by Jeff Potter
Beer = Water + Barley[Sugar] + Yeast + Hops[Flavoring]
Mead = Water + Honey[Sugar] + Yeast
Soda = Water + Sugar + Yeast + Flavorings
Some of these are easier processes to control than others. Wine, for example, is relatively straightforward, with few variables: vary the sugar level to control the amount of yeast activity and choose the grapes and strain of yeast per your desired type of wine (trace elements in the grapes themselves are usually responsible for the flavor and aromas in wine). Beer has more variables to play with: in addition to sugar levels, proteins and saccharides have to be controlled to correctly balance viscosity and head, and the bitterness of the hops has to be managed.
Note
Hops—the flowers of a herbaceous perennial—are a recent addition to beer making. The earliest beers were flatter and sweeter, and would quickly spoil. Around the eighth century, brewers discovered adding hops extended storage times by acting as a preservative.
Ginger Lemon Soda
Making your own homebrew doesn’t have to be a long, drawn-out process. You can make your own soda with just a few minutes of work, and it’s rewarding to see the curtain pulled back on an everyday drink, as the following recipe illustrates.
Start with an empty two-liter soda bottle. Add water, sugar, yeast, and flavorings, let it set at room temp for two days to give the yeast a chance to do its thing, and you’ll have soda.
Create a ginger syrup by bringing to a boil and simmering for at least 15 minutes:
1 cup (240g) water
¾ cup (150g) sugar
1 cup (90g) ginger, finely chopped
Strain simple syrup to remove ginger pieces and transfer into a two-liter soda bottle. Add:
30 oz (900g) water
4 oz (120g) lemon juice
½ teaspoon (1g) yeast
Screw on lid, shake to combine, let rest at room temperature for two days, and then transfer to fridge and drink.
Dark & Stormy Cocktail
In a highball filled with ice, pour:
6 oz (180ml) Ginger Lemon Soda
2 oz (60ml) Dark Rum
Garnish with a slice of lime.
Notes
For yeast, try using Lalvin’s #1118 yeast (available online at http://www.lalvinyeast.com) or look for a local brewing shop. Baker’s yeast can be used, but it’ll contribute a slightly odd flavor.
Try adding cayenne pepper or other spices to the simple syrup, or making other flavors, such as mint lime. The method is the same—create a flavored simple syrup (say, ½ cup mint leaves simmered instead of ginger), and use lime juice in the place of lemon juice. Like mojitos? In a tall glass filled with ice, pour 3 oz (90 ml) mint lime soda, 2 oz (60 ml) white rum, and 1 oz (30 ml) lime juice. To be proper, muddle fresh mint leaves with sugar in the glass before adding the ice.
You can skip peeling the ginger, since it will be strained out. However, the ginger will become tender and sugary—this is how to make candied ginger!—so slice off the skin if you do want to save the pieces.
Want to go all out, DIY-Soda-Company style? "Recycle" some beer bottles and cap them yourself with a handy-dandy beer bottle capper, available for about $20 online.
The Four Stages of Yeast in Cooking
You’ve just added starter yeast to bread dough or a liquid such as wort (beer liquid before it’s beer). What happens next?
Respiration. A cell gains and stores energy. No oxygen? No respiration. During this stage, the yeast builds up energy so it can reproduce.
Reproduction. The yeast cell multiplies via budding or direct division (fission) in the presence of oxygen. Acidic compounds get oxidized during this stage, with the quantity and rate depending upon the strain of yeast, resulting in different pH levels in the food.
Fermentation. Once the yeast has utilized all the available oxygen, it switches to the anaerobic process of fermentation. The cell’s mitochondria convert sugar to alcohol and generate CO2 ("yeast farts"!) and other compounds in the process. You can control the level of carbonation and alcohol in beverages by controlling the amount of sugar.
Sedimentation. Once the yeast is out of options for generating energy—no more oxygen and no more sugar—the cell shuts down, switching to a dormant mode in the hope that more oxygen and food will come along some day. In brewing, it conveniently clumps together (called flocculation) and settles to the bottom, where it’ll stay if you’re careful when pouring out the liquid. Commercial beverages filter out and remove this sedimentation before bottling, but if you make your own brew, don’t be surprised at the thick layer of gunk that forms.
While each yeast cell goes through these stages, different cells can be in different stages at the same time. That is, some cells can be reproducing while others are respiring or fermenting.
Yeast in breads
Baker’s yeast comes in three varieties: instant, active dry, and fresh. All three types are the same strain: Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The instant and active dry versions have been dried so as to form a protective shell of dead yeast cells surrounding some still-living cells. Fresh yeast—also called cake yeast because it is sold in a compressed cake form—is essentially a block of the yeast without any protective shell, giving it a much shorter shelf life (well, fridge life): cake yeast is good for about two weeks in the fridge, whereas instant yeast is good for about a year and active dry yeast is good for about two years in the cupboard.
Instant and active dry yeast are essentially identical, with two differences. First, active dry yeast has a thicker protective shell around it. This gives it a longer shelf life, but it also means it must be soaked in water before use to soften up the protective shell. The second difference is that the quantity of active yeast cells in active dry yeast is lower than in instant yeast, because the thicker protective shell takes up more space: when a recipe calls for 1 teaspoon (2.9g) of active dry yeast, you can substitute in ¾ teaspoon (2.3g) of instant yeast.
