around here, and I guarantee your eye will be caught by a colorful array of conchas. This sweet roll, whose name derives from its sugar-paste topping scored to resemble a shell, is the most visually fun, and maybe the best-known, pan dulce of all.

You might notice that the colors of my conchas are more muted than those you often see. Not being a big fan of food coloring, I experimented with more natural ways of coloring the topping. I used (clockwise from upper left) coarsely ground cacao nibs, dehydrated raspberries and blueberries (finely ground in a spice mill along with a bit of granulated sugar to keep them from clumping), and acai berry powder:

This is how the corresponding finished conchas looked:

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The February 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession.

Although admitting it may well get me thrown out of baking school, out of Daring Bakers, and quite possibly out of the entire human race, I’ve never been a big fan of tiramisu. It’s really the only dessert I ever flat-out said I didn’t like. I know, I know. I love coffee. I’m not averse to spirits. But lady fingers sodden with same and buried in acres of creamy creaminess… it’s just never tweaked my biscuit.

Well, consider my biscuit tweaked. I changed things up just a bit by adding fresh raspberries between the layers, skipping the espresso, and instead soaking the lady fingers with cake syrup flavored with just a hint of citrus liqueur. Now there’s a dessert I can love to eat. And eat… and eat.

The cream in this — a mixture of whipped cream, mascarpone, pastry cream, and zabaglione (all made from scratch) — can be summed up in three words: A. May. Zing. I didn’t have marsala for the zabaglione, but white port made a fine stand-in. Since I didn’t know how much I would end up needing for my 7-inch round tiramisu, I made a double batch of the cream — which was pretty much exactly double what I needed, but I can testify that it’s delicious over fresh fruit. (It might even be wonderful as spoonfuls stolen right from the mixing bowl, but I plead the Fifth on that one.)

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The 2010 February Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Michele of Veggie Num Nums. Michele chose to challenge everyone to make mezze based on various recipes from Claudia Roden, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.

Once in a while, it’s nice to catch a break.

I do love challenges, I really really do, honest, but sometimes it’s okay, when you realize that it’s the day before Daring Cooks posting day and once again you’ve procrastinated the month away, sometimes it’s okay to be able to say to yourself, “Relax, these are things you’ve made before. Stop hyperventilating, why don’t you, and just make supper.”

So, pita bread and hummus. Delicious and familiar. Does it count as Daring that I mixed it up, just a little, by throwing a roasted red pepper into the hummus, making half the pitas with sourdough starter instead of yeast (best pitas I’ve ever made, by the way), and adding some za’atar-spiked olive oil and my favorite middle eastern dip, baba ghanouj, to the platter?

No? Well, it was good, anyway.

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My friend Jamie (Life’s a Feast) is throwing herself a birthday party for BreadBakingDay this month. A very special bread is therefore in order, and I think this fills the bill. Distinctive in both appearance and taste, it derives an earthy flavor and rich deep brown color from buckwheat flour, and sweetness — but not too much — from toasted walnuts and wine-soaked pears.

Before making these loaves at home, I had made the bread several times at SFBI — including for my bread practical exam — and it never disappoints. As a testament to its universal appeal, I’m thrilled to congratulate my friend and classmate, David E, who just today won the SF Food Wars People’s Choice Honorable Mention with his interpretation of the bread, presented to 200 discerning tasters at the  SF Food Wars artisan bread bakedown. Go David and go Pear Buckwheat!

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The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca.

There isn’t much gluten-free baking around here — in fact, I’m usually all about the gluten. I have to admit there was a little scene playing out in my mind as I prepared these gluten-free graham wafers, my first foray into a world where wheat flour is taboo and things like sweet rice flour, sorghum flour, and tapioca flour rule the oven.

If anyone asked for a taste, I would, with shuffling feet and downcast eyes, stammer out an apologetic explanation for why these tasted more like graham cracker box than graham crackers.

