Bread and burgers

Now that some basic supplies are hard to find, we've started ordering things online, like lots of other people. That's led to a lot of great purchases and to some purchases we might never have made otherwise. One of those purchases was a 50 pound bag of bread flour. That's why you see so many bread pictures - not only do I love doing it, I have oh-so-much material to work with. However, finding yeast is hard to do right now, both in the grocery store and online.

A few weeks ago Walter and I were talking about the lack of yeast, which is where the yeast starter I talked about in a few posts came from. What I didn't mention, is that he did a little research and found out that bakeries used to be located next to breweries because they would use the yeast from the beer to make their breads. You see, when you brew beer, you add yeast to the wort, a sweet infusion of ground malt or other grains and water that you make. The yeast eats the sugar in the liquid, multiplies, burps out CO2, and converts the sugar to alcohol. When the sugar is gone, the yeast goes dormant, but is usually still kind of floating around in the beer. To get it to settle out, you "crash" the beer by putting it in the fridge. The yeast settles to the bottom of the container in a kind of sludge (sounds tasty, I know!!). That sludge is sleeping yeast, and it can be woken up by adding a sugar or malt solution to it. You then add that liquid to the flour and salt, and make your bread. Because of that research, we bought some chardonnay yeast thinking that he would make a starter from that as well and I could experiment with it. Yesterday was the day of the experiment!!!

So I made two batches of bread, one with the bread yeast starter and one from the chardonnay yeast starter. I tried to keep the recipes identical with the exception of the yeast, so I measured everything before starting either batch. I started with the bread yeast solution and decided to knead both batches by hand instead of in the mixer because I wanted to really feel the textures. The recipe said to knead for about six minutes, or until it felt smooth. I was listening to music so I kneaded each batch for two songs - nothing like working bread to Marilyn Manson's "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This..." I also know why bakers are always buff in old pictures - my arms and shoulders got a workout.

A few things to note - The chardonnay yeast smelled "winey" which wasn't surprising. There are hundreds of different kinds of yeasts, each one with different fermentation characteristics and flavor profiles so it's not surprising that this one would have a smell like wine. There was also more liquid, and I suspect yeast, in the bread yeast starter than in the chardonnay starter. It did take the chardonnay yeast batch about 30 minutes longer to rise, which could have been because of the type of yeast or because of the volume of yeast present in the liquid.

Regular yeast on right -
 chardonnay on the left

However, both sets of bread came out looking pretty much the same, although the taste is a bit different. The chardonnay yeast has a more interesting flavor. It's not anything I can put a name to, just more interesting. The texture of the two batches is pretty much identical, and they are both super tasty. I had planned to make something like tacos or enchiladas for dinner, but with four loaves of fresh bread, we decided to put the ground beef I had defrosted to a different purpose - burgers!

Please excuse the
dirty counter!

I took the ground beef out of the fridge and added salt, pepper, garlic powder, and tarragon to it, and made 4 patties. Walter cooked up some bacon in the toaster oven so that it stayed flat. I chopped up the roasted peppers from earlier in the day (remember that from yesterday's blog??) with some garlic powder (LOVE GARLIC) and tomatoes to make chile caribe. We assembled the burgers on slices of the fresh bread, and toasted them in the skillet with some butter. To say they were spectacular is really selling them short. A really good burger is a thing of beauty, especially served with some rippled potato chips.

And that's a wrap folks!! I hope you all find joy today in the small things and you find gratitude in all you do.