Baking Bread in a Bread Machine

[Deryn]

I am right with you, Anna. I have heard of 'yeast starter' - primarily in conjunction with beer brewing - and I have definitely heard of 'wild yeast'/sourdough 'starter' but not the term 'starter yeast' so otherwise, right now, I am totally confused.

 

Barney - you are determined to use your old bread maker, correct? And you are equally determined to make a complicated bread with a lot of sugar and butter in it, right? And yet you also want to essentially make a sourdough bread I am guessing (though you may not realize that) if you want to use a 'wild yeast' starter. In a bread maker. Why? You can make no-knead dough so why do you 'need' the bread maker, if I may ask? And you seem frustrated by having to activate yeast that the instructions didn't tell you needed to be activated, but, was that recipe that didn't say to do that the exact recipe you listed in your first post - or have you modified it? Are you using instant yeast or yeast that must be activated?

 

We have had threads here (and there are many on the web) where people talk about making yeast from the air essentially - and it is a delicate, often frustrating process but it can be done. If you make yeast 'from the air' successfully though, for as long as you can keep it alive after that, you have what I might term the 'starter yeast' for any bread (but, no, it will not be a 'dough-like' consistency - it will be brown and gloopy most probably - and should be kept refrigerated and 'fed') - but, because the process for making wild yeast starter involves a form of fermentation I think whatever bread it is used in probably would be called a 'sourdough' bread - and probably have a slightly different flavour as a result - a bit of 'tang'. And I am not certain it would work well with your particular recipe (most sourdough breads are simple - flour, water, salt, 'yeast') - but then I am no expert in that department.

 

At any rate, people here want to help you but I would bet I am not the only one more than a bit confused about exactly what it is you really want help with. Do you want to know how to make yeast 'from the air'? Do you want to know if that kind of yeast will work with your specific bread recipe and/or when made in a bread maker as opposed to an oven, with or without kneading? Do you want to know why you have to activate yeast that is not instant (in fact, I would bet you wouldn't except that the results you got when you didn't could be because your recipe is so full of butter perhaps it requires the extra oomph that one might get from using more yeast than many of us use these days or what a prolonged activation in advance of adding to the mixture might provide)?  Are you determined to only learn how to make THIS particular recipe or are you trying to learn more about bread making in general? Is this the only recipe you have tried? And if so, why? Have you ever baked bread any other way than in that bread maker? And have you ever baked relatively simple bread (just yeast, flour, water, salt) before? How much bread making experience do you actually have? If you could answer these questions perhaps we could better point you in the right direction.

 

I have many questions. It appears you do as well. But, it seems as though this thread is wandering off what I thought your question was at the start and frankly, I am really lost. Was all you really wanted to know was how to save a teaspoon or so of yeast every time you make this specific bread recipe?

 

I apologize but two things come to mind for me right now: Penny wise, pound foolish. And. Begin at the very beginning ... it's a very good place to start.

 

 

Edited May 9, 2016 by Deryn (log)

[curls]

Here are some links to various bread classes from the eGullet Culinary Institute (eGCI) that may be of help... including one about sourdough bread.

Sourdough bread - https://forums.egullet.org/topic/27634-sourdough-bread/

A Sampling of North Indian Breads - https://forums.egullet.org/topic/31614-a-sampling-of-north-indian-breads/

A Sampling of South Indian Breads - https://forums.egullet.org/topic/31133-a-sampling-of-south-indian-breads/

 

[Lisa Shock]

What book are you referencing about the 'starter yeast'?

[Lisa Shock]

I should note that when I said I had made yeast, I mean I actually made fresh cakes of wet yeast, like what used to be common at the supermarket, and is still sold to bakeries in 1lb blocks that resemble butter. I found the recipe in one of those old pharmacy receipt books form the 1800s. I wound up with a full sheet pan, 1" high, of the stuff and couldn't use it fast enough.

[keychris]

High levels of sugar will cause them to grow well, however the by-product of this is carbon dioxide and alcohol. When the alcohol level gets too high, it kills the yeast.

[Deryn]

The water you use and the flour you use will all influence how well the yeast 'grows'. Tap water containing chlorine may not be ideal. The more processed the flour the less growth you may get. Less processed flours often contain some naturally occurring yeasts.

