Wild Yeast

Risotto for Breakfast

Susan — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:33:30 +0000

The 2010 March Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Eleanor of Melbourne Food Geek and Jess of Jess the Baker. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make risotto. The various components of their challenge recipe are based on input from the Australian Masterchef cookbook and the cookbook Moorish by Greg Malouf.

This is the point where I am in the habit of making excuses: excuses for why I opened a bottle of wine approximately 15 minutes after rolling out of bed, for why I’m eating mushroom risotto by myself for breakfast on a Sunday morning, for why I waited until the last possible moment to complete the Daring Cooks assignment for this month.

No excuses today. It’s just what I did.

In my defense, I will say that I did complete the most involved segment of the challenge, making chicken stock from scratch, well in advance, and had it standing by in the freezer. This was a first for me, and I loved the result.

I’ve made risotto before, and felt comfortable enough with the basic process to feel my way to a mushroom and goat cheese version. (I know, how uncharacteristic of me to demonstrate any sort of independence in these challenges. I don’t know myself any more.) Starting with the given recipe, I made these (allowed, I hope) modifications:

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YeastSpotting 3.12.10

Susan — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:00:16 +0000

YeastSpotting is a weekly collective showcase of yeasted baked goods and dishes with bread as a main ingredient. For more bread inspiration, and information on how to submit your bread, please visit the YeastSpotting archive.

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Seeded Multigrain Sourdough — It Is What It Is

Susan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:43:42 +0000

This is a bread we made in class (way back in the halcyon bread days, before butter and sugar commandeered my educational life).

I modified the formula to use liquid instead of stiff levain. I removed the small amount of instant yeast, and increased the fermentation and proof times accordingly. I used a different seed mixture and slightly increased the amount of whole grain flour. I added an autolyse (rest period after fours are mixed with water and starter).

So is this the same bread we made in class? Here I turn to G. W. F. Hegel, who said, “Identity is the identity of identity and non-identity.” That clears things up nicely, doesn’t it?

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Use It or Lose It

Susan — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 02:22:00 +0000

One of the questions people ask me most often is why you need to discard a portion of your starter every time you feed it. The answer is — you don’t; you can bake with it instead, if you’re in a baking frame of mind. However, as far as perpetuation of the starter is concerned, you’d better be taking some of it out regularly, or you’re going to be in trouble fast.

Think about what happens when you deliver a meal to those microorganisms — yeast and bacteria — that live in your starter. They gorge themselves on flour and then go about the business of procreation. Now they’re out of food, but there are even more mouths to feed. Unless you expeditiously dispose of some of those little mouths — into a bread dough, the compost pile, the trash can, whatever — you will need to bring in exponentially larger and larger meals for them, and your little dinner party party will become seriously out of control within a matter of days.

To illustrate: say you have a rather small amount of starter, 60 grams. At each feeding, you need to feed in proportion to the amount of starter you start with, around three times the flour and with an equal amount of water. If you kept feeding without taking any out, after one feeding you would have 60 g starter + 180 g flour + 180 g water = 420 g of fed starter. After the second feeding you would have 420 g starter + 1260 g flour + 1260 g water = 2940 g of fed starter. After three feedings, 20,580 g.

After just three days (six feedings), you would have 7,058,940 g of starter. You’re going to need a pretty big jar, not to mention a pretty big budget to afford all that flour.

This is not to say you must always take some out. If I have 60 grams of starter at night and plan to bake bread the next morning, I would keep and feed the entire 60 grams, giving me 420 grams. This is enough to bake a few loaves (in a few hours, once it has a chance to become hungry again) and still have 10 grams left over to keep the starter going.

YeastSpotting 3.5.10

Susan — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:01:19 +0000

See this week’s yeast spottings…

Conchas de Colores Naturales

Susan — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:22:48 +0000

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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Raspberry Tiramisu

Susan — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 03:19:22 +0000

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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YeastSpotting 2.26.10

Susan — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:01:59 +0000

See this week’s yeast spottings…

Little Feet Biscuits

Susan — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:35:08 +0000

Last month, my 18-year-old daughter M, recently back from school in Europe and living with me while looking for an apartment and taking classes locally, nervously approached me. “Mom, I have to tell you something, and you’re not going to be happy about it.”

That right there was almost as thrilling as the time I got a phone call from a man identifying himself as a Highway Patrol officer and wanting to know if a certain young man was my son. He was (and still is)… but let’s not dwell on the past.

In the first few seconds, my thoughts ran something like this: I see no bruises no broken bones no scratches on the car she could be failing her classes but probably not she’s bright and usually does her homework god help her if she broke my oven but it was working last I checked—

Oh. OH. No. But what else? Realization settled in: patter… of… little… feet. Oh my. Well. Hm. No. No no no no no! OK, let’s not panic here. She can still finish school, she can still—

Little feet, indeed. Moms always know these things.

“I got a dog.”

Like I said, she’s a smart one. Anyone who can elicit the words “Oh, thank GOD, you got a DOG!” from my lips, when the words “What the hell were you thinking?” rightfully belong there, is no dummy.

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YeastSpotting 2.19.10

Susan — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:01:41 +0000

See this week’s yeast spottings…