It is hot here today. I’m having some neck pain this week either from doing some new fancy lifts for exercise, or from having my neck in a non-neutral position for the last few weeks working our manufacturing line. Whatever the reason, I find myself spending all my free time in the evenings lately laying on my acupressure mat trying to relax the tension and skip the migraine. Does anyone else have the migraine snowball, where you start with kind of a crick in your neck and if you nurture it you might be fine, but if you ignore it then boom your eyes swell and any form of light or sound murders your brain?
No? Okay well it’s kind of new to me and the only thing that puts a pause in it is laying down on my mat and then taking a nap.
Last week, a day or so after my first successful loaf I baked another one. And another. Since I got the starter really nice and active I became fearful that it may die off. Or fearful that the first loaf was a fluke and that I may not actually know how to make sourdough loaves that rise, that that first one was just a fluke. There is a pesky voice that says, “Bitch you’re a home-baking imposter, you don’t know how to make sourdough bread!” Even though I’ve now done it several times, forces me to make yet another loaf to prove it wrong. The last one, S was in charge of scoring and baking and honestly it came out with the best crust thus far, so he’s now in charge of scoring and baking all of them even though he doesn’t know it yet.
I made flour and water pasta shapes (orecchiette, strozzapreti, freestyle) via zoom again with M&M the day the last loaf was baked. Then we ordered some seafood for pickup in the Presidio that included a Cioppino kit with a freshly baked loaf of sourdough last Saturday – and it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I didn’t even want to eat bread anymore, that’s how sad it was. So I fed the starter, gave some to my friend down the street, and decided to take a break this week.
But then S started asking me to bake some “yeasty” rolls. We had a Filippi Colomba di Pasqua, an Italian Easter bread-cake similar to Panettone but in the shape of a dove, around Easter. We housed that yeasty dove blob in two days. I think that’s what instigated the craving. You can buy one here if you’re interested, I believe they’re on sale. However I had my heart set on cinnamon rolls, because it has been years since I’ve had one. Now my mom would make sticky buns (not rolls) every time we headed up to Lake Placid for a few weeks and I have such fond memories of the glazed sticky-sweet yet somehow tart rolls of dough crusted with what had become candied walnuts. She has given me that recipe probably twenty times but it involves buying a bag of frozen pre-made dough which I can’t do. Not because I have anything against pre-made dough, but because the East coast tri-state area (NJ, NJ, PA) is a beautiful little bubble of delicious breads in all shapes and forms, including frozen balls of perfect yeast-yness. And kaiser rolls. Such things do not exist on the West Coast that I have found. I’ve been in at least fifty groceries out here and not one has these freezer section dough balls. Pah.
While perusing a book I think is actually M’s because there are all sorts of bookmarks in French, what do I see? A recipe for cinnamon rolls with the “sticky bun” option. They require instant yeast, which I finally have found at our market, which technically makes them “yeasty”. I have only used perhaps 5kg of my 10kg bag of flour. I told myself, no more bread for a week, but cinnamon rolls are not bread. They are cinnamon rolls.
Commence baking. I’m excited. S is concerned because these are not the yeasty rolls he requested, but I decide if I don’t make them “sticky” with brown sugar and corn syrup then they’ll still be very yeasty tasting…right?
Look, making cinnamon rolls is fun. You get to use the dough hook on your mixer and roll the dough up which I think is super satisfying even though it only takes 30 seconds max. The dough texture is pleasing. The cinnamon sugar making is simple. The frosting is super simple. Did I mention I made the white fondant glaze? Just powdered sugar and milk! Then after all that fun you get to fuck up a frosted yeasty cinnamon roll? Some people pay for this type of entertainment. It was also a really good distraction from all the bad news this week.
Next on the list is the requested “yeasty rolls” I totally skipped for my own cinnamon roll craving. I suspect I’ll get up to more elaborate naturally fermented bread recipes with all sorts of weird starters called things like sponge and pate over the next few months. I’m just so intrigued by the complicated nature of things I took for granted. For instance, that Easter Cake is made with a mother dough that is super complicated to create. I’d like to try when it comes time for Panettone and if I still have all of this time on my hands. It’s the natural leavening mother that allows for those cakes to stay fresh and moist for a long time. I read somewhere that they had used traditional yeast for a while because it was easier commercially. But when they starting using the original mother recipe again and selling those cakes in addition to the commercial yeast ones, the originals outsold the commercial ones because they lasted longer and I suspect had a better crumb, and so they made the switch back to the original mother recipe permanently.
I forever skipped baking except for things like cakes and brownies, because it seemed too complicated, or perhaps, I didn’t have the patience. I think I was also fearful of the calories. What a mean societal joke. And now I want to try and bake everything listed in this book.
I’ll leave you with this. In therapy this week my homework is to spend some time exploring the dams I’ve built and what it would feel like, or mean, to drill many tiny holes into them so that whatever energy I’m stopping up, whatever I’m holding back, is allowed to flow freely. What a weird yet appropriate metaphor for this time we’re in as well. Man has built a dam to wield control over nature and then man ignored all of the cracks. Perhaps it’s time to drill many tiny holes and irrigate the field on the other side – to see what grows.
Love,
Julianne
itinerant gastronomer 