New Year, new me life lessons! Yesterday, I embarked on a food adventure I hadn't even embarked or thought about embarking on in quite some time. So long, in fact, that I was pretty sure I had forgotten much of what I used to know about this particular method of cooking. That method is yeast-risen bread making. I even had legitimate proof (believe it or not, pun not originally intended) that it had been quite some time since I last embarked on a yeast-risen bread adventure, given by the fact that the only trace of yeast in my apartment was a jar of Red Star® Quick Rise™ that expired sometime in 2016. Thinking I knew better than food scientists before me, I still went ahead and tried using this yeast to make the Swedish cardamom buns I had been craving since my last trip to FIKA. BIG MISTAKE! Yeast really does expire and even doubling the amount a recipe calls for doesn't do the trick. Who knew?!

You see, I started making the cardamom buns around 1:00pm and it wasn't until about 2:30pm that I realized the dough wasn't rising... like at all. I was in denial, thinking my apartment was too cold, but after adding another round of expired yeast starter and seeing no improvement, I threw in the flour sack towel.

I got dressed for the arctic weather that has been enveloping Brooklyn for the last week or so and hoped I could find some active dry yeast at my local, not-so-well-stocked (or so I thought) C-Town. It did take me a few minutes, and I nearly gave up altogether out of defeat, before I spotted the active dry yeast, tucked away on the shelf of an oddly-stocked baking aisle, but I found it! At last, I was reunited with some live, youthful, and hungry fungi that I couldn't wait to raise, feed, and later decimate inside a hot oven.

Once I got home, I realized that had I learned a few things with the food science experiment that I had created. Firstly, never keep active dry yeast for too long and know how to test if your yeast has expired, well before you need to use it. A jar of active dry yeast may appear to say that it's good for nearly a year from the date of purchase, but if you read the fine print, you will come to realize that, once opened, a jar of active dry yeast may only be truly fresh and active for six months. So, save yourself the trouble and just replace it. When unsure, test your yeast using this method: add 1 teaspoon of granulated sugar and 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry yeast to 1/4 cup of 115ºF (46.11ºC) water, mix, and let sit for ten minutes. It should end up looking like this and make it well past the 1 cup mark:

Live, youthful, and hungry fungi. The expired yeast didn't even foam past the 1/2 cup mark.

Secondly, even if your bread dough fails to rise at first, you can re-knead a new activated yeast starter into the dough (using your chef-like intuition to adjust the amount of flour too, so that you don't end up with a sopping wet, yeasty mass) and let it rise again. This works even if the dough sat around for nearly three hours, waiting for you to get your life together! So don't throw out those failed food science experiments when there's hope of recovering them.

Swedish cardamom bun dough rising, post-recovery.

Thirdly, make the effort ahead of time to properly read food and ingredient labels and instructions and don't hesitate to write a more accurate best by date on them in Sharpie (this is especially important for items you toss into the freezer and likely forget about).

Looks like I've got a lot of bread to make in the next six months!

In the end, my day and all the effort I put out, did not go to waste. I ended up with some seriously delicious screw-up cardamom buns. There's a few technical adjustments I know I'll make next time, but these are seriously delicious and are highly #rickommended.

These Swedish cardamom buns were made by blending the ingredients and techniques from two incredible recipes, Swedish Cardamom Rolls (Kardemummabullar) from Alana Kysar over at Fix Feast Flair and Leila Lindholm’s Classic Swedish Cinnamon & Cardamom Buns from The Curious Pear over at Food52. Either recipe will yield delicious results, so get baking!