the peaceful peacock

For the record, there are two types of yeast. One is tra­di­tional yeast, which you use the sponge method for. That’s what we’ll be going over here.

The other kind is instant yeast. This is also known as rapid rise or bread machine yeast. Basi­cally, you just toss it in with every­thing else and there is no need to do the sponge method. It’s con­ve­nient but I tend to dig the tra­di­tion of the sponge process. It’s science-y and cool, and it breaks the process into do-it-quick steps.  As the mama of two small trapeze artists, I appre­ci­ate that.

If, like me, you have fol­lowed a recipe with­out pay­ing any atten­tion to what kind of yeast is called for, you might have ended up with a dough that con­tains lit­tle balls of yeast in the fin­ished prod­uct. It also doesn’t rise prop­erly, result­ing in a dense, heavy bread.  So if your recipe calls for instant yeast and you don’t have any, you need to do the sponge method.  The two types of yeast are gen­er­ally inter­change­able, pro­vided you fol­low the proper method for what­ever kind you have.

The Sponge Method

Maybe you know this, maybe you don’t, but yeast is a liv­ing organ­ism. You always begin a tra­di­tional yeasted dough with the process of com­bin­ing the yeast, a sugar, and warm water. These are the only three ingre­di­ents that are put together in the beginning.

• The yeast feeds on the sweet­ener (sugar, honey, agave, what have you) and the warm water cre­ates a peace­ful, sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment for the event to happen.
• Ide­ally, the water should be about 100–105 degrees (almost too hot on the ten­der part of your wrist). To ascer­tain the tem­per­a­ture, use a meat ther­mom­traeter to gauge the feel of the water.  Com­mit this feel­ing to mem­ory, or use a ther­mome­ter every time if that works for you.

When the con­di­tions are ideal, this will hap­pen in about five minutes:

This is what is known as “the sponge”. Basi­cally it’s a bowl of foamy goop. There are rules to yeast, but don’t be afraid of it. If the water is too hot it will kill the organ­isms, if the water is too cold the process will take FOREVER.

The feed­ing frenzy must be stopped at the foamy goop point or else the yeast will over­proof (gorge itself and die) and won’t work in your dough.

How on earth do you stop the mad­ness of this hun­gry yeast? Add your salt. That’s it. And tech­ni­cally it doesn’t stop it, it just slows the process down to the point where you can add the rest of the ingre­di­ents and give the yeast some real work to do. You don’t want to add your salt prior to this point though because your bread will turn out dense and brick-like.

Pre­vi­ous Post About Dough

Next up:  Bal­anc­ing the Tex­ture of Your Dough

Mak­ing an impec­ca­ble loaf of  home­made bread–by means of skill rather than accident–has been on my list of life­time goals for a very, very long time.  (I can say decades now, though I don’t want to say decades because it makes me feel much older than 34.)  I  began my trek into this noblest of hum­ble skills by fol­low­ing the  stan­dard rou­tine:  I fol­lowed a recipe, I was hor­ri­fied at the results, I  con­sulted books and trou­bleshoot­ing guides about bread mak­ing, I tried  another recipe, and once again I was hor­ri­fied by the results.

You  might as well punch down your ego when you punch down that ris­ing  dough.  The learn­ing curve of home­made bread is pretty unforgiving.

Or  so it would seem.

Allow me to pro­pose a solution:

Pizza.

Even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good and above all, it’s usu­ally edi­ble no mat­ter what you do to screw it up.  It’s easy to add into your weekly reper­toire, and the wealth of top­ping options makes it pos­si­ble to dis­guise a less-than-perfect dough result while you’re learn­ing the ropes.

There’s no way around it.  You have to just dig in and accept the fact that you are most likely not going to cre­ate per­fect dough from your first efforts.  I didn’t and I spent two years work­ing  in a bak­ery for God’s sake.

In order to help you incor­po­rate this beau­ti­ful tra­di­tion into your own life, I’m offer­ing the knowl­edge that has been passed to me from a vari­ety of sources–my family’s secrets, tricks of the trade that I picked up work­ing in a nat­ural food store’s bak­ery, and tips and point­ers handed to me by my co-workers there who have worked for places like this and this (thanks, G!).

