Category: Pastry

Reader Cassie wants to know why, if sugar kills yeast, how the yeast manages to survive in the chocolate crotin recipe I’m doing this week. That’s an excellent question and the answer is that it doesn’t. Notice in the recipe below that crotins have two stages, a sponge stage and a mixing/baking stage. The sponge is cultured with just yeast, flour, water and a small amount of sugar. Once it’s inflated, full of little yeast-created pockets of CO2,

Yeast as an ingredient has been historically very closely tied to beer making. The first leavened breads were made from porridges that were left sitting out too long and eventually fermented (the first bread starters), but bakers soon came to understand that quicker, stronger, more aggressive rises could be achieved when the scum left over from beer making (what we now understand to be a thriving yeast culture) was added to dough.

Beer has been around for at least ten thousand years…about as long as bread, unsurprisingly. We know the ancient Egyptians brewed beer, though even earlier records of beer making come from the mountainous region of western Iran. So from the very earliest days of agriculture in the West, beer, and by extension bread, was hot stuff all around the Mediterranean, across the Middle East and up into the Eurasian steppes. From there it spread into the backward and barbarous lands of Europe and the British Isles. Out-of-control football hooliganism followed soon after.

Watching a bread dough grow is a wonder. Or at least it is to me, a dedicated baker and consummate geek. I never fail to be startled when I peer into a cloth-covered bowl and find a completely inflated sponge, bubbly and rarin’ to go. Just two hours prior it was a lifeless paste of water and flour. What could be cooler?

Moments like this make one understand how the ancients (and a few not-so-ancients) came to believe that leavening was a miracle. Certainly no one had any concept of the tiny creatures we call microbes until the age of Pasteur. Europeans in the Middle Ages simply called fementation “goddisgoode”. Whenever I think of that I imagine two Medieval dirt farmers staring drunkenly into mugs of beer a the local mead hall. One says to the other: I wonder how this happens? The other shrugs and says: Hey, God is good!