Improving karma

I've always had terrible trouble making yeast bread. It turns out heavy and lumpen, the crumb heavy with tiny to non-existent airholes and no flavour to speak of, despite my religiously following all the instructions. So after numerous failed attempts, I wrote it down to bad karma and gave up the effort.

Recently however, I have been through quite a lot of life changes and have reason to believe that my karma may have changed. On impulse last week, I bought a cheap pizza dough mixture, thinking that if I were wrong and my karma left me with nasty pizza, it wouldn't matter much. I bought nice but not riduculous ingredients for the toppings - mozzarella di bufala, fresh tomatoes, mushrooms. (Anchovies and olives also went into the shopping basket but when it came to the point, the pizza looked full enough without. Next time.)

Just two ten minute provings were required by the recipe on the side of the packet, and it worked! Not the nicest pizza ever, but given the constraints (an unfamiliar oven, a too-small pan, the cheapness and nastiness of the mix, my family calling me just as I took the pizza out of the oven), it was a triumph.

So this week I decided to take the next step and make the pizza dough from scratch. I used extra strong Canadian flour from Waitrose and dried yeast. Jamie Oliver (in his first book) offered a fairly straightforward-looking recipe, although I halved it because there is no room in my freezer for the extra pizza bases he suggests making. I'm not convinced I got the yeast/honey/warm water mixture right, as it didn't fizz up the way I expected, and the final product smelt much too strongly of yeast. The proving was also underwhelming - I have never seen dough double in size, despite in this case putting it in the hot press. However, the resulting product was definitely not to be sneered at. It was a little heavy, and soft in the middle, but that should be remedied by the pizza crisping pans I bought yesterday, and possibly by rolling the dough a little thinner.

Next step: real bread!

PS the other thing that is affected by karma is yoghurt making. I have never had a problem making yoghurt at home in Ireland, but never once has it worked for me in England. I tried everything, even taking it to bed with me, but it just sat there being runny, sour milk. Yuck. Maybe I should try that again.