To begin, we will be using my go-to pizza recipe, adapted from Horn of the Moon Cookbook’s Spinach Ricotta Deep Dish Pizza recipe (page 195).  I’ll be shar­ing the recipe that has mor­phed from the orig­i­nal and the tech­niques, step by step, over the next few days.  Bak­ing bread is a slow process.  Learn­ing how to do it with good results should be viewed as a process as well.

Next up:  Deal­ing With Yeast.

I can gen­er­ally tell how pro­duc­tive the day will turn out by 10am.  Psy­chic?  Nah.  It’s a sim­ple mat­ter of dis­ci­pline.  If I get myself in gear and do the major­ity of my “Daily Dis­ci­plines”, then I know I’ll have a pro­duc­tive day.  If I fal­ter and blow them off, then the day is already shot by mid-morning.

Amaz­ing but true.

These are small prac­tices, baby steps in the world at large, but for a mother of two tiny chil­dren I’d say it’s a pretty good challenge.

Make the bed.

This has become much more impor­tant now that the bed is in the liv­ing room.  (In a space that used to be a bed­room at some point in time so it’s really not that weird.  And it works for us so there you go.)

Brush everyone’s teeth.  And floss mine.

This is much trick­ier than I ever imag­ined it could be.

Make some­thing.

Sit at the table and eat break­fast together.

Get the giant stroller and go for a walk.

Even when it looks like this outside:

I’ll admit that we don’t nec­es­sar­ily get out into snowy weather every day…do you have any idea how long it takes to get them dressed for this?

Sit still with myself for a moment of peace.  Every sin­gle day.

This usu­ally involves cook­ies, a cup of Moroc­can Mint Green Tea, and Face­book.  Today it’s choco­late bis­cotti that I made over the weekend.

Dance.

Usu­ally in the liv­ing room.

And let’s not forget:

Dishes.

Laun­dry.  Laun­dry.  Laun­dry.  And more laundry.

Vac­u­um­ing.

Some­times these mun­dane tasks require a lit­tle extra boost of moti­va­tion ~ I fol­low my friend Asja’s advice and put on a cardi­gan, some polka dots, a pretty neck­lace, and some tall shoes.

My heels of choice are Danskos.

It’s a gar­den, fridge, or freezer cleaner-outer.  It’s hearty.  It chases away throat tick­les.  The over­load of vit­a­min D will make you feel chip­per on a gloomy day.  And it has *ravi­o­lis*, which makes it a win­ner in my book any day.

I present our family’s Gar­den Veg­etable Soup with Ravi­oli.  Don’t let your eyes glaze over at the sight of the crazy, long list of ingre­di­ents.  Add them all or throw in a few–this soup is very flexible.

In an 8–10 quart soup pot, saute:

• one yel­low onion, diced
• 5–6 cloves of gar­lic, minced
• 3–4 car­rots, sliced
• the ribs from the bunch of greens, sliced like celery
• 1 tsp. dried basil
• 1/2 tsp. dried oregano
• 1/4 tsp. pepper

until veg­gies are translu­cent and ten­der (8–10 min­utes on medium to medium high heat).

Add:

• 1 28 oz. can diced tomatoes
• 1 14 oz. can tomato sauce
• 4 cups chicken or veg­gie broth
• 3–4 cups of water

Bring to a gen­tle boil.

Add any or all of the following:

• 2 yel­low sum­mer squash, sliced into half moons
• 1 zuc­chini, sliced into half moons
• broc­coli flo­rets, chopped
• 1/2 — 3/4 cup peas
• 1 cup cut green beans
• 2 red pep­pers, chopped
• 3–4 toma­toes, chopped
• 1 14 oz. can black beans

Con­tinue to cook at a gen­tle boil until for about 25 min­utes.  When the veg­eta­bles reach the tex­ture of your lik­ing, turn heat down so the soup gen­tly simmers.

Add:

• leaves from the bunch of greens, torn

Once leaves have wilted, add:

• ravi­o­lis

Cook thor­oughly, until the ravi­o­lis float.  We use the meat filled ver­sion but veg­gie or cheese would be equally as good.

Spoon into bowls and top with slices of Swiss cheese.

