…Posts Tagged ‘yeast’…

Christmas Bread

I was reading the New York Times the week before Christmas and found a delicious looking recipe for Cesnica, Serbian Christmas Bread. I still had some yeast in my cupboards, so I thought it would be a nice treat to make it and have it on Christmas day. I also REALLY want to become a seasoned bread maker since that’s really the only food I don’t make myself.

Anyway, Cesnica is a lovely braided bread with a coin cooked inside, and much like the baby in King’s Cake, whoever gets the coin, gets good luck for the year.

I’m not posting the recipe for a couple reasons. One, I can’t find it anymore. Two, it wasn’t one of my raging successes. It tasted really doughy and while it was good toasted, it’s not a light, fluffy bread you can consume on it’s own. It may very well have been my oven since it’s terrible, but who knows… I did want to blog about it, though, so I could show it off and because I spent a collective 6 hours, making the darn thing.

But first, I was really nervous about baking the coin so I took the question to Facebook. One of my friends suggested wrapping it in aluminum foil and another to just insert it after it’s baked. I also Google-d a bit and found that you can brush it with hot water and baking soda to sanitize it. So, of course, I did both.

I found a quarter (a Hawaiian one since that’s where my parents got married) and soaked it in baking soda and water.

And then I wrapped it in tin foil.

My brother ended up getting the good luck and when he unwrapped it, we found that the baking soda had totally corroded the quarter. Yuck.

And while we’re talking about Christmas (yes, it’s a month late), I thought I would show you my Christmas nails.

Aw, yeah.

And here are some pictures of the process. It’s useless to you, I know, but just humor me.

Ta-da! Too bad it didn’t taste as good as it looks. Nevertheless, I did eat my fair portion – heavily toasted, slathered in butter, and soaked in jam. It’s a Christmas miracle that I didn’t gain ten pounds over the holiday…

Rosemary Grape Flatbread

The other day, I had bought a huge bunch of grapes, only to realize when I got home, that they were not that great. Sigh. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Such a disappointment…

So I decided the only way to salvage these grapes was to cook them somehow. Hello, Rosemary-Scented Flatbread with Black Grapes. After many years of baking, I thought that now was finally the time to tackle my fear of this guy:

Yes, yeast. Cue the western showdown music.

Yeast scares the heck out of me, for some reason. I guess because you really never know how it’s going to act since it’s alive, and all. (Ick, FREAKS.ME.OUT.) But after Beth tried her hand at baking with yeast, I thought I might give it a try.

Verdict: not too bad

Now that I’ve worked with it once, I’m much more inclined to try it again. I’m not going to re-post the recipe on my blog since I didn’t make any changes to it, so just check out the Cooking Light recipe here.

Here are a few tips, though.

Use a meat thermometer to make sure the water is at the right temp. You don’t want to mess with yeast, people. It’s alive.

Don’t be alarmed when the mixture bubbles up. It’s alive, after all.

Make sure to use fresh rosemary. It makes all the difference. Love it!

Mix, mix, mix.

Mix, mix.

Kneading is a very good arm workout. Especially when you don’t know what you’re doing. Of course, after I finished baking it, I looked up “how to knead dough” on youtube and figured out that… I was doing it wrong. Oh well!

It said that the dough was supposed to double in size. I would say, mine rose 75%.

Good enough.

Punch it down…

And then CAREFULLY incorporate the grapes. Most of mine got mushed up. Pretty sure “mushed up” is a technical baking term.

It’s HARD to make the dough spread out without it ripping! Mine was more of a “focaccia” than a “flatbread”. It still worked out.

Add more grapes at the end.

And make sure to watch the bread as it bakes pretty quickly.

Also, generously salt the top of the bread since beyond the grapes and rosemary, there’s not much flavoring in the dough.

It was lovely and crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside! The grapes gave it a sweet touch and I ate it dipped in some olive oil. Yum! My co-workers had nice things to say about it

This was definitely a time-intensive ordeal so you want to make sure you have at least 5 hours to get all of this done, since it needs to rise and all that. I was very productive during my breaks and painted mirrors (more on that later) and went to the gym across the street.

I bought some more yeast this past weekend so stay tuned for more yeast-baking adventures!