 

If you have a few minutes, please try to read this wiki article: wiki article about Sourdough. I think it may explain quite a bit for you.

 

I just don't think that leaving your 'starter' out on the counter will produce anything BUT a sourdough-like result though it may be subtle. You will cause fermentation to some degree - and more on the counter than if refrigerated. However, not ALL sourdoughs are really tangy/sour. I have tasted a lot lately which were purchased from grocery stores, labelled as sourdough, but with so little tang I might not have known but for the label. They are probably Type II sourdoughs - use commercial yeast and have a lower pH than a San Francisco Type 1 'sourdough'. Sourdough bread by the way is better for you than unfermented breads.

 

Please though tell us about your recipe. There seems to be a lot of flour for a bread-making machine for one batch. How large is your machine? Is there any way you can post a picture of a finished loaf (perhaps cut and uncut) for us to see? What kind of texture/crumb does it produce with all that butter in it? Is it somewhat sweet with that much sugar?

Edited May 10, 2016 by Deryn (log)

[cakewalk]

9 hours ago, BarneyDorfman said:

I wouldn't eat a piece of sourdough bread with butter.  Yuck.

[BarneyDorfman]

3 hours ago, Deryn said:

Please though tell us about your recipe. There seems to be a lot of flour for a bread-making machine for one batch. How large is your machine? Is there any way you can post a picture of a finished loaf (perhaps cut and uncut) for us to see? What kind of texture/crumb does it produce with all that butter in it? Is it somewhat sweet with that much sugar?

 

Recipe is posted at the beginning of the thread.  Also mentioned was that the bread machine is a 2.5 lb. "Chef Paul Prudhomme" stainless steel machine.  The first one died after about the 10th loaf, and it was a major hassle getting the warranty replacement, so even though the 2nd one produces good loaves that are very consistent (now that I'm weighing most of my ingredients), I still don't "love" it, because I don't trust it.  Maybe in a year, if it maintains it's performance, I'll give the machine a ringing endorsement, but right now I'm cynical, and waiting for it to fail again.  However, on the up-side, it has a built-in electronic scale.  I'll post a pic of the machine as well.

 

Next loaf I make, I'll post pictures.  I'm not trained in baking, so my opinion is going to be more layman-y, but I have a strong vocabulary, so to the question of texture/crumb, it's a bit crumbly, but not extreme.  When the bread knife goes through it, there's a decent pile of crumbs at the bottom of the cut, and throwing them away is a routine chore everytime I clean the kitchen counter.  It's not WonderBread.  It's not what I would call sweet, but that's what I'm aiming for.  I want it to be just on the underside of sweet.  Wherever that threshold is where most people would say they could taste sugar, I want to be 1 or 2 T. sugar less than that.  Recipe is still under development, but right now I'm focused on consistency, practicing weighing my ingredients (totally new to me),  I want a moist, buttery loaf.  Mostly this whole thing is for my wife.  To me, bread is what you make sandwiches out of.  It's the stuff that keeps you from getting the grease from the meat on your fingers.  However, my wife has fond memories of her now deceased aunt making fresh bread, and so in my household, making the bread is more for her than it is for me.  And she has a sweet tooth the size of King Kong, and likes butter.  Butter in the bread, butter ON the bread, and washed down with a nice mug of warm butter, with extra sugar.

[Deryn]

I just meant (by 'crumb') if you are getting a 'fine' texture result as opposed to more 'coarse' ones (larger), not how many dropped to the board when being cut. No large holes either? I presume that with all that fat, the resulting loaf must be quite tender and will store quite well. At any rate, I gather you are satisfied with that aspect of your bread so I have no really useful further comment there, other than to say that if you do have 'denseness' issues again, you may want to try adjusting the kneading time and/or rising times (upwards) if you can. That said though, that doesn't really address the yeast reduction problem, at least to any great extent, because I am not sure that machines are infinitely adjustable, even nowadays.

