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How to make your own yeast for baking:
As more people bake their blues away while stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, yeast is reportedly becoming harder to find on grocery store shelves. There's no shame in turning to carbohydrates for comfort in times like these. But what's one to do when a key ingredient for satisfying that craving is becoming as elusive as a roll of toilet paper?
[...] There's a good chance you've already got what you need at home to get started. The Verge asked Stephen Jones, director of Washington State University's Bread Lab, for simple instructions. What you'll actually be doing is capturing wild yeast and bacteria that's already present in the air or in the flour to make a "sourdough starter." This is what bakers have relied on for generations before commercial yeast became available less than 100 years ago.
[...] "Sourdough" is often used to refer to bread that's made with a wild yeast starter rather than with store-bought yeast; following the instructions for this starter doesn't necessarily mean that the bread you make with it will taste sour. But since you're harvesting wild yeast and bacteria (the bacteria is what adds some sourness) that's naturally present in your kitchen, your bread will have a flavor that's unique to wherever you are in the world. That's why, Jones says, "There's a little more beauty in starting your own starter."
What you'll need: Jones says that although some recipes you'll find online call for things like fruit or juice, all you actually need are flour and water. White flour works fine, but whole wheat is best because it has more micronutrients like zinc and iron for the yeast and bacteria. You'll also need time; it'll take several days before your starter is ready, so it's best to plan ahead.
Step 1: Mix together equal parts flour and water in a small bowl. You can start with about a quarter cup of each. Stir well. Water activates the enzyme amylase, which breaks down starch into simple sugars that the yeast and bacteria can eat.
Step 2: Cover the bowl loosely with a lid or towel and leave the mixture on your counter at room temperature. Keeping it in a place that's a bit warm, but not too hot, will speed up the process of the yeast and bacteria colonizing your batter.
Step 3: Twice a day, in the morning and evening, add one to two tablespoons each of flour and water. By doing this, you're actually feeding the yeast. In about three to five days, your starter will begin to bubble. This is a good thing: the way yeast makes bread rise is by producing gas, like what you see in the bubbles. After day five, your starter should have at least doubled in volume and will be ready to use. As a rule of thumb, a bit of the starter should float in a glass of water when it's ready.
[I've been making bread for over a decade now, and sourdough is one of my favourites. If you have some time to spare give it a go. You will love the results. --Janrinok]
(Score: 5, Informative) by insanumingenium on Friday April 03 2020, @06:46PM (10 children)
If you are running low but are not yet out of modern yeast and don't want to lose all the benefits modern commercial yeast provides. You can go through this same process with commercial yeast added. It should outperform the less engineered fauna in the flour. If you want to be real careful you could boil your starter to make it sterile before you inoculate with commercial yeast at no more than blood warm temperatures. You will likely get some amount of starch conversion in the process which may or may not be ideal.
Given the speed of modern yeast, you will likely need to retard your culture in the fridge.
You will get genetic drift over time, and you will likely find that some other microbes can coexist with the dominate strain. Your culture will start deviating from the commercial product. Ideally you would want to minimize the number of generations. Taken to extremes (and depending on how much foreign fauna you introduce) you will likely end up with something like a cross between sourdough and modern yeast.
Modern yeast is very quick acting and is very neutral in flavor. Sourdough is wonderful, but to get the best results requires a totally different process on account of the slower ferment (especially if you like it sour), it isn't the best choice for all tasks. This is not a dig on sourdough, just acknowledging horses for courses. There is a reason that commercial bread skews heavy towards modern yeast.
If I had regular access to flour but was running low on yeast, I would maintain at least two cultures, a "modern" culture, and a "sour" culture. I might even make third a culture of a "high osmotic pressure" yeast.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Friday April 03 2020, @06:55PM
I presume you could also dry your modern culture and freeze it in the manner that a lot of sourdough maintainers do with their starters.
