From what you are made: sugar and spice and all things nice

[venta]

So, about this one new skill per month idea.

April, as you know, didn't start well. Since then I've been away a lot, so it hasn't so much gone badly as not really gone at all.

In the past fortnight, I've managed one batch of bread and one batch of cinnamon buns. And even thought I wasn't expecting to get to the end of the month and think well, brilliant, I'm now a master baker I was hoping for something a bit more impressive.

My bread was - again - "all right". I took one batch of buns out of the oven a tad early (they're cooked, but anaemic-looking) and, though the second batch looked more healthy, they still weren't great. They seemed a little doughy and solid - does anyone know what might be the main cause of this ? I noted after the fact that my mum's recipe called for rather more yeast-per-pound-of-flour than the one I used - might increasing the yeast help ?

The cinnamon bun manufacture was a series of disasters. The first one bopeepsheep warned me about: the quantity of flour in the recipe was woefully inadequate. The second I fell into because I decided that (without greater experience) I should follow the recipe exactly; something I'm very bad at doing ordinarily. Accordingly, I simply mixed my fresh yeast in with the flour then added the liquid. What I wanted to do was warm up the milk and dissolve the yeast and sugar in it before adding to the flour. I think this would have been a much better way to go.

(I suspect yeast issues caused the dough not to rise much during proving, then rise massively and uncontrollably while actually in the oven. Never mind, I enjoy cleaning burnt sugar off enamelwork. And I wasn't at all worried when the oven slightly caught fire. Oh no.)

April has given way to May which means I have a new quest, but I still have an imperial shitload of fresh yeast to use up post-haste so will attempt to continue in the bready products vein. The mother has dispatched what she claims is a simple recipe for tea-cakes, and I'm hoping I can improve on the bread.



(The finished buns. Which despite the disasters, and the middle ones being a little undercooked, actually tasted OK. Photograph, flour-pouring assistance and consolation in the face of disaster courtesy of leathellin.)



All and any advice welcome from those with bakery skills.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

Um, neither. I'm using the only kind of fresh yeast I'm familiar with: the non-breeding brick kind, which is approximately the colour of modelling clay and the consistency of, er, modelling clay.

Hang on, I think I might see where I've been going wrong...

[hjalfi.livejournal.com]

That stuff is, if I remember correctly, preserved live yeast. What you do with it is mix a little of it in a cup of warm sugary water, leave it for a while, and it starts frothing madly and turns into live live yeast. I've used it once, but someone else was driving and I was just following instructions.

Personally, I find that freeze-dried ('easy bake') yeast is far easier to work with, and with the popularity of bread machines, is suddenly very cheap. OTOH I would like to learn how to work live yeast, mainly because it's cool (and even cheaper; it used to be that you could get jugs of the stuff for free at your local bakery because they had so much of it)...

[venta.livejournal.com]

OK: from the descriptions in cookbooks, the brick kind is what they're expecting you to use. I know that you mix is with warm liquid and sugar, but it seems Nigella doesn't and I thought she just might know what she was talking about.

Personally, I find that freeze-dried ('easy bake') yeast is far easier to work with

... but makes the bread taste nastier. At least, I find it does.