Wild Yeast

Notes from my kitchen, in which I bake bread and raise a few other matters

You are here: Wild Yeast / Category: recipes / baker's yeast

When Hope Is All You’ve Got

Those of us who work in family planning have an aphorism: Hope is not a method. That is excellent advice when it comes to birth control, and it applies pretty well to baking too. Think things through, have a plan, protect yourself from unintended consequences.

For example, one thing you might think about, if you have some yeast that’s sat in the refrigerator for a while, is to check the expiration date before blithely throwing it into some brioche dough that you plan to use for a rhubarb tart. This could go a long way towards protecting yourself from the unintended consequence of unrisen dough.

Sometimes, though, things just happen. You get caught up in the heat of the moment, in the passion and excitement and anticipation of that perfect … brioche, and your careful plan is suddenly miles from your consciousness, and before you know it … well now, wasn’t that a big “Oops!”

[Read more…]

They Took a Licking

So, how was your day yesterday? Let me tell you about mine. (Be warned, it’s a long story.)

It started well enough. Finding myself in my minimalist sometime-kitchen with a few bottles of Guinness Extra Stout and Saint Patrick’s Day on the horizon, I thought I would try a bread that made an appearance in last week’s YeastSpotting: Mary’s (One Perfect Bite) Rye Bread with Guinness Stout and Fennel Seeds.

I mix it up (with a couple of adaptations); so far so good. I must say the aroma of the dough catches my attention, and I know this is going to be one mighty bread. I decide to go with two larger loaves rather than Mary’s three, and here’s where things start getting interesting. In this kitchen we have no brotforms, no bannetons; in fact, we have no baskets of any kind except a couple of plastic chip baskets that are way too small for these two-pound loaves. But we do have a couche; let’s see, here it is. Uh-oh:

The mice have been here, apparently. And let’s just say I cleaned the couche up a bit before the photo. Normally I don’t wash it, but I think I will make an exception in this case. Before I use it again.

[Read more…]

Fennel and Pepper Taralli

I have seen taralli variously described as Italian bagels, Italian pretzels, and Italian oval bread sticks. So I guess we can at least safely say they’re Italian. Since I haven’t eaten these in Italy, I don’t know whether the ones I made are anything like the authentic ones, but they did taste good with a glass of red wine. And they’ll keep until your two-year-old is in college.

The recipe is inspired by Royal Crown’s Fennel Taralli from Artisan Baking by Maggie Glezer. I added some cracked pepper and made a few other adaptations for the ingredients I had on hand. I used a food processor but the dough can also be kneaded by hand if your upper body needs a good workout. The fennel seeds are worked in by hand at the end in either case.

[Read more…]

Mamie’s Oat Meal Bread

I have an accordion recipe file, the kind that has a pocket for each category, and when you want to find a recipe you have to dump everything in the pocket out — the index cards, the magazine clippings, the scraps of paper torn from whatever legal pad was handy at the time — and sift through them one by one for the one you want.

I’ve had it since 1982, and I don’t use it too much any more, but there are certain old recipes in there that I use regularly but that never made it onto the computer, like my mother-in-law’s pork tenderloin and Christmas cookies, and many more that I never used and never will but never got around to tossing. It’s a mess, really.

I can’t even tell you what I was looking for in “Cakes, Pies & Baked Goods” the other day — it won’t be cookie season for a while — but what I found was this:

[Read more…]

Rosca de Reyes

In the western Christian tradition, Epiphany is celebrated on January 6. Although this is not a day that I personally observe, on our recent trip to Mexico I was interested to learn about the Mexican Epiphany, Día de Los Tres Reyes Magos (Three Wise Kings Day), when the Kings are said to have arrived bearing gifts for the baby Jesus. This day is the traditional day of gift exchanging, and it’s not Santa but the Three Kings who leave presents for the children in the night.

Rosca de Reyes is the sweet ring bread that is enjoyed during this time. According to custom, a small porcelain baby Jesus is baked into the bread, and whoever gets the doll in his or her piece must host a party on February 2, Candelaria Day.

[Read more…]

Chocolate Panettone Baked in Folded Paper Baskets

I had three goals in making this Chocolate Panettone, a new bread for me:

  1. To make a panettone that my daughter would like. M has an inexplicable dislike of fruit in bread, (indeed, in most baked things; this is inexplicable because she is my flesh and blood). Although fruitless chocolate panettone is not traditional, I have seen it now and then, and I thought M might give it a thumbs-up.
  2. To bake a panettone that, unlike the wild yeast one I usually bake (and love), does not take a good 30 hours to make. While that is a delicious panttone that keeps quite a long time, and the weekend-long process is starting to feel like a necessary holiday ritual for me, sometimes you just can’t invest that kind of time, and why should that have to mean going without home-baked panettone completely?
  3. To try my idea of making folded paper baskets to bake the bread in. You can of course buy paper panettone molds and other decorative, bake-in-to-give-away, paper “pans,” but they’re expensive (and I just like to make things).

[Read more…]

Send this to a friend