 

You may find, at least parts of, the following interesting reading if you have not found it already: KA article about bread machine bread making. That first KA article suggestion posted by keychris is also really useful and relevant here I think if your objective is still just to reduce the amount of yeast you have to use in each loaf so I hope you read that as well. The knowledge that you can reduce the amount of yeast in any given loaf by a substantial amount (perhaps down to as little as 1/8th of a teaspoon) is valuable. However, in order to do that, and also get more flavour as a side benefit, you will need to increase the rise time substantially. Is your particular bread machine capable of being set to let its contents sit overnight after the initial mix before going on with its job? If not, would you consider turning it off overnight perhaps or removing the contents to a bowl and then returning it in the morning? It would I think best also be done in a cooler environment (i.e. the fridge as others have suggested) but perhaps you can make this work on the counter if it is not extremely hot in your kitchen. I think this part is much more easily accomplished without using a machine at all frankly, but, perhaps you can figure out a way that works for you with the machine if you experiment a bit with 'timing' of the rises, etc. as opposed to just letting the machine automatically just go through its programmed cycles.

 

So that may be one way of attacking the problem you initially seemed to have. The other is, of course, to consider keeping a starter, either in the fridge or on the counter and once it is working well, perhaps reducing the amount of yeast required per loaf even more. Which direction do you feel is most feasible for you?

Edited May 10, 2016 by Deryn (log)

[Lisa Shock]

Honestly, this recipe is really a brioche pastry, not an everyday bread.

 

I agree with Deryn, you can reduce the amount of yeast by increasing time. If you do that, you will have plenty of yeast for several years from your one purchase. That said, the longer times will also lead to some fermentation and development of bacteria, and the sourdough flavor you unfortunately dislike. You will always be trying to balance the yeast growth against flavor, you best bet is to just make the bread straight and use the full amount of yeast. It doesn't cost that much, Sur LaTable stores sell bags of the instant for about $6. (and they have Texas stores)

 

You don't ever need to have such long bloom times. The bloom is usually 5 minutes, just until activity is seen in the water. The point of blooming is simply to hydrate the large granules of activated yeast. But, if you bought instant, that step is no longer needed you just add that along with the flour. The yeast is growing and multiplying in the dough.

 

Sourdough gets the sour tang from bacterial fermentation, which is separate from yeast activity. This fermentation makes the bread more nutritious. There's a good explanation in the the new Netflix series 'Cooked' presented by Michael Pollan.

 

If all of this obsession is over saving money, obviously the incredibly large amount of butter in the recipe costs far more than the yeast involved. You could use a couple tablespoons less and never really notice much of a difference and save twice as much as the yeast costs.

 

Again, I am curious as to what book you got this whole idea of 'yeast starter' from. This whole quest is going to take up hours of your time, and generally give you results you won't like. This is time that probably could be spent doing other things, things more productive than trying to save ¾ of a cent on yeast.

[keychris]

7 hours ago, BarneyDorfman said:

It's not WonderBread.

 

Thank goodness for that If anyone compared any of my bread favourably to that abomination, I think I would slap them!

[BarneyDorfman]

8 hours ago, Lisa Shock said:

Honestly, this recipe is really a brioche pastry, not an everyday bread.

 

Well, I don't know what a "brioche" is (I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and this recipe has no eggs), but it's not sweet.  My wife likes it, and we eat it every day, so by that standard, it's an "everyday" bread.

 

8 hours ago, Lisa Shock said:

You don't ever need to have such long bloom times. The bloom is usually 5 minutes, just until activity is seen in the water. The point of blooming is simply to hydrate the large granules of activated yeast. But, if you bought instant, that step is no longer needed you just add that along with the flour. The yeast is growing and multiplying in the dough.

Thanks, I appreciate that, but earlier in the thread someone else said that my standard 45 minute blooming time wasn't enough, and also when you consider that the exponential growth phase of yeast can be around 3 day, if the goal is to maximize the yeast population, then the bloom time should be longer and not shorter than my 45 minutes.

 

8 hours ago, Lisa Shock said:

Sourdough gets the sour tang from bacterial fermentation, which is separate from yeast activity. This fermentation makes the bread more nutritious. There's a good explanation in the the new Netflix series 'Cooked' presented by Michael Pollan.

Thanks, I'll look into that.

 

8 hours ago, Lisa Shock said:

If all of this obsession is over saving money, obviously the incredibly large amount of butter in the recipe costs far more than the yeast involved. You could use a couple tablespoons less and never really notice much of a difference and save twice as much as the yeast costs.

 

Again, I am curious as to what book you got this whole idea of 'yeast starter' from. This whole quest is going to take up hours of your time, and generally give you results you won't like. This is time that probably could be spent doing other things, things more productive than trying to save ¾ of a cent on yeast.

