Double Baking Disaster

My bf and I have been baking together lately, with some good results and some not so much. There was the time I added an extra cup of water to the pizza dough, the time he said he had oil but didn't, the time he said he had sugar but didn't, various missing cooking implements that caused me to make some scowly faces and now...the infamous yeast incident of 2007.

We bake together to have fun together, but I must admit I am not necessarily that fun to bake with. Just ask some of the people that have assisted me in making gingerbread houses. I think I completely terrorized them. It's just...I've never had a gingerbread house that didn't win first place, and I wasn't about to start. Each house increases the pressure of having to be better to win first place again.

Baking with my bf is kind of the same. It's partly my personality I guess, but it's also because we have an audience (his family) that sometimes just want to watch, or sometimes help or ask questions or maybe just stand in the way. This would probably be okay in a kitchen that I knew my way around pretty well, with people that I know pretty well making recipes that I've made before with someone that already is an experienced baker, but instead I'm using a kitchen I don't know very well (and which doesn't have all the tools I often take for granted, like tonight's lack of an electric mixer), people I don't know well, recipes that are new to me with someone who doesn't know much about baking...which is actually kind of fun, teaching someone something new, but I also think part of the problem (besides me being totally bossy) is his family watching and sort of not giving him credit for doing as much of the work as he is.

Despite all our problems learning to bake together, we did really well last night making some raspberry/almond muffins in these cool silicone baking cups. It was the pizza dough that was our problem.

Sunday we didn't make pizza because we didn't have any sugar (you need some sugar in the dough to feed the yeast, although now that I think about it we could have probably used honey, but also we were rather tired from a long day, it was getting late and pizza takes about 3 1/2 hours to make when the dough is totally from scratch.)

So, tonight we started the pizza dough and then sat down to watch a movie while the dough was rising. While the movie was playing I started wondering to myself, "did I put yeast in the dough?", "did ANYONE put yeast in the dough?" My bf and his sister were both putting in ingredients but I had been telling them how much and spending way too much time blathering about how a quarter cup is the same as four tablespoons so the easiest and most accurate way to measure five tablespoons is, arguably, to measure a quarter cup plus one tablespoon. (I know, snore, right?) But, did I tell them to put the yeast in? I didn't remember doing it. But...the dough had looked so NICE when I was done kneading it!

After the dough had been sitting for two hours and should have doubled in size, I looked and saw some dough that was, well, the same size it had been two hours before. I grabbed the yeast container and looked at the expiration date: 1998! That means the yeast has been expired for nine years and is actually probably more like 11 years old. Yikes! This was the yeast that had been sitting in my bf's pantry, which is kind of sad because I have a bag of nice, fresh yeast I just got from King Arthur's last month sitting around at MY place.

The truth is, though, I don't know if the 11 yr old yeast would have worked or not. I did some research online, and I did find a beer making site where this guys says he had some yeast packets in his refrigerator for four years and they're still good. Now I kind of wish we'd saved that yeast to experiment with. It's not often you have yeast that old to test out! Maybe 11 year old yeast would have worked great, although from what I read on that beer making site, it would have had the best chance if we'd done the whole put-the-yeast-in-a-bowl-with-water-and-sugar thing instead of immediately incorporating it into the dough as called for in this recipe. Give it a bit of a head start.

But yeah, we'll never know if that yeast was still active because the more I think about it, the more I am PRETTY DARNED SURE that the yeast never ended up in that lovely dough. Drat! I guess it's just been too long since I've done much cooking/baking. I'll have to work on that, as well as work on playing well with others a little more.