For the last few months, I've been cooking a lot of yeast bread. I freely admit, I used to be an idiot with all things yeast-related. Didn't matter what it was, how fresh or foul the yeast was, I'd always manage to mess it up. After years of avoiding all recipes that required me to work with yeast, I found a recipe on Pinterest that claimed to be so easy that even I could do it. I decided to try and overcome my yeast-related anxiety and give the recipe a shot. Lo and behold, when all was said and done, I had a gorgeous loaf of bread.
From there, I ventured to try other yeast breads and recipes, almost all with overwhelming success (the exception to the rule was a loaf of bread I under-baked... Whoops). I was feeling so amazingly confident that my yeast curse had finally been defeated that I even bought two bulk packages of yeast from BJ's Wholesale, giving me the resources to make about 20,000 loafs of bread.
Well, it seems like every once and awhile, the Culinary Gods look down on somebody and say that they need to be put back in their place. They're too confident in their abilities and, as such, they randomly determine that a recipe is going to fail for no particular reason. It's happened to everybody... The recipe they follow exactly which doesn't do what it's supposed to do, the sauce you've made a million times that won't thicken, the family recipe that you could make blindfolded that, for some reason, just isn't coming together right... In my case, the Culinary Gods decided I was getting too cocky with my ability to bake something required to rise and sent down their little invisible lightning bolt and zapped my yeast.
This recipe for Kona's sweet bread, by all accounts, is amazing and easy to make. That is, if you get your stupid yeast to do it's one, very basic job. I, unfortunately, did not. As a result, after the hour long rise time, I had a lump of dough that weighed as much as a bag of bricks and looked exactly the same as it did before I put it in to rise. Not the fault of the recipe, but the fault of me, though I blame the yeast and it's irritability.
I've been told a million times by professional chefs, even the fine folks at King Arthur Flour who were nice enough to let me poke around their kitchens for a day, that sometimes dough doesn't rise and that I shouldn't think badly of myself for having a batch of dough fall flat (or not rise at all). That's all well and good, but I think I'm going to have to take this recipe as a sign from the Disney Gods that perhaps I need to lay off my obsession with the Polynesian and focus on other places to eat around WDW...
From there, I ventured to try other yeast breads and recipes, almost all with overwhelming success (the exception to the rule was a loaf of bread I under-baked... Whoops). I was feeling so amazingly confident that my yeast curse had finally been defeated that I even bought two bulk packages of yeast from BJ's Wholesale, giving me the resources to make about 20,000 loafs of bread.
Well, it seems like every once and awhile, the Culinary Gods look down on somebody and say that they need to be put back in their place. They're too confident in their abilities and, as such, they randomly determine that a recipe is going to fail for no particular reason. It's happened to everybody... The recipe they follow exactly which doesn't do what it's supposed to do, the sauce you've made a million times that won't thicken, the family recipe that you could make blindfolded that, for some reason, just isn't coming together right... In my case, the Culinary Gods decided I was getting too cocky with my ability to bake something required to rise and sent down their little invisible lightning bolt and zapped my yeast.
This recipe for Kona's sweet bread, by all accounts, is amazing and easy to make. That is, if you get your stupid yeast to do it's one, very basic job. I, unfortunately, did not. As a result, after the hour long rise time, I had a lump of dough that weighed as much as a bag of bricks and looked exactly the same as it did before I put it in to rise. Not the fault of the recipe, but the fault of me, though I blame the yeast and it's irritability.
I've been told a million times by professional chefs, even the fine folks at King Arthur Flour who were nice enough to let me poke around their kitchens for a day, that sometimes dough doesn't rise and that I shouldn't think badly of myself for having a batch of dough fall flat (or not rise at all). That's all well and good, but I think I'm going to have to take this recipe as a sign from the Disney Gods that perhaps I need to lay off my obsession with the Polynesian and focus on other places to eat around WDW...
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