 

There's more to it than just saving money.  As mentioned before, I have a bit of the "prepper" in me.  The idea of "starter yeast" has been around for a long time, since I think Sunday school when I learned the difference between leavened and unleavened bread and how nomadic jews (and other beduins) would keep a lump of "something" around in order to make leavened bread.  I'm calling that thing "starter yeast".  They made bread before Fleishman's started selling yeast in cans. Somehow.  Maybe they walked five miles to school, uphill in both directions, carrying a burning Franklin stove with Aunt Mamie's bread baking in it, but they managed to bake bread before large factories started selling 4 lbs. of yeast on eBay for $16.00, and I'd like to learn how to do what they did, live, at least in some respect, like they lived.  I don't like being dependent on things, and helpless.  And, if there's a way to make bread using yeast that I didn't have to buy from Walmart, then I'd at least like to know that I could make it without buying yeast from Walmart, even if I'm making bread using the yeast I bought from Walmart.  Just knowing I COULD do without that Walmart yeast might be enough for me.

 

Or, it might not.  You never know.  I've seen this in other areas of life, where "everyone else" gets so locked-in to the standardized and formulated method for "living" that their universe becomes very small, and (worst) it's the exact same small universe as everyone else has.

One day, I accidentally walked into a place called "La Madeliene" and had some of what I thought was that silly, froo-froo "French Food", because you know on Hogan's Heros, that little fey "Le Beau" was always cooing and clutching himself going on & on in his effeminate manner about the delicate and nuanced flavors of French Food.  The French, I concluded (I was young, were delicate, effeminate people that ate delicate and insubstantial food that only a highly evolved sophisticate could appreciate.  La Madeliene served me large portions of meat, and even larger portions of potatos, with salt, pepper, onion and ALL the flavors that I loved.

 

Turns out, French food is hearty, substantive stuff.  "Rib Stickin' Food", and I had no clue.  My universe was very small, thanks to that stupid show, Hogan's Heros.

 

So yeah, I wanna charge out there into the great beyond, and let my yeast grow for 3 days and then toss that slop into my bread machine and see what comes out.  What if my universe comes out much larger than I imagined it could be?  And what if your universe, too, gets bigger, as a result?

[JoNorvelleWalker]

As I recall Fleischmann saw a business opportunity and smuggled his family yeast culture to America after visiting and learning first hand just how bad American bread could be.

[keychris]

1 hour ago, BarneyDorfman said:

earlier in the thread someone else said that my standard 45 minute blooming time wasn't enough

 

I think perhaps you're misunderstanding what the purpose of that process is. It's not to get the yeast into a state of multiplication, it's simply to rehydrate them and wake them up from dormancy.

[pbear]

Now that I understand the question, I'm intrigued by the possibility this might actually work.  MIGHT.  Meaning, developing commercial yeast as a stable culture, similar to sourdough but mild.  What captures my imagination isn't saving ten cents per batch in yeast but rather whether it will function like a levain, building in flavor as well as a rise.  It'll take me a week to do the test.  I started tonight.  I'm gonna put the culture through six generations of pare-and-rebulld.  Will report back on how it bakes out in a tried-and-true recipe.

 

FYI, Norman, if nothing else, understand you absolutely must incorporate a chill phase into the process.  If you don't, as several others have mentioned, you will end up with a sourdough starter.

[Anna N]

Isn't making your own yeast as a "prepper" in direct opposition to making bread in a machine?   I am unable to chase from my mind the picture of a  dignified Bedouin  crossing the desert lugging his bread machine.  It is absolutely possible to make bread without resorting to Fleischmanns or Walmart.   There are posters on here who do it every week.  Yeast is in abundant supply in the air and free for the effort to capture and nourish it.  Bread requires nothing more than salt, flour, water and yeast (even the salt can be dispensed with under certain circumstances).  But you want to use also butter, sugar and olive oil. As a "prepper" you might have some serious difficulty sourcing and storing butter and oil.  

[Lisa Shock]

3 hours ago, pbear said:

Now that I understand the question, I'm intrigued by the possibility this might actually work.  MIGHT.  Meaning, developing commercial yeast as a stable culture, similar to sourdough but mild.  What captures my imagination isn't saving ten cents per batch in yeast but rather whether it will function like a levain, building in flavor as well as a rise.  It'll take me a week to do the test.  I started tonight.  I'm gonna put the culture through six generations of pare-and-rebulld.  Will report back on how it bakes out in a tried-and-true recipe.