Here’s my per­fect lit­tle turkey.

We cook a turkey once a year. This makes it pretty tough to learn from our mis­takes and tweak our tech­nique, because by the time turkey time rolls around again I’ve com­pletely for­got­ten what we even did the pre­vi­ous year. This is worse now that I have lived in a con­stant state of sleep depri­va­tion for almost two years. What to do?

Step One: Ask Santa for this cookbook:

It rules.

Step Two: Do every­thing that she says.

Maybe it’s the Virgo in me, but I absolutely love how Pam Anderson’s cook­books go into great detail about how she arrived at the point of per­fec­tion. She goes on for pages explain­ing what worked, what didn’t work, meth­ods that she tried, ingre­di­ents that she used, ah…it makes my heart go pit­ter pat.

I won’t go into all of the detail of how she arrived at the per­fect turkey, but I will share the process that we use to make it hap­pen. Of course we start with a good 10–12 hour brine (inte­gral if you are using a frozen turkey but not so impor­tant if your bird is fresh). Then it’s off to the races.

There is a pretty major prob­lem in the world of turkey cook­ing: in order to get the dark meat up to temp (165 degrees) the white meat suf­fers scorch­ing tem­per­a­tures that ren­der it com­pletely dry and over­cooked. The solu­tion? Cook your turkey upside down. Seri­ously. But just for a lit­tle while.

Now there are two dif­fer­ent meth­ods of using this technique–it depends on the size of the bird you are cooking.

For a 12–14 pound turkey:

Pre­heat oven to 400 degrees.

Stuff the cav­ity of the bird with one chopped onion, a chopped car­rot, a chopped cel­ery stalk, and two sprigs of fresh thyme along with one table­spoon of but­ter. Truss turkey if desired.

Scat­ter the same amount of chopped veg­eta­bles in the pan around the turkey and pour one cup of water into the bot­tom of the pan. (This tech­nique calls for plac­ing the bird on a V-rack.) Place turkey breast side down on the rack. Brush the turkey with 2 Table­spoons of melted butter.

Roast for 45 min­utes. Remove pan from oven, close the oven door, and baste turkey with but­ter. With a whole lot of paper tow­els in each hand, turn the turkey leg/thigh side up (there is just no grace­ful way to do this–just go for it and try not to drop the turkey). If water has evap­o­rated, add 1/2 cup more to the pan. Return turkey to oven and roast for 20 min­utes. Remove from oven, baste and reuse paper tow­els to turn the other leg/thigh side right side up. Roast for 20 min­utes more. Remove turkey from the oven a final time, baste and turn it breast side up. Roast until a meat ther­mome­ter stuck in the leg pit reg­is­ters 170–175 degrees (30–45 min­utes more). Breast temp should reg­is­ter 160–165 degrees. Trans­fer turkey to a plat­ter and let it rest for 20–30 min­utes before carving.

For an 18–22 pound turkey:

It’s pretty much impos­si­ble for a large turkey to fit in the oven side­ways, so the tech­nique for big birds is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. The high tem­per­a­ture will also over­cook the bird, so it’s nec­es­sary to make some alterations.

Pre­heat oven to 250 degrees.

Roast turkey, breast side down, for three hours, bast­ing back side every hour or so with but­ter and adding a bit of water to the veg­eta­bles if they look dry. Remove pan from oven, close oven door and baste turkey with but­ter. With a whole lot of paper tow­els in each hand, turn the turkey breast side up. Con­tinue to roast for one hour, bast­ing once or twice. With turkey still in oven, increase oven tem­per­a­ture to 400 degrees and roast until skin has browned and a meat ther­mome­ter stuck in the leg pit reg­is­ters 170–175 degrees, about one hour more. Breast should be 160–165 degrees. Trans­fer turkey to a plat­ter and let rest for 20 to 30 min­utes before carving.

NOTE: We make giblet gravy and just use a cou­ple of table­spoons of drip­pings from the pan. We brine our turkeys so gravy made from drip­pings alone would be too salty.

So go for it–be brave. Your com­pany will be thor­oughly enter­tained with the whole process and they will be absolutely delighted with how freak­ing amaz­ing your turkey tastes. Happy Turkey (or Tofurkey) Day!!