YouTube is abound with videos along this line. I keep seeing in my Recommended section "How to make your own yeast in five minutes" and it shows somebody with a plate of what looks like commercial yeast. It looks too click-baity for me and I haven't bothered watching it.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 03 2020, @07:22PM
Or, source yeast from your own facial hair. Like Rogue Ales' brewmaster does. https://www.rogue.com/stories/beard-beer-official-beer-of-no-shave-november [rogue.com]
better living through biology, and keep it local too!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @11:46AM (1 child)
The industrial yeast will not continue to be dominant if you try to make a sourdough culture with it. The yeast on the flour with the best adaptation to acidity will be all that is left after a week or two.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @03:20PM
Ah, one other person here who gets it...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @01:14PM (3 children)
Fruit skins are a good place to start. Just throw in a couple of blueberries and smash them up. Also the bacteria that is used to culture youghurt is from the same family as the bacterias that are commonly used in commercial sourdough. If I remember right I think the bacteria that makes Greek Yoghurt is actually the same as a common sourdough bacteria. So you can add a dab of yoghurt to seed an appropriate culture. Takes a while though.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @02:30PM (1 child)
No, don't add contaminants. You're just making it more likely to grow mold, bad bacteria, etc. Yes, LAB (lactic acid bacteria) are in yogurt and on fruit skins, but they will naturally grow in a sourdough starter in just a few days. (LAB are just about everywhere.) But by dropping other things in your culture, you'll also get any other rotting contaminants in the dairy or fruit.
And there's a common myth of using fruit skins as a source of yeast -- guess what: the best yeast to grow on flour actually is already IN flour. By feeding it over a few days, you will gradually select for it and grow it. Any yeast introduced from other sources won't survive as well on a food source of flour, so once again you're putting stuff in your culture to rot and potentially provide other microorganisms, molds, etc. that are more likely to ruin your young starter before it becomes established.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @08:11PM
Bb..but what are people going to fuck with and make worse?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday April 04 2020, @04:42PM
This is similar to the process to develop a vinegar "mother" to make your own vinegar with. Mix the fruit peels with water and let it attract fruit flies. Their leg hairs apparently carry the bacteria you need to culture. It's a little gross, but it works.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @03:14PM (1 child)
Quite a bit of misinformation here. Yes, you can propagate a starter by beginning with commercial yeast, and it will get things going faster than using just flour and water. But much of the rest of what you say is problematic.
Depends on what you mean by "outperform." Will it grow faster? Yes, at least initially. But commercial yeast is bred for growth, not long-term subsistence in an acidic medium. Over time, the commercial yeast strains will likely decrease in favor of more hardy ones.
No, no, no. Are you serious? Setting aside that this will really mess with the texture of the bread (due to the starch issues you mention), it will be next to impossible to keep things out of your "starter" without boiling all the ingredients before every feeding. And that's really not useful, productive, and perhaps could even be unsafe. Why? Because sourdough cultures aren't just about yeast -- they are also about bacteria, generally various strands of LAB (lactic acid bacteria) among others. Those bacteria produce acid that makes a selective environment and helps prevent other bad stuff from growing in your starter (like molds or various bad bacteria, some of which could produce toxic byproducts over time that might not even be destroyed completely by baking).
To remain healthy, a starter generally has a cycle of yeast and bacteria growth that is essential to its maintenance. And LAB is really hard to avoid, as it lives just about anywhere. To keep the yeast outcompeting it, you'd likely need to feed your starter every few hours perpetually. And no, you can't save it by refrigerating it -- since LAB will grow at colder temperatures whereas commercial yeast almost stops growing completely. It's the reason why retarded commercial yeast dough begins to taste a bit like "sourdough" after a couple days in the fridge.
Boiling your starter products is just unproductive. The fact that you would recommend this should be a reason for everyone to question everything else you have to say.
Where you will grow LAB, as I said, effectively giving you a hybrid "sourdough" culture. (It's the LAB that make it "sour.")
Genetic drift? Seriously? That's not your main concern in propagating a culture at all.
And yes, you'll grow all sorts of other stuff by trying to propagate a culture in conditions it isn't manufactured for.
Not really. Unless you're feeding the yeast on the schedule that commercial yeast are used to (which, as I said, would probably require continuous feeding every couple hours and constant new growth medium), a lot of the commercial yeast will gradually die off in the first couple weeks. If you're lucky, they'll be replaced by more hardy yeasts that will actually survive long-term. If you're unlucky (and depending on your feeding regimen), your starter will gradually weaken as the commercial yeast die off and you'll end up with a much more sluggish starter than if you had started with only flour and water at the outset.
