Wild Yeast

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

Watermelon Gazpacho

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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Oven Construction Begins, or How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Pedicure

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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Too Much Steam, But The Deer Are Nice

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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Adventures With OTiS

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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Pesto Fans

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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Potato Salad Non-Recipe

potato salad

My son B and his girlfriend J called from school the other day, wanting to know the ingredients in the potato salad I made when they were here a couple of weekends ago. They were planning to cook a steak also. They are cooking, hallelujah! I don’t know, and can’t honestly say I want to know, everything B is up to when he’s out of my reach, but it’s a little comforting to know it’s not all fast food all the time.

This is the potato salad I have made ever since I can remember, and it’s notable if for no other reason than that both my kids like it. Now I normally am not the person you want to go to for any recipes that don’t include yeast, or at least flour. But what the heck, it’s really good potato salad, and the Fourth is coming, and it’s not really a recipe anyway, more like a collection of ingredients.

Of course having this online could mean B calls just that much less often (because does he call when he doesn’t want or need something? not so much), but he doesn’t read here that I know of. So if you see him, please keep your mouth shut about it, OK?

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