I AM A KILLER

I am a killer. No doubt, I am a killer. I read it on Internet. So it must be true. So, the story goes like this. After the yesterday "dry run", tonight I planned to have a pizza dinner in my place with some of my friends. In the afternoon I took 20 minutes break and I prepared some dough. The recipe suggested 2 kg of flour, 60 grams of yeast, salt and warm water. I found myself amazed when I found out that the new bag of flour was unbleached. This pretty much means that the one I used so far was bleached. Never mind. American food. You can't even trust the flour! I got over that, and I decided to make the dry yeast melt down faster than yesterday, so instead of the warm water, I went for really hot water. Basically boiling. It went pretty well. The yeast melted down really fast. I worked the dough. Put in a wet and warm place and waited it to grow. Half hour, nothing. One hour, nothing. Two hours, nothing. This is what it was after 3 hours. A piece of nothing. Didn't grow not even one millimeter.

I started to fear an other major fiasco. And this time I had friends invited for dinner. So I thought what I did different from the previous time. The metallic bowl can't be. Maybe the water temperature. So I went on Internet ... and I found this ..."Moist dough between 78 degrees and 80 degrees is an ideal environment for yeast growth. Since yeast is very sensitive to temperature, temperature is a major factor in how fast yeast multiples. Yeast is dormant and will not grow at 40 degrees and grows only slowly at 55 degrees. Yeast dies instantly at 140 degrees. We recommend not using water warmer than 120 degrees to avoid accidentally killing the yeast." Basically I used boiling water (212 F) for the yeast. This makes me pretty much a killer. A yeast killer. If you are curious ... when I discovered my crime ... I was lucky enough to have an other 3 hours before the dinner. So I did again the dough with the right water temperature. The dough grew up really well, and the pizzas were pretty good.