Instant yeast is the easiest to work with: add it directly into the dry ingredients and mix. Unless you have reason to work with active dry or cake yeast, use instant yeast. Remember to store it in the fridge!
Note
The recipes in this chapter assume that you are using instant yeast. Check in the refrigerated section of your grocery store: SAF Instant and Red Star are two of the more common brands.
If you have active dry yeast instead, you will need to proof it first. Proofing—soaking in lukewarm water—softens the hard shell around the active dry yeast granules. Use lukewarm water (105°F / 40°C). If the water is below 100°F / 38°C, an amino acid called glutathione will leak out from the cell walls and make your dough sticky; if it’s above 120°F / 49°C, the yeast will show very little activity.
Don’t be worried about too-hot tap water killing your yeast. Yeast actually dies somewhere above 131°F / 55°C, so too-hot water from the tap shouldn’t be able to kill the yeast; it just slows down reproduction. You can confirm this by filling a glass with your hottest tap water, dumping in some yeast, waiting a few minutes to give the yeast time to come up to temperature, and then adding some flour and watching the yeast still do its thing.
You can skip all this proofing and temperature stuff by just using instant yeast.
Check Your Yeast!
In baking, proofing can refer to a few different things: checking that your yeast is alive, allowing the dough to rise, or allowing the shaped loaf to rest and rise before baking.
Whatever you call it, you should make sure that your yeast is alive before proceeding to work with it. Measure out 2 teaspoons (10g) of the yeast and 1 teaspoon (5g) of sugar into a glass and add ½ cup (120g) of lukewarm water (105°F / 40°C). Stir and let rest for two to three minutes.
You should see small bubbles forming on the surface. If you don’t, your yeast is dead—time to head to the store.
You probably don’t need to check your yeast every time you use it, especially if you’re using instant yeast and storing it in your fridge. If you notice that
your doughs aren’t rising as expected, though, give the yeast a quick check.
Proofed yeast will bubble up and foam (left); dead yeast will separate out and not foam (right).
Bread—Traditional Method
If you’ve never made bread before, a simple loaf is easy enough to make, and perfecting it will keep you busy for many years. This is one of those recipes that’s worth making several days in a row, making one change at a time to understand how your changes impact the final loaf.
In a large bowl, whisk to thoroughly combine:
1 ½ cups (180g) bread flour
1 ½ cups (180g) whole wheat flour
3 tablespoons (30g) gluten flour (optional)
1 ½ teaspoons salt (2 teaspoons if using kosher or flake salt)
1 ½ teaspoons instant yeast (not active dry yeast)
Add:
1 cup (240g) water
1 teaspoon (7g) honey
Stir just to incorporate—maybe 10 strokes with a spoon—and allow to rest for 20 to 30 minutes, during which the flour will absorb the water (called autolysing).
After the dough has undergone autolysis, knead it. You can do this against a cutting board, pressing down on the dough with the palm of your hand, pushing it away from yourself, and then folding it back up on top of itself, rotating the ball every few times. I sometimes just hold the dough in my hands and work it, stretching it and folding it, but this is probably unorthodox. Continue kneading the dough until it passes the "stretch test": tear off a small piece of the dough and stretch it. It shouldn’t tear; if it does, continue kneading.
Form the dough into a ball and let it rest in the large bowl, covered with plastic wrap (spray it with nonstick spray to avoid it sticking), until it doubles in size, normally about 4 to 6 hours. Try to store the dough someplace where the temperature is between 72°F / 22°C and 80°F / 26.5°C. If the dough is kept too warm—say, if you’re in a hot climate, or it’s too close to a heating vent—it will double in size more quickly, so keep an eye on it and use common sense. Warmer—and thus faster—isn’t necessarily better, though: longer rest times will allow for better flavor development.
After the dough has risen, give it a quick second kneading—more of a quick massage to work out any large gas bubbles—and form it into a tight ball. Coat it with a light dusting of flour, place it on a pizza peel (or piece of cardboard), cover it with plastic wrap again, and allow it to rest for another hour or two.
Note
Yeast produces both acetic and lactic acid at different rates depending upon temperature. Ideal rising temperature is between 72°F / 22°C and 80°F / 26.5°C.
If kept too cold, dough will be tough and flat due to insufficient gas production, and the final loaf will have uneven crumb, irregular holes, and a too-dark, hard crust.
On the other hand, dough risen in an environment too warm will be dry, lack elasticity, and break when stretched, and the final loaf will have sour-tasting crumbs, large cells with thick walls, and a pale/whitish crust.
While waiting for the dough to proof, place either a pizza stone or a baking stone in your oven and set it to 425°F / 220°C. (No pizza stone? Use a cast iron griddle or cast iron pan, flipped upside down.) Make sure that the oven is fully heated before baking—a full hour of preheating is not unreasonable.
