Category: Pastry

Who Needs Yeast?

Reader Jen writes:

For reasons that have nothing to do with baking, I recently stumbled on the 19th/early 20th-century technology called “aerated bread,” which used carbon dioxide instead of yeast for industrial baking – as I understand it, was intended to preserve the comparatively low quantity of protein in British-grown wheat, while still achieving something fluffy and bread-like. Have you ever heard of this? Do you know anything about what it was like?

I certainly have heard of it, Jen! In fact a short history of the “ABC” (Aerated Bread Company) of Britain would have made a good post last week when I was talking about carbonation, since that’s what ABC bread was really all about. The company was founded in 1862 by a fellow named John Dauglish, who envisioned a bright, shining future where bread yeast was a thing of the past.

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Let’s Talk Yeast

Since it always helps to start at the beginning, let’s first define what yeast is in the world of baking. It’s a fungi. The strain — out of some 1500 known species of the microbe — that’s best suited to baking breads and pastries. You’ve heard the Latin name before I’m sure: Saccharomyces cerevisiae, essentially “the brewer’s sugar fungus”.

Baker’s yeasts are very, very simple organisms, single-celled little bugs that have but three jobs: to eat, to excrete and to reproduce. As they carry on in this way they’re highly effective at turning simple flour pastes into doughs full of little holes that bake up all light and fluffy-like.

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What the heck is a “crotin”?

Good question. It’s not really anything, it’s a word Nancy Silverton probably made up to describe this particular bit of bakery. However it resembles the French “crottin” as in crottin de Chavignol, probably the world’s most famous goat cheese. As for where that word came from, there’s some dispute over it. Some say that it comes from an Old French word crot, which means a short, round oil-burning lamp made from clay. That’s the uptown explanation. The downtown version posits that the word means “manure”, “dung” or “dropping”, specifically from a heard animal. Crotte is

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A Starch is a Starch

Actually it isn’t, but I liked the sound of that for the headline. Reader Mark asks:

In my local Asian food market I can find a few different starches (Corn, Potato, Tapioca) pretty easy, and it would seem to some extent starch is starch, but that also seems a bit naïve on my part to think of them all as inter-changeable. Are there texture, flavor, or other reasons why I’d want to use a corn vs. any other starch in pudding?

Hey Mark! A very interesting question. There are quite a lot of starches that can be used as thickeners and all of them are a little different from one another. Cornstarch (corn flour) is a common one for pudding because it’s so readily available and can handle some boiling before the “gel” starts to dissolve. Cornstarch-thickened mixtures also hold their thickness after being frozen, though acid can inhibit it’s ability to thicken.

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Next Up: Crotins au Chocolat

Generally speaking I try to avoid recipes that aren’t classics since, well, there’s no end of classics to do. However these seem appropriate given the requests I had last week. First there was reader Ted who asked me to write a bit more in depth on the subject of yeast. Then there was reader Aliyah […]

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Regarding Un-Thickening

Several readers have written in with questions about starch thickeners: wheat flour or cornstarch (corn flour) in particular. Several have told stories about failed puddings which thickened at first but later thinned out after several minutes of simmering. They key thing to remember when it comes to starch-thickened mixtures is that they’re a as thick as they’re going to get as soon as they come to the boil. Starch-thickened puddings, creams or sauces can handle maybe 2-3 minutes of boiling, but that’s all. Beyond that they start to become thinner rather than thicker.

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