Well. As Gomer Pyle would say, “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” The wafers tasted fantastic — just like “real” graham crackers, only better. Even though I was in a rush and messed them up — well of course I did, this is a DB challenge, isn’t it? — by not letting them chill thoroughly, so it was impossible to cut them into squares and they (it) ended up looking like a giant ginger snap — even then I found myself wishing I’d made a full batch instead of just the half I’d need most of for the Nanaimo bars. I actually wanted to eat these.

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The January 2010 DC challenge was hosted by Cuppy of Cuppylicious and she chose a delicious Thai-inspired recipe for Pork Satay from the book 1000 Recipes by Martha Day. I opted to use goat instead of pork.

These Daring Cooks escapades always involve lots of education. Let’s just cut to the chase with what I learned this month:

• Bamboo skewers should be soaked for longer than 20 minutes before putting them under the broiler.
• A broiled bamboo skewer does not make a bad charcoal stick if there isn’t a pencil handy.
• My kitchen smoke detector is in good working order.

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The news is good: Menu for Hope has been extended through December 31, so there’s still time to make your donations to the UN World Food Programme, and bid on my items: a class at the San Francisco Baking Institute, and a signed copy of Advanced Bread and Pastry.

Details on how to bid are here (and there are lots of other items to choose from, too). It will make me very happy if you do.

It’s that time of year! Once again, I am honored to be a part of Menu for Hope, the international food blogging community’s annual fundraising event to benefit the United Nations World Food Programme. This is a unique opportunity to donate to a most worthy cause while bidding on some fantastic culinary raffle items.

Proceeds from this campaign will go to a new WFP initiative, Purchase for Progress, which gives small farmers a market for their surplus crops at competitive prices in their own developing countries. Since its inception, Menu for Hope has raised over $230,000. Please help extend this stunning success by giving as generously as you can.

Each $10 you donate to Menu for Hope between now and December 25 gets you one chance on your choice of bid items from an incredible lineup hosted by food bloggers around the world. The more you donate, the more virtual raffle tickets you earn, and the greater your chances of winning.

You may bid on any items you like, but I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to resist mine, both very generously donated by the San Francisco Baking Institute:

Find out how to bid…

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

When I was introduced to macarons in Paris two years ago, the puffy almond meringue sandwich cookies and I became fast friends. I was captivated by the delicate smooth crisp shell, ruffled “feet,” chewy-soft interior, and shiny, creamy fillings, of these oh-so-French confections. But mostly I was seduced by the dazzling array of colors and flavors that beckoned from bright displays at the likes of Pierre Hermé, Ladurée, and countless other patisseries around the city.

Blackcurrant Violet. Chocolate Passionfruit. Pistachio Caramel. Oh, the limitless possibilities…

So this month’s Daring Bakers challenge excited and inspired me. I can do that! With almond meringue as my medium, my creativity will be unleashed and I too will present an eye-popping parade of macaron artistry.

And that is exactly what I did. I managed to make several varieties of macarons, and I’m pretty excited about how they turned out. I figure my line is broad enough that I’m all set to open my own macaronerie. Soon I’ll be taking orders for:

The Underbaked Macaron
A thin, crisp shell (with feet!) surrounding a wet, sticky, married-to-the-silpat mess.

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Can you imagine? It’s World Bread Day and I have no bread.

Well, I mean, of course I have bread. I have bread all day every day. I have more baguettes, boules, batards, and other assorted loaves than I know what to do with. I come home from class in the afternoon and scrape dough from my fingernails, brush flour from my hair, and shake crumbs out of my clothes.

But for World Bread Day, I wanted to contribute my own bread from my own kitchen. I actually did bake last night for the occasion, but the taste wasn’t really what I wanted. I will eat it, but I won’t post it, not now, not until I can tweak it until it’s right.

So here I am, breadless on World Bread Day. A breadless brat. “I don’t like that bread. I want a better bread.”

Now imagine if I were really breadless. Imagine if you were too. Imagine if we were among the world’s one billion people that are affected by food insecurity, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, which has designated today, October 16, World Food Day. Imagine that. And now imagine something you might do about it.

Now stop imagining and go do it. And be thankful you have any bread at all.