Ask a Geologist: Don't Fear the Yeast(er)

Dear Geologist,How did you overcome your fear of yeast?I'm always afraid 1. I'll kill it 2. I'll overfeed it, and it'll take over the kitchen like the blob 3. It'll just be bad.

I want to learn to make rum baba which has yeast.

I used to be afraid of yeast too. And it’s funny because I always used the word “fear” with yeast and so many people I talk to say the same thing. People are not ambivalent about yeast. “Fear” is a pretty serious word for something that is not going to literally kill you if you mess it up. Lemme tell you how I got over my fear.At first I went out of my way to try and make yeastless bread. I made the stupid beer batter bread…that sucked and was horrible (imho) and I tried a bunch of quick breads. Nothing is as delicious as real bread.

My husband worked at a fancy pants French restaurant as a baker for a while so he was all the time makin’ stuff with yeast like it was no big deal. I always wanted to know how to do it but I was always scared. Then I got a bread maker for $12.50 at the G Dub and everything changed. A bread maker is kind of a gateway appliance. With that thing I was churning out beautiful loaves of bread and the house smelled fantastic. It was so easy! It was like a crockpot that made bread! But after a while I got kind of tired of always having loaves of bread with the weird little spot on the bottom from the mixer…and I realized that the bread machine wasn’t really doing anything revolutionary. It certainly wasn’t doing anything I couldn’t do and it wasn’t doing anything magic with the yeast.

The other thing that helped me get over the fear was that I realized that flour and yeast are super cheap so if I messed something up I could easily chuck the batch and start over without a lot of lost time and money. So here is a quick and awesome pizza dough recipe that I use all the time that’s a great introduction to yeast. If you mess it up you realize it within the first half hour and you have plenty of time to start over before dinner. I think started out as a recipe from the Pioneer Woman mashed with a recipe from About.com but I have tweaked it a little bit to suit my pizza needs.


Ingredaments
2t yeast
1 ¼ cup warm water

1 T honey

1 T olive oil

1 ½ cup all purpose flour + 1 cup whole wheat flour OR 2 ½ cups all purpose flour

1 t dried or fresh rosemary

1. Add 2 teaspoons of yeast to the bowl of a stand mixer (or regular bowl, it’ll work, you just have to try harder). Add 1 ¼ cups of lukewarm water. You want it to feel warm but not be hot enough on your hand to be uncomfortable. Just slightly warmer than your normal temperature. Add this to the bowl and then put in a big squirt of honey. (If you don’t have honey you can use a little bit of sugar or molasses. Just a lil something to get the yeast interested. Swish that all around. Let that sit for like 5 minutes. I generally go get my other ingredients now.

2. Come back and look at your yeasty water. Does it look different? Does it have kind of a foamy brown cap on it? Mine looks like this:

If yours looks the same you should start over with cooler water or think about how old your yeast is. If it's pretty old it might be dead. It should smell good and yeasty right now and if it doesn't your yeast has probably gone to meet it's maker. Whatever that means.

3. Add in 1T of olive oil, your flour and the rosemary. You can leave out the rosemary or add other spices (except salt). Sometimes I put in basil or garlic powder. It doesn’t change the chemistry so it won’t hurt your rising or anything. Stir that all up in your mixer or by hand (you may want to kind of knead it) and until it looks like…dough. Having a stand mixer is awesome for this.

4. Find a warm spot for your bowl and put it there with a clean towel over it. HAHA. I love on recipes when they tell you to put a clean towel over something as though you’re such an idiot that you’d drape a dirty towel over your food. “Huh, alls I’ve got is this gunky gym towel that I used to clean the skunk carcass off of Rover. That should be fine.”

The best place in my house for bread is a closet in the master bedroom that we use for our out of season clothes. This is where I put my dough with its nasty ass towel draped over it. My dough started out like this:

Leave it there for at least 15 minutes….or longer if you can spare it…or if you get wrapped up in Facebook. When you come back it’ll look like this:

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.

Take a normal rectangular baking sheet, spray it with pam, and then fit your dough over top of it until it fills up the whole thing. This takes some doing but you can make it happen. If you have holes you can move dough globs from the thick spots. Go ahead and put on your favorite pizza toppings. I like olives, onions, mushrooms, cheese and sauce.

When your oven is pre-heated you can pop this in. I NO RITE? SO FAST!! Then it cooks for 25 minutes and you have pizza. Yummy, healthy, pizza in less than an hour. ADDED BONUS: You’re a yeast expert and can now go on making all sorts of stuff with reckless abandon. OK…so maybe not…but you’re on to something and you can practice.

A few of my friends are really into the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day craze and I just tried out that method recently. It’s super easy and fantastic. You can buy the book on Amazon for cheap or you can get the basic recipe here. It’s sooooo basic and easy and the bread turns out delicious and adorable.