Wild Yeast

See this week’s yeast spottings …

After way too much fretting that the corners of the firebricks for my oven hearth aren’t perfectly square (and how many things in life are perfectly square?), there was only one thing to do: get over it and get on with it. So task number one yesterday was to lay the hearth no matter what. It’s a little gappy at those pesky corners, but it will do.

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After a day of trying to lay my oven hearth, and ending up with very little to show for it, I went to forage a few early blackberries. They wound up in this bread pudding, along with the last of my (now 3-day-old) sourdough. Now I am fortified for another day of oven-wrangling.

Click to see the recipe…

See this week’s yeast spottings …

Combine two-day-old bread with a craving for a cold, light summer soup, and what do you get? Gazpacho, of course! (Did you know that stale bread is a defining ingredient of original Andalucian gazpacho? I didn’t, until a year or two ago, although I’ve been making “gazpacho” for years.)

I have no tomatoes, but I do still have half of the best watermelon ever. Watermelon gazpacho it is, then. We ate this light, bright, refreshing soup with grilled flank steak for the perfect summer supper.

The bread I used was a fairly sour sourdough. If your bread is less sour, you may want to increase the amount of vinegar. Of course, all of the ingredients are to taste anyway.

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I can’t figure myself out sometimes.

The smallest of tasks, such as hanging pictures, can get me so bogged down in analysis paralysis that they often languish for months or even years on my to-do list, while I try to decide the position of everything to the last sixteenth of an inch, and just what size nail would be perfect for each one.

And yet I’m apt to dive into more involved projects with only the barest hint of an idea of what the hell I am doing. For example, I now find myself muddling through in a fairly clueless sort of way, here at my home-away-from-home, the construction of a wood-fired mud oven.

Not that I’m flying completely blind here. I do have both inspiration and direction from the definitive book on the subject, Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer, and from very helpful photos and advice from several oven builders around the internet.

But have I ever built anything? Not unless you count my toothpick model of Plymouth Plantation in fifth grade. Am I strong enough to be hauling 50-pound buckets of dirt around? Barely. Have I ever even baked bread in a wood-fired oven? Well, now that you mention it, that would be a no. Am I completely stupid? Quite possibly.

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This is what over-steamed bread looks like. Like someone took a varnish brush to the crust. In fact the photo doesn’t do justice to the shine on these loaves. You can see your reflection in them.

Here in our tiny sometime-(not-often-enough)-house (where my husband and I, having shipped our daughter off for adventures in places unknown, can claim a few days of quiet sunshine, blissfully uninterrupted by the teenager’s constant lamenting that her life is waiting for her back home, so when can we leave already?), there is a perfectly good oven.

But this, my sometime-oven, is different from my most-of-the-time oven, and I clearly haven’t mastered it yet. Last time I baked bread in it, when I poured water into the heated steam pan, the steam came pouring, and I do mean pouring, out of the vents. Leading me to wonder if there would be any steam at all left for the bread in there. So this time I sprayed the hell out of the loaves with water first, as extra insurance. Too much insurance, as it turns out, which is why the bread looks like some giant plastic Happy Meal toy.

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See this week’s yeast spottings …

What was your latest baking experiment gone right? Here’s mine:

2 pm: I remembered to take the pork out of the freezer yesterday. I remembered to start slow-cooking it early this morning. I’m starting the sandwich rolls so they’ll be fresh out of the oven when the pork is done… Doh! I’ve forgotten to make the prefermented dough.

There’s no time to make a preferment now. I have my sourdough starter, but only about 60 grams of it, not enough to make true sourdough rolls. OK, it’s not a mega-disaster in the scheme of things. With what will (hopefully) be a super-flavorful pulled pork on top of them, a straight-dough roll will be just fine. Sure to top store-bought, anyway.

But I’m feeling experimental. I’ve been saving the toss-off from a few days’ worth of sourdough feedings. I have a couple hundred grams of it in the refrigerator, waiting to be used in pancakes, or maybe destined for the compost bin. Those wild yeast have been languishing, close to death, and will not be very effective as little fermenting machines in my dough. But maybe I can use that old starter to bring some flavor and acidity to my rolls, which is what preferments do best. It’s worth a try.

7 pm: Dinner. The pulled pork is lovely, and the sour rolls provide a very nice counterpoint to its sweetness. I’m calling my experiment a success.

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I’m a big fan of pesto. In recent years I haven’t made it as much as I’d like because I haven’t had access to a ready supply of basil. Of course I could buy it, and sometimes did, but I got spoiled for fresh-picked basil pesto when we lived in Vermont and I had a decent vegetable garden, something I’ve never managed to quite get going in all the years we’ve lived in California. It’s quite lame, actually.

I’m happy to report that this year, inspired by my brother-in-law’s incredible garden, I now have a small plot of my own, a raised bed in our tiny but eminently sunny front yard. It’s not what the real estate agents would tell you makes for optimal curb appeal in this suburban neighborhood, but the back yard is just too shady for most summer vegetables. Grass lawns are so 20th-century anyway.

I got a late start, so while other gardeners around here are already harvesting squash, peppers, and tomatoes, mine won’t be ready for another few weeks. But I have herbs! Last night I picked the first basil of the season, and buried my nose in it for about 20 minutes before I got down to the business of making the pesto.

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