I don't bake bread often enough. It takes time, and I tend to be in a rush and begrudge the process the time it needs. But it's fun, and the result is very pleasant.
I was sick the other day, so I stayed home from work. I found myself craving some nice white toast. All we had in the house was brown bread. All right, I thought; I'll put a couple of loaves of white bread down to rise, and they should be ready by early afternoon.
My yeast was dead.
There is a process, you see, called “proofing the yeast.” You put the yeast in warm water with a little sugar, and you watch it come to life; it foams and bubbles and develops a faint yeasty brewery/bakery smell.
Mine just sat there. The water smudged and clouded, but no frothy yeasty bubbles were forthcoming. I finally dumped the whole sorry bowl of slime down the drain, and settled for brown toast.
Yeast is a wonderful organism. It's everywhere. We bake with it, and brew with it, and pickle with it. It surely made its debut that day ten thousand years ago when Bap son of Ungaga forgot his bowl of barley water on the windowsill. A few spores of free-range yeast got into it, and it fermented, and: kapow!
I stalked the wild yeast monster a few years ago myself. I left a jar of flour and water and sugar open for a day or two, and then I capped it and let it work. The stuff in the jar foamed like a science experiment for days and days. By the time I threw it away, there were at least two inches of evil-looking yellowish alcohol at the bottom of the mixture. Any bread baked with that stuff would have tasted like tennis shoes marinated in Jack Daniels and Pine-Sol.
I'm not man enough to tangle with feral yeast.
Fleischmann's Yeast, tame and docile, in its modest yellow packet, is perfectly okay with me from now on.
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