Liniments, unguents, potatoes and bacon fat

Don’t underestimate the power of a decent fat to transform a pedestrian offering into tasty transcendence.

Finding myself painted in to another Coronavirus Corner, I cast about for potato recipes. Anything would have sufficed really, I just needed a way to get the potatoes cooked before they started sprouting, which I knew was at best a week away. It’s either that I can’t track how long I’ve had them, or there’s something about the climate of my kitchen, but they do love to sprout early. OK, the kitchen is not a root cellar. Perhaps one day I’ll own a castle with a true root cellar, in which my potatoes will keep, un-sprouted, through the long Alpine winters. They will have to be Alpine because if I’m going to live in a castle, it’s going to be in the Alps.

In the meantime, faced with the exigencies of expiring edibles, I root around for approaches to liquidating my list of lapsing legumes.

I stumble upon a recipe for roasted potatoes that seems to fit. Thank you, Serious Eats. The recipe doesn’t mention bacon fat as one of the many fat options. They talk about duck fat and goose fat and beef fat. These are all good fats, but the king of all fats is surely bacon fat. Knowing in my true heart that this recipe, in the omission, is clearly pointing to an undisclosed secret ingredient, I turned to my Strategic Bacon Fat Reserve and made a withdrawal.

With the enthusiasm of the uninitiated, I went hammer-and-tongs at the preparations and after a couple of minutes of mid-recipe madness, I regained my composure and produced garlic rosemary bacon-fat roasted potatoes. An unmitigated success. Crispy on the outside and soft and fluffy on the inside, I will surely be making these for many many years to come. God bless the Internet, and Idaho.

The mysteries of sourdough - pizza edition

The tang of fresh yeast wafts through the hall and up the stairs. The yeastie-beasties have been busy converting sugars to CO2 and other gaseous outputs while we were asleep. Some days, after a particularly successful feeding, the starter has bubbled over the top of the jar and out onto the counter. Once the little organisms have done their work, it’s time to take a cup of the earthy, bubbly mixture and get to the business of baking.

Those little yeasties need time to digest their flour feedings. They don’t work as quickly as the commercial packs of dried yeast. They’re not as instantly vigorous as the live yeast you can buy in the stores. They work differently, more slowly, with a qualitatively different output. The doughs these native yeasts produce feel as though they’ve been worked differently, with more (and different) transformation of the input wheat.

How do I know this? It’s easy — when I eat bread made with commercial yeasts, I feel drowsy and enervated. The sourdough yeasts produce a different product that nourishes me. The natural yeasts create pizza crusts with depth and character. The breads are complex with interesting dimensions of flavour.

We’ve long followed Bobby Flay’s idiot-proof pizza dough recipe, and with the help of a bread maker, it produces passable output. I’ve experimented over the years with more or less olive oil (more makes the crust crispier, more biscuit-y), more or less salt and sugar (more of which doesn’t make it better, and less of which definitely makes it worse) and the addition of spices like Herbs de Provence, sometimes in very generous quantities, which also makes no difference, except for green flecks in the final crust.

Recently, with much CoronaQuarantine free time on our hands, we’ve taken the time to make pizza dough with the sourdough starter. I doubt anyone will be surprised to read that the dough is superior in virtually every dimension. Crispier on the outside, moist on the inside, workable and stretchy but well behaved in the oven.

My working hypothesis is that the yeasts floating around in the air are perfectly capable of producing great bread — you don’t need Grandma’s decades old starter with super-secret yeastie-beasties nestled away in the stinky darkness of her old jar. The key is simply to use sourdough-starter-based yeasts of any vintage instead of commercial varieties.

Commercial bakers (and makers of yeast) do not have infinite patience to wait for the slow-but-complete conversions that native yeasts perform. They’re in a hurry because time is almost literally money. The longer they have to wait for the dough to proof, the fewer loaves they can produce per month, which directly equates to less money in their pockets. They are obviously going to gravitate towards faster strains. I believe the faster strains leave some components of the input flour unconverted, components which are hard for our systems to process. I believe the sourdough yeasts process the input flours differently, in a way that makes for a more digestible and nutritionally-accessible product.

I’ll have more to say about bread, in a future post.