14 June 2007
Yeast
Those who have been monitoring my various online adventures and/or who know me in real life know that yeast cookery is one of my taller hobbyhorses. In the past, this used to mostly concern its (lack of) availability in Ireland. Understand: yeast baking to me very nearly represents the pinnacle of comfort food. When I think about my childhood home, my Grandmother’s house, images and and other sensory memories of freshly baked goods swim to mind sooner rather than later. My Grandmother has decades and decades of experience in the kitchen, and nearly everything she cooks and bakes she does from memory, without consulting books. And it is her yeast cookery I remember with particular nostalgia.
We enter another linguistic barrier here. She made yeast bread in all forms: rolls and loaves, but she also, every week, made sweet yeasted goods. In Finnish, the term is pulla and I am quite unfamiliar with its etymology. All continentals use yeast in their baking, do so with ease and have entirely different terminology for it. The dwellers of the British Isles have no such tradition - a topic to which I will return anon - and consequently, one assumes, lack the language for these things. I dislike using the word pulla in English because it sounds to me faintly ridiculous, and I tend to translate it simply as “bun,” which, while more or less verbatim translation, does not really capture the fact that several different kinds of baked goods can be made from the pulla dough, from cinnamon rolls and other small buns to tarts and sweet braided loaves. In essence, though, I am talking about a basic yeast dough, but made with milk instead of water for soft texture, enriched with an egg and a goodly amount of butter, sweetened with sugar and spiced with cardamom, although I would be inclined to experiment also with nutmeg, allspice and cinnamon. Saffron is sometimes used in addition to the cardamom, in particular at Christmastime. The Swedish lussekatter are a good example.
So I grew up with yeast, and I learned to use it both at home and at school, delighting in its crumbly texture and musty aroma. Fresh yeast was always used, it was only much later that I even encountered dried yeast, although I was aware of it at the same time. It was considered much like condensed milk. In the Ireland of the late 1990s and early 2000s, I missed yeast cooking, but, to my horror, fresh yeast was nearly impossible to find. I once found it in small cubes in a health food shop in the Swan Centre in Rathmines, a few times in the Superquinn Sundrive baker’s counter, enduring the odd looks they gave me when I asked for it. I looked for it in the Irish Yeast Company in College Green but the ancient man there said that it was only delivered early in the week (it happened to be a Friday) so instead, at the time, I got some high quality dried yeast, which produced marvelous results. I struggled with fast action yeast that was available in supermarkets: I did not understand the philosophy of only letting the dough rise once instead of twice, and attempted to follow recipes tailored for a more northern, much dried climate. I quickly came to realise that the reason the British Isles, and Ireland in particular, lacked a tradition of yeast baking was the climate itself. Throughout the year it’s humid, cold, and windy - all veritable antitheses to yeast! On a Finnish expatriates’ online board advice regarding yeast cooking was exchanged: one let their dough rise inside the microwave oven, another turned on the light in the electric oven and put the dough there. For a time I lived in an Edwardian house which had a fireplace in the kitchen. My tactic became lighting the fire there any time I wanted to make this particular dough, or indeed anything with yeast. I liked to believe the fire sucked out humidity from the air, and its warmth enabled the doubt to rise. I can’t say how informed my reasoning was, but it did always work.
In the more recent year, Ireland suddenly became the choice destination of tens of thousands of Eastern Europeans looking for their fortune. Shops catering for them appearing. Imagine my delight, when I went to investigate that not only did these places stock things like smetana and all sorts of goodies based on forest berries, but also honest, sincere, wonderful yeast. In the same size and shape packaging I remember from my childhood, even if the colour of the packaging is yellow and not blue. Obviously, I still have the whole climate issue to deal with, but there is always an age-old range cooker with an open fireplace in the kitchen of our current house…