Talking Sweet About Nothing

You know what I never imagined would be so difficult? Finding live baker's yeast. At my pizza class in Philly the chef, Jeff Michaud, used live yeast in his dough. He purchased his at the local Whole Foods. 'That's cool,' I thought. 'I shouldn't have any problems finding it in Baltimore.' Wrong. I tried both Whole Foods locations, Trader Joe's, and finally asked the bakery departments at a couple of area grocery stores, all of which only carried dry yeast. This sort of bummed me out. Dry yeast is perfectly acceptable, but I was eager to try out my new skills learned in Philly. I remember my mom buying the stuff in the dairy department of any grocery store when I was a kid. Fliechman's sold it wrapped in tiny tin foil cubes. Now nobody has it.

Instead of giving up, I decided to reach out for help. I wrote the Pizzablogger. Pizzablogger is from Baltimore, and for the last few months has been keeping up with the local pizza scene at www.pizzablogger.org. He has an excellent site sharing tons of information on all things pizza related. It's definitely worth adding to your feed reader.

PB quickly wrote back suggesting that I try Graul's Market in Towson. I had been salivating for pizza for days, so I immediately jumped in the car to buy some yeast. Sure enough, Graul's was happy to sell me a small portion from behind the bakery counter. When I arrived at home I immediately got together the ingredients for dough and made a batch. I knew I'd have to wait at least 24 hours to eat, so I wanted to get started as soon as possible.

My first pizza out of the oven proved to be a huge payoff for the extra effort.

This pizza is doomed.


My dough stretching technique is getting better thanks to the tips learned from Jeff Michaud. All in all, everything is getting much more consistent with each pie. In fact, the pizzas that followed (from the same batch of dough) tasted even better as they had more time to stew in the fridge.