Wild Yeast

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

Small-Scale Thinking

In the past I have recommended (OK, scolded, ranted, pleaded) that you weigh your baking ingredients. Are you doing that?

Do you have a kitchen scale that gets a workout every time you bake? Yay!

Are you using that scale to weigh all of your ingredients? Not so fast.

Most kitchen scales have a resolution of one or two grams. That means that if you need to measure in small amounts, which is common for things like yeast and salt, it is very difficult to be accurate.

If you needed, say, 2 grams of instant yeast, and you tried to measure that on your 1-gram-resolution scale, you could wind up with anything from 1.5 to 2.5 grams. That’s a 25% margin of error, even assuming the scale is perfectly calibrated. If you’re weighing only one gram, the margin of error goes up to 50%, and if you need less than a gram, you might as well just let lemurs weigh it out for you.

Being the conscientious baker (ok, the phrase “compulsive geek” could come to mind) that I am, this is not okay with me. (Maybe it’s okay with you, and I’m okay with it being okay with you, but it’s still not okay with me. Okay?)

I’m really liking this new Admetior spoon scale. It’s fairly inexpensive, compact, and spot-on accurate, as corroborated by my earlier MyWeigh Axe, which I also like but is a little pricier. Both have 0.1-gram resolutions and can handle up to 300 grams.

Until you can get your hands on one of these little gems, I suggest using good old-fashioned measuring spoons in most cases where you need 10 grams or less. Here are some conversions for ingredients commonly called for in small amounts:

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The Difference Between Panettone and…

About three years ago, it came to my attention that my pressurized toilets were, literally, ticking time bombs.  Nothing bad happened, but it was only a matter of time. I knew this because the company was offering to replace those toilets with new (plain old, non-pressurized) toilets. Free shipping and everything. You’d have to pay for the plumber to install the new ones, but still, replacing them seemed like a no-brainer when you read things like “worst case, they explode and flood the house.”

A simple phone call and everything was arranged, no questions asked. My new toilets would be sent out by UPS within a week. All I had to do was sit back, relax, and hope my back end didn’t meet that worst-case scenario before those babies arrived.

Sure enough, a few days later I came home from work to find one of those UPS post-its on my front door. The gist was, “We tried to deliver your toilets but you weren’t home. We’ll be back tomorrow. Please be home.” Well, I wouldn’t be home tomorrow either, but surely this could be fixed with a phone call to the UPS Lady.

Me: Can you please leave my toilets in my driveway tomorrow?

UPS Lady: I’m sorry, ma’am, those items require a signature. We can’t leave them unless someone is home to sign for them. You have five business days to take delivery before we have to send them back.

Me: Can I waive that signature thing?

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Stollen (With Just a Few Sour Grapes)

stollen

Today’s post was supposed to be about this year’s panettone, but we’re not going to talk about that right now. If you must have panettone, fine, go, get out! And don’t bother coming back!

Stollen is much easier than panettone. None of this fussy sweet Italian levain business, none of this persnickety adding of the sugar in stages so you don’t overhwhelm your poor fragile gluten, none of this namby-pamby hanging upside down after baking so the sissy little bread doesn’t collapse under its own weight.

No, with stollen you just throw everything into the mixer and mix the hell out of it. The hardest part is shaping the loaf so it looks like the baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in the manger. (I think I did a pretty good job with that. I mean, I really see the resemblance there, don’t you?) And you won’t catch our little Lord collapsing under his own weight any time soon, now, will you?

sliced stollen

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Osmotolerant Yeast

saf-goldEspecially during the holiday season when sweet breads abound, you may run across recipes that call for osmotolerant yeast (also called SAF Gold, as it comes in a gold-colored package; SAF is the brand.)

Osmotolerant yeast is a special strain of instant dry yeast that performs better in high-sugar doughs than other yeasts do. In small amounts, sugar enhances fermentation, but when the amount of sugar exceeds about 5% of the flour weight, it impedes fermentation by pulling water away from the yeast. (If you’re a science geek, you probably know that sugar creates osmotic pressure, and if you’re not, you probably don’t care.)

SAF Gold is available from a number of online sources. However, if you can’t get it and have recipe that calls for it, you can use regular instant yeast (SAF Red, for example), and just increase the amount by about 30%.

Pandoro

pandoro

Let’s begin with the name: is it “pandoro” or “pan d’oro?” In The Italian Baker, Carol Field writes, “Although the name suggests pan d’oro (golden bread), pandoro is actually a dialect word for a Veronese dessert made more than two centuries ago.”

My own choice of appellation owes more to laziness than a commitment to historical accuracy. “Pandoro” is easier to type, and doesn’t require me to constantly edit after I’ve hit the semicolon key instead of the apostrophe. Let;s face it, I;m a slacker.

Whatever you call it, though, “golden bread” is definitely an apt description for this sweet, egg-and-butter-rich Italian holiday bread.

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