Actual sourdough forums online are somewhat divided as to the relative success rate of "spiked starters" that begin with commercial yeast. Some say they fail long-term more often than "natural" ones with only flour and water. Others say they often work long-term. My one experiment with this type of starter failed miserably after it basically died 2.5 weeks in, whereas I've rarely had a failure with flour and water and a proper feeding schedule. The main advantage to a "spiked" starter is that you don't have to wait a few days or maybe a week to begin baking passable bread. YMMV.
Again, it's not the yeast that gives the sour flavor, but the bacteria. And one might say that modern yeast produces "bland" bread.
Yes, the reason why "commercial bread skews heavy towards modern yeast" is due to cost and convenience. Just the amount of equipment, places to store fermenting dough, etc. would likely quadruple the cost of commercial bread if it were made exclusively with sourdough cultures.
Traditional fermentation is long, as you note. Though you're somewhat incorrect that the time requirement is for sour flavor -- it's actually longest to create sweet breads with sourdough culture. To avoid sour flavor, one gradually builds up the dough in stages, typically 3 or 4 times when the dough is doubled or tripled every few hours. That dilutes any acidity (as LAB grow slower initially than yeast after a feeding). And if the final dough is sweetened significantly (and/or enriched in other ways, like with lots of butter, eggs, etc.), that will inhibit yeast growth further. Brioche is one of the hardest breads to make with sourdough, though the flavor is still great. It's very possible to make non-sour breads with "sourdough" cultures, despite the name. One just needs a much longer and complex process.
Which brings up the other reason why commercial breads skew heavily toward baker's yeast -- typical white bread is often heavily enriched with butter/oil, eggs, milk, sugar, etc. You need all that stuff in commercial bread to give it flavor. If you've never done this, sometime after this virus stuff is over with, go find a classic French baguette or loaf made with traditional ("sourdough") yeast. It can be hard to find, depending on where you are. But compare it to the typical supermarket baguette, and you'll be shocked. It's not sour -- but it's full of flavor, with a texture that is made creamier inside by the long fermentation with more complex cultures (which produce their own flavor notes). I'm not some sourdough purist -- I know the place for commercial yeast. But I could sit down and just eat a freshly baked traditional baguette with nothing else... the bread itself can just be that good. I'd never do that with a plain baguette bought from a typical grocery store.
Anyhow, if you want to create cheap, fast bread that has some sort of flavor, you use commercial yeast and enrich its flavor with other stuff. If you want bread that tastes good with great texture and without all that stuff added, it will take a lot longer (and be much more expensive on a commercial scale). In both cases, by the way, the processes act as preservatives. Even without random chemical preservatives, enriched bread will last longer before staling. And "sourdough" cultured bread will also last a lot longer and taste good in a traditional French loaf a few days later, instead of that supermarket French loaf that tastes like dry sawdust on day 2.
Again, that's not to say one can't make very good bread without traditional cultures. But generally the best baker's yeast recipes build up flavor through similar staged dough techniques (preferments, etc.) that effectively allow enzyme action and breakdown of flour components over time, maybe involving some retarding in the fridge too. Basically, you won't save much time with baker's yeast over sourdough if you're actually making a lean bread (a "lean bread" is without enriching agents, like butter, eggs, milk, sugar, etc.) and want it to taste good.
That last bit gives you away. Sounds like you know something about brewing/alcohol fermentation. Maybe stick to what you know, or read up on how sourdough actually works before pontificating on why commercial yeast is superior (other than that it's fast and cheap).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 04 2020, @03:34PM
Just to clarify one thing, so my post doesn't get misinterpreted -- standard "traditional" French baguettes today aren't generally produced with 100% sourdough. Baguettes au levain generally make use of sourdough along with a small amount of baker's yeast to make the process easier to deal with commercially. Still, this sort of hybrid is vastly superior to lean bread produced with only commercial baker's yeast.
Of course, if your goal right now is to use up all that flour you bought while panic buying and you can't find enough yeast, making a traditional fully-flavored lean bread is probably not the top of the priority.