 

FYI, Norman, if nothing else, understand you absolutely must incorporate a chill phase into the process.  If you don't, as several others have mentioned, you will end up with a sourdough starter.

 

Hops are the key. Old recipes for non-fermented yeasts always use hops because it prevents development of the bacteria you don't want. Generally, pure yeast-making was tied to commercial beer brewing back a few centuries. Before refrigeration, individuals brewed beer, and made bread from sourdough starters. Cake yeast needs to be kept fairly cool and has always been a product of a larger brewery/bakery complex -like one might find in/near a medieval village around a castle.

 

Use of pate fermentee is pretty common in all sorts of traditional breadmaking, including your romanticized vision of Bedouin life. Students in reputable culinary schools learn about it in the first week of bread class long before they make their first sourdough starter from yeast in the air. That said, it doesn't stay alive enough to leaven for very long, and gives a distinct sour flavor. It is very commonly used in the sourest of sourdoughs.

 

But, all of that said, traditional peasant breads were all very sour, and made from rougher ground grains. And, they did not always have access to butter or oils -certainly not refined sugar, which wasn't cheap until the 1820s. If you take a look at Pollan's Cooked, you will see examples of people making breads in traditional ways and they are all fermented. This business of having bread just leavened with yeast, without fermentation, is a modern phenomenon -Pollan discusses the implications of this situation.

Edited May 11, 2016 by Lisa Shock
spelling error (log)

[Deryn]

I really don't want to be harsh, Barney, but your dependency on electricity and a mechanical machine while spouting stuff about prepping and Bedouins is what is 'confusing' (to try to put it politely). Frankly, it is verging on the nonsensical.

 

I am more than a bit of a prepper myself. I suggest you go visit www.survivalistboards.com and perhaps you will begin to understand the concept. There are also discussions there about making bread with wild yeast. There is a lot of knowledge (and many practical skills) involved in 'preparing' to live in a world without electricity, water, grocery stores, and the like - just in case someday, due to a catastrophic event (large or small, local, national or global - people 'prep' for different things, for different reasons), some or most will have to live without those, for a short or long time. I will warn you though that while you will find a LOT of knowledge, insight, experience and good people on the survivalistboards, they can also be rather straightforward at times about calling people on outlandish assumptions or laziness (failure to read the boards thoroughly first and at least open your questioning with an obvious understanding of the greater picture).  

 

Anna is also right about fat storage - that is one of the biggest issues that 'preppers' talk about constantly (especially since most people are not in a cow keeping position and/or don't grow their own grains and have an expeller). If you were really interested in 'prepping', you would want to learn to make simple bread by hand and without fat. In fact, you would probably want to grind your own wheat - since most don't store flour (it contains fats and goes rancid relatively quickly).

 

So .. as I said before .. 'let's begin at the very beginning'. Not in the middle. Not at the end. Let's go back to the basics. Learn to make simple breads by hand. Then you can up your game and 'experiment' with a better basic understanding of theory. We'd like to help but right now you are pretty much out in the weeds, my friend. If all you really want to do is keep making this particular bread, this particular way, for your wife, that is fine too but it doesn't fit with the rest of what you keep talking about - and you should realize that.

Edited May 11, 2016 by Deryn (log)

[Lisa Shock]

On 5/9/2016 at 7:10 PM, JoNorvelleWalker said:

 

I'm not positive, but as a quondam biochemist, I'm pretty sure non-GMO yeasts lack the ability to produce enzymes to break down starch to sugar.

 

I think the flavor comes from organic acids.

 

For my bread I use a poolish -- flour, water, and a tiny amount of yeast, ripened overnight at cool room temperature -- along with a normal amount of yeast in the final dough.  The poolish is for flavor, not so much for leavening.

