About Me

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I'm a Houston-based Yeast Wrangler who decided that fighting Gulf Coast humidity with yeast was a reasonable hobby. It is not. I do it anyway. I'm also a beginner trying to perfect this, which means I'm losing this fight in real time, in public, and inexplicably taking notes like anyone asked. I recently bought an Ankarsrum, a beautiful Swedish mixer engineered over decades by serious people who assumed it would be operated by someone with a single qualification. It met me. It has not recovered. We're working on it, by which I mean it works and I hover nearby.

This is a city, and frankly a planet, that has personally declared war on my bread. Water shows up first, pre-soaking my flour before I've measured a thing. Then air, in the form of humidity, rushes my proofs and wrinkles my mantou before I've even closed the steamer lid. Fire arrives via an oven that lies about its own temperature to my face. And earth just sits there as flour that behaves differently every single day out of pure spite. All four elements, fully coordinated, ganging up on one loaf, and somehow the loaf and I both agree it's my fault. The Ankarsrum performs flawlessly every time and quietly makes the case that the equipment is no longer the problem. I am the problem. I remain, by a wide margin, the least reliable appliance in my own kitchen. And yet here we are, loaf after loaf, each one a marginally less embarrassing draft of the one before. I work mostly in yeasted breads from all over the world: Spanish rolls, Turkish griddle flatbreads, soft enriched things I have absolutely no business attempting at 11pm on a work night. Some of them come out beautifully. Some of them come out. A few stay in the oven out of spite. I document all of it, flattering or otherwise.

What you'll find here are recipes, photos, and the kind of honest notes you only earn by ruining four loaves first: what worked, what went sideways, and the small adjustments that get me one humid inch closer to a loaf I'd actually call finished. Think of it as a beginner narrating her own crimes against flour, in real time, with measurements, on equipment far too dignified to be implicated. No sourdough cult on the premises. What I bring to the counter is a yeast packet, a grudge, a mixer that deserved a better owner, and the kind of confidence you can only have before you know enough to be scared. Somehow, that's gotten me surprisingly far.

Stick around. Bring butter.