December 18, 2006

Fresh Christmas yeast

Today´s Swedish word: jäst Means yeast. The Swedish word gäst, which is pronounced exactly the same - like yes with a t in the end - means guest. Isn´t that neat? You use jäst when you expect gäster (guests).

I found these on the shelf when I shopped for some Christmas baking, fresh yeast in holiday packing. This is for sweet baking, with "extra power" but I have learned from several articles, experts etc. that it is really not necessary to use a special yeast for sweet things. I can understand that, I have never had problems with plain yeast during the long dark years before the sweet yeast introduction.
Despite my knowledge I couldn´t resist buying these because of the merry feeling they give me. God Jul means Merry Christmas, and there are tiny little lussekatts on them too. Cute!

Here fresh yeast really is widely available so I was surprised at first when I read food blogs and realised that in quite a few countries it is rather hard to get hold of, and people think it is hard to use it (on the other hand we don´t have a very good bakery tradition here so if you want good bread without paying a fortune then you will have to get baking yourself). Anyway. I use it for most of my baking (though I always keep a few bags of dried yeast in my baking cabinet, for back-up).

As it turned out I haven´t used them - I almost did yesterday for making lussekatter for my sister-in-law who just had a baby (yay! We have a new little boy in our lives!) but then we were out of saffron and out of time so instead she got these delicious muffins which are much more fast to make, and I had all ingredients in the house. You can read about lussekatter here instead...

Finally, the Menu for hope III campaign is still running, until december 22nd, and you still have the opportunity to buy raffle tickets for winning my wonderful Swedish candy collection with prize code EU20, or something else. I have bought three tickets myself today and can assure you it is very easy, safe, and above all it feels good to spend money on something that really matters this time of year when you just shop shop shop ´til you drop.

2 comments:

Pille said...

I had such hard time looking for fresh yeast in Scotland, and eventually found it in health store, where you could buy it by grams from big tubes. I don't mind using dried yeast, though I always prefer fresh. And the active dried yeast is plain weird (popular in the UK).
Holiday packed yeast sounds sweet:)

Eflornithine Topical Vaniqa said...

Hello, nice blog