 

HERE is an article that may be of interest. (or at least explains it as well as I would, and I am too lazy to type that much right now) The enzymes are in the flour itself, amounts vary by type of flour, type of wheat, and what conditions it was harvested, milled, and aged under. It also shows why a mixture of just water and yeast sitting for long periods won't do much of anything (well, you can add sugar and start making alcohol, but, that's a different topic), but just water and flour together make magic. It's action of the water with flour, either in a preferment (which often contains no yeast), and/or over time during autolyse that does the trick. It's one of the main reasons why no-knead bread is constructed with all ingredients being mixed together at the beginning. (fairly good gluten development is also a result of the no knead method, but the CI N-K is enhanced by a short knead)

 

The bacteria developed in sourdough starters and other long term storage type preferments also interact with starches, but have not been quite so extensively studied as yeast which was one of the first microscopic organisms studied when the microscope was invented. What is known is that nutrients are more bioavailable in traditionally made sourdough type breads. Micheal Pollan simplifies it when he states that a person can live pretty much indefinitely on soured breads, but would die after just a few months from eating just unsoured flour -like say in biscuits, tortillas, or modern yeast-only style bread (which is only a little over 100 years old), such as the original poster's recipe.

 

HERE's an NYT article on starting out with starter.

 

And, as much as the OP thinks of himself alone out on the cutting edge of a new frontier, I would assure him that while I am open to new information (I love the work the MC folks are doing! Aquafaba is cool!), my experience in breadmaking is not as much of a walled garden in his rear-view mirror as he imagines. (As a born foodie, I would never pooh-pooh one of the world's great cuisines. but then again, I was lucky enough to grow up with Julia on TV every week helping me out. I also checked every single cookbook out from the public library and cooked my way through them, as my mother hated to cook and left me to make dinner much of the time starting when I was 4 years old.) I have over 40 years' worth of experience in managing sours at home. I graduated with a degree in P&B from LCB, have 50+ certificates in master-level classes, taught in several B&P university-level programs including a program run by the CIA, I compete in professional competitions, I have been a judge in professional competitions, worked several jobs as a baker, been a BBGA member for over a decade, worked as a consultant to bakeries, worked as a consultant to the local high school district's culinary programs, run a catering company, done occasional pop-ups, baked bread for a local organic exchange, plus done a bunch of marginally related savory-side things. I have seen a lot of starters in my life. I have had to grade hundreds of students' starters daily for weeks on end, following their progress to ensure their understanding of what was happening every little step along the way. I have graded hundreds of preferments and the loaves that were produced by them. I have done many, many demonstrations of artisan bread production often including showing what happens if formulae or procedures were not followed precisely. -And I am by no means the most experienced baker on eGullet, not by a long shot. The knowledge and experience of the people who have replied to this thread is incredibly large and comprehensive.

 

There's a chance that messing around with yeast might yield a small refinement in technique, but, as you seem intent on ignoring our advice, chances are, you'll just waste a lot of time retracing steps through known territory.

[BarneyDorfman]

Okay so I've done quite a bit of learning during the course of this thread, and one of the primary things I've learned, which has taken some time to assimilate, is that there are different kinds of yeast, and in general they can be described as either "wild" or "sourdough" and "commercial".

 

Tonight I spent some time looking at YouTube videos regarding sourdough starter yeasts, and did not find any that focus on commercial yeast, which given my aversion to the sourness of sourdough, may make my little project harder than it would otherwise be.  (However as a side note I have also learned that there are varying degrees of sourness in "sourdough" bread, and that my last experience may be been with a particularly sour bread, and that I might be okay with sourdough as a general class, however as mentioned before this is all about my wife and what she likes).

 

There are a bunch of YouTube videos discussing starter yeasts and they are exactly as I imagined them; bowls of brown glop.  They take half out and use it, and "feed" the starter by adding more flour and water back in.  However they are on baking schedules on the scale of once a week and I am baking once every 1 1/2 days.

 

And also, one video mentioned something already mentioned in the thread, which is that the starter should be kept in the refrigerator, but again they were baking once a week.  Another thing to think about is what impact the amount of starter has on flavor.  Example if I add 1/2 c. of starter to my 4 2/3 c. recipe, how does that flavor compare to if I use 1 c. of starter and reduce my flour by a full cup?

 

Working out the details before executing some experiments.  I should start my starter yeast sometime tomorrow.

Edited May 13, 2016 by BarneyDorfman (log)

[keychris]

1 hour ago, BarneyDorfman said:

Working out the details before executing some experiments.  I should start my starter yeast sometime tomorrow.

