Great Yeastery
Posted by Julie in Food, General Rant on 12 10th, 2009I love good food. I love to cook and am pretty good at it. But I’ve always been afraid of baking bread.
First of all, the nature of yeast is confounding. Animal? Vegetable? Sea monkey? We didn’t do much real baking at our house, so the yeast packets were written in Aramaic. This should’ve been the first indicator of death, but who thinks about little grains of stinky sand as being alive in the first place? Even if the leavening was hale and hearty, I worried about the exact temperature of lukewarm. FYI, there is no ‘lukewarm’ indicator on a baby thermometer, which was older than me and probably didn’t work anyway. Proofing? Strange little verb. Chances are, I either cooked the rascals before they could start farting into my dough, or froze their non-existent nuts off.
Since the yeast was probably DOA, there was little rising and no real ‘punching down’ to be done. Kneading was a fun activity but I had no idea what should be happening or what to look for. No matter what I tried, every attempt came out like a lump of dysmorphic building material. Even the frozen dumbshit-proof Rhodes bread would break any plate or knife unlucky enough to wander into its gravitational pull. I was panne morte. Bread Dead.
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