Just before transferring the dough to the oven, pour a cup or two of boiling water into a baking pan or cookie sheet and set it on a shelf below the baking stone. (Use an old cookie sheet; the water may leave a hard-to-clean residue on it.) Alternatively, you can use a spray bottle to squirt the inside of the oven a dozen or so times to increase the humidity. (Be careful not to hit the light bulb inside: it can shatter.) Upping the humidity will help impart heat into the bread faster and will also prevent the outside of the loaf from setting prematurely, giving the bread better oven spring—the rise that occurs as the loaf heats up in the oven before the outside of the loaf sets and becomes, essentially, an exoskeleton.
With a serrated knife, lightly slash the top of the loaf with an "X" and then place it into the oven. Bake until the crust is golden brown and the loaf gives a hollow sound when rapped on the bottom with your knuckles, about 30 minutes. You can also check for doneness using an instant-read thermometer; the internal temperature should be above 205°F / 96°C and ideally around 210°F / 98.5°C, which is the temperature at which starches in flour break down (see Making gels: Starches in Chapter 6 for more about starch gelatinization).
Allow the bread to cool for at least 30 minutes or so before slicing; it needs to cool sufficiently for the starches to gelatinize and set.
Notes
If even at the ideal rising and baking temperatures your bread is still coming out too dense, try reducing the amount of whole wheat flour to 1 cup (120g) and increasing the bread flour to 2 cups (240g).
For an even simpler bread, see the interview with Martin Lersch in Gluten earlier in this chapter, or search online for "no-knead bread." Mark Bittman of the New York Times describes a technique used by Jim Lahey, a baker in New York, in which the dough is left to sit for a day, during which the gluten forms without kneading.
For a slightly more complicated method, try starting with a sponge: a prefermentation of flour, water, and yeast that allows for better flavor development. Instead of adding all the flour and water together at the beginning, mix half of the flour (180g) with (140g) of the water (ideally, at 75°F / 24°C—if it’s any warmer, oxidation will impact the flavor) and all of the yeast (7g), and allow that to rise until bubbles start to form on the surface and the sponge starts to fall. Once this stage is reached, mix the sponge up with the rest of the water (100g), add the rest of the flour (180g) and salt (7g), and allow the mixture to rise per the earlier instructions. For more details, see Edward Espe Brown’s The Tassajara Bread Book (Shambhala).
While the exact science of what causes bread to go stale is still unknown, a couple of different mechanisms are reasonable suspects. One thought is that, upon baking, starches in flour convert to a form that can bind with water, but that they slowly recrystallize after baking and in doing so release the water, which then gets absorbed by the gluten, changing the texture of the crumb. Then there’s the crust, which draws away some moisture from the middle of the bread, causing the texture of the crust to change. Regardless of the exact mechanism, storing bread in the fridge speeds up these changes in texture while freezing does not, so keep your bread at room temperature or freeze it. (The only benefit to storing bread in the fridge is that it slows the growth of some types of mold.) Toasting the bread above the temperature at which starches gelatinize reverses some of these changes.
Try adding rosemary, olives, or diced and sautéed onion during the second kneading. Or, use only bread flour and add some large chunks of bittersweet chocolate.
Yeast Waffles
Baker’s yeast contains a number of enzymes, one of which, zymase, converts simple sugars (dextrose and fructose) into carbon dioxide and alcohol. It’s this enzyme that gives yeast its rising capabilities. Zymase doesn’t break down lactose sugars, though, so doughs and batters made with milk will end up tasting sweeter. This is why some bread recipes call for milk and why foods like yeast waffles come out with a rich, sweet flavor.
At least two hours in advance, but preferably the night before, measure out and whisk together:
1¾ cups (450g) milk (whole, preferably)
½ cup (115g) melted butter
2 teaspoons (10g) sugar or honey
1 teaspoon (6g) salt (table salt—not the kosher or flaky type)
2 ½ cups (300g) flour (all-purpose)
1 tablespoon (15g) instant yeast (not active dry yeast)
2 large (120g) eggs
Cover and store at room temperature. Make sure to use a large bowl or container with enough headspace to allow the batter to rise.
Briefly stir the batter and then bake in your waffle iron per instructions of your waffle iron manufacturer.
Notes
In baking
, use table salt, not kosher or flake salt, because the finer-grained salt will mix more uniformly into the batter.
Try using honey, maple syrup, or agave nectar instead of sugar, and try substituting whole wheat flour or oat flour for half of the all-purpose flour.
If your waffles come out not as crispy as you like, toss them in an oven preheated to 250°F / 120°C—hot enough to quickly evaporate out water, cold enough to avoid caramelization and Maillard reactions.
Pizza
If there’s one stereotypical geek food, it would have to be pizza: ubiquitous, cheap, and cheesy. But the stuff sold in your local strip mall is far inferior to what you can make at home. It’s like the difference between canned fruit and the fresh thing: both can be good, but the fresh version is distinctly more nuanced.
Start by making pizza dough. You can also buy pizza dough at your grocery store, although I find I get better results when I make it from scratch (see Bread—No-Knead Method for a simple no-knead pizza dough recipe, or Pizza Dough—Yeast-Free Method for a yeast-free pizza dough recipe).