 

Keep us posted with how you do, Barney. I really recommend getting a good book on bread if you're interested in at least trying out the sourdough route and having a good read. You wouldn't have a problem with an every day or every second day baking schedule with sourdough - but you do have to refresh your starter regularly, which basically means throwing flour into the compost - and I get the feeling this isn't something you'd be down with

[Lisa Shock]

The NYT article covers daily usage quite well. It's a common practice. After all, most bakeries make bread every day. But, then again, they also use scales.

[pbear]

Barney, a few tips.  If you want to go the sourdough route without it being too sour, you'll get better results if you buy the starter.  Sourdoughs Int'l (sourdo.com) has several mild ones.  A starter you develop in your own kitchen (for free) may or may not be mild, but probably not.

 

If you stick with commercial yeast, you have to chill between incubations because otherwise the bacteria will take over.  Not even daily use will prevent this; in fact, most sourdough starters are pared back and rebuilt daily.  By incubation I mean the period at warm temp when you're letting the yeast reproduce.  For my experiment, I'm using four hours.  Don't think I would consider going more than six.  Bear in mind you just need the yeast to double.

 

As for coordination with your recipe, my strategy is to size the starter to make that easy.  For example, I'm going to be using this starter in a simple sandwich white based on 450 g flour (1 lb, about 3.4 c by the stir-scoop-and-sweep method) and 300 g water (1-1/4 c).  I prefer starters with a 2:1 ratio by weight, so I set up this one with 240 g water (1 c) and 120 g flour (just under a cup), plus 1 tsp dry yeast.  Ran four hours, stirring down halfway through and again at the end, then chilled.  Next day, discarded half and replenished with 120 g water and 60 g flour (no more yeast).  Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

When I go to bake, the half I've been discarding is what will go into the bread.  I know that's 120 g water and 60 g flour (scant 6 tbsp by volume), so I'll adjust the other quantities accordingly.  For your bread machine recipe, you might need a slightly larger starter, but the principles remain the same.

 

Hope that helps.

 

ETA: I'm doing the pare-and-rebuild thing for two reasons.  First, I'm curious whether this is a viable long term strategy.  Second, I'm trying to develop a mild bacterial culture.  If this works, not yet tested, the discards could have been used to bake all along, but I don't have the time, nor the need for that much bread.

Edited May 13, 2016 by pbear (log)

[Lisa Shock]

There are thousands of types of yeasts. Wild yeast can be any of them. There are wild yeasts that are found to only live in particular regions, giving local brewers and bakers unique properties to their products. There's a commercially popular sake brewing yeast used by cheap sake brewers that gives off a lot of alcohol but almost no CO2, so a brewer can use smaller tanks, and therefore have a smaller building, as there is no bubbling and almost no increase in volume during yeast growth.

 

Commercial yeasts are simply specific strains that are grown and sold for their consistency. Producers focus on the needs of end users when choosing the strain they will cultivate. They take great care to nurture the one strain while carefully setting up their systems to kill any unwanted yeasts or bacteria.

 

A sourdough starter is a complex mix of the action of lactic acid bacteria, enzymatic action from the grain, and some yeast activity. In the beginning, it is composed of what was placed in the container: water (or other liquid), microorganisms from the water including wild yeast and bacteria, flour, wild yeast and other microorganisms found in the flour, plus anything else the maker feels like adding -although these extras, including commercial yeast, tend to be a pointless waste of ingredients. Over a period of a few weeks, as part is discarded and more wild-yeast-laden water and flour are added, it acclimates, and transforms into a culture of the local region's microscopic organisms. This why it's pointless to start one with commercial yeast and expect it to continue to be just that particular strain multiplying itself. All sour starters will pick up wild yeast and bacteria from the air, that's what the process is designed to do. Some yeasts actively kill off other yeasts in their environment, some just survive better than others in some micro-climates and take over a starter via simple survival of the fittest type, others live in symbiotic harmony. The only way to accurately test which yeast type(s) you are culturing in a starter is to check samples under a microscope -and keep checking as average room temperatures and other environmental factors in the home change. Bakeries try to maintain exacting standards, like maintaining starter in environments with very tightly controlled temperatures which are checked multiple times daily, to achieve consistent results.

[liuzhou]

Coincidentally, this turned up in my Twitter feed today.

 

The Wonderful, Woolly World of Wild Yeast (and How to "Catch" Your Own)