Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Mess Hall => Topic started by: zxcvbob on April 23, 2020, 10:39:45 PM
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The recent shortage on baker's yeast makes me want to try baking some bread, and even tho' I have dried yeast in the freezer I want to try culturing the natural yeast from raisins just to see if I can. (if I can't, I'll bake a loaf with dried yeast and hold back a piece of dough as a starter for the next batch)
A few years ago I had a wonderful sourdough culture that I started myself just using rye flour and filtered water. And I let it die in the fridge over summer because it was too hot to bake and I went too long without feeding it. :'( I have tried replicating that starter but I have had no luck. But raisin-water yeast is not sourdough. I'm not sure what my point is; I've been cooped up too long :P
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I'm not an expert, but I like to try. So far in quarantine we are 3 and 1. Made a skillet flatbread, challah bread, and a rustic dutch oven bread. Slow rise on the dutch oven one, it only uses a 1/4 pack of yeast. One Challah fail before success, recipe used instant yeast and we had some old stuff.
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For some years now, I've been making an artisan bread, recipe given to me by Adively. I tweak it slightly in a few different ways.
6 cups flour
2-3tsp salt
1tsp yeast
2 cups water
Mix it all together (dough hook works best if you have one).
Cover bowl with saran wrap and let sit for 12 or so hours (overnight makes it easy).
Remove from bowl onto floured surface and lightly knead a couple of times into a ball.
Place inside lightly floured towel and let sit and rerise for ~2 hours.
Put a dutch oven (5qt for this amount) in the oven and preheat to 425.
Put dough into the dutch oven and bake for about 45 minutes with the lid on, then another 10 minutes with the lid off (to develop a crust)
Baking times vary by oven. I use a thermometer. Bread is done at 200. I usually take the lid off at 190.
Remove from oven and let cool for as long as you can stand not cutting into it, because the smell is amazing. I like to cut off an end piece relatively early and slather it with Kerrygold butter.
This recipe is literally like 10 minutes of work from start to finish, including clean up. Up until this recipe, I had limited success baking good bread. I don't beleive I've ever gotten a bad loaf with this recipe. I often tweak it in different ways. Sometimes, if I have sourdough starter going, I will use that instead of yeast or even added to yeast. I will also sometimes mix in various quantities of rye flour or wheat flour for different consistency and flavor.
I also, for myself, cut the recipe to 4 cups of flour for a smaller loaf. I put it in a 3qt dutch oven I found on Amazon that is shaped to create a smaller diameter, higher loaf making it better for sandwiches and stuff. It's not available anymore, but when I get a chance I'll post a pic that hopefully shows the dimensions.
On yeast, I always buy a big package that Costco sells and stick a bunch of it in the freezer, and I end up buying yeast maybe once a year.
Also, funny tangent. I was speaking to a former coworker yesterday and she said at their virtual staff meeting this week, all anything the hippie yuppies (most of the staff) could talk about was their sourdough experiments, because suddenly 19th century skills are cool with that crowd, and not something wacko preppers do. There was apparently only limited success in what most would consider a pretty foolproof process. :laugh:
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I have lots of yeast in the freezer, the raisin water thing is an experiment :D And so I can tell Patty's friends how to make their own yeast (because they want me to give them my dried yeast and bread flour) I do have enough bread flour to share a little of that.
I was planning to use 100 grams whole wheat flour, 200 grams bread flour, 200 grams fizzy raisin water, 5 grams of salt. And maybe 5 grams of ground malted barley (diastatic.) Those proportions should yield a fairly wet dough, but I have no idea how large a loaf it will make. (I wonder if I should double everything?) So I might make buns with it the first time, and scale it up or down to make a loaf next time. When I was baking sourdough bread, I had good luck using an old Corningware casserole dish for a pan. I baked it with the lid on until almost done, then removed the lid at the end to brown the top. But I don't remember any of the amounts or times ;/
I will definely try your recipe too. Thanks. (and maybe I can glean some measurements from yours to scale mine)
When I make pizza dough, I don't knead it at all. I use strong flour and a kinda wet shaggy dough. I stir it up and put it in the fridge for a day or two. Then I shape it while it's still cold when I'm ready to use it (it's not as sticky that way.)
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At one point I was making all my own bread. I partially cheated by using a bread machine, but ingredients came from separate bags, not box mixes.
Basic White
4 C flour (bread flour works best but All-Purpose works almost as well)
1-1/3 C water
2 T cooking oil
1 T sugar
2 t salt
2 t dry yeast
Variations are endless. Make onion bread by adding one packet of onion soup mix and deleting the salt. Make Parmesan-pepper bread by adding half a cup Kraft grated parm along with a healthy grind of fresh black pepper and heavy pinch of oregano. Make onion thyme by adding a quarter cup of reconstituted dried onions along with a heavy pinch of thyme. Pretty much anything you can think of is fair game.
Cover, let set until it doubles. Punch down and parcel into cooking vessels, cover and let rise until it doubles again, then bake at 350 until golden brown.
Brad
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I wonder if fresh grapes would be a better option for yeast over raisins?
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When I make pizza dough, I don't knead it at all.
I should redefine how I use "knead" above. I don't really knead the dough, mostly lightly fold it over a couple of times to get a light coat of flour on it, then lightly form it up into a sorta ball/mound. I don't press the dough down at all.
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I wonder if fresh grapes would be a better option for yeast over raisins?
Perhaps. Whole dates are supposed to work well too. I don't see or smell any active fermentation yet, but some of the raisins are starting to float; that's a good sign.
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With the lack of yeast, I have been reading some interesting recipes using self-rising flour and Greek yogurt as a substitute for yeast. I have not yet tried this, though.
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This is the size of 3qt dutch oven I use, good for one or two people. It is smaller diameter and higher than the Lodge 3qt. It's 8.5" diameter and 4.5" high. Same height as the Lodge 5qt. The four cups make a loaf that rises to just the top of this pot. Not just the center, but the sides as well.
(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49813975072_bc0f020643_c.jpg)
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(https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sourdough_starter.png)
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Perhaps. Whole dates are supposed to work well too. I don't see or smell any active fermentation yet, but some of the raisins are starting to float; that's a good sign.
If it was late June/early July, I be deep in a lot of yeast covered black currant berries.
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If it was late June/early July, I be deep in a lot of yeast covered black currant berries.
Any fresh picked fruit should be covered with yeast. :) I'm not so sure about supermarket fresh grapes, so dried is probably a better bet there.
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Any fresh picked fruit should be covered with yeast. :) I'm not so sure about supermarket fresh grapes, so dried is probably a better bet there.
And now I have another use for the massive number of plums we're going to have this year.
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Any fresh picked fruit should be covered with yeast. :) I'm not so sure about supermarket fresh grapes, so dried is probably a better bet there.
Black currants seem to be extra yeasty.
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These guys might say it is easy to make your own yeast but trust me, it is very finicky when it comes to temp and feeding.
https://www.offthegridnews.com/off-grid-foods/prepper-baking-101-making-your-own-yeast/
bob
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Perhaps I should test my recipe using active dry yeast before I ty making it with wild yeast :D I have to wait a week for the raisin yeast to build up anyway. (why didn't I think of that earlier) :facepalm:
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Anyone tried making starter with whole wheat flour? Best I can remember, my grandmother (Mom's side) made her starter with whole wheat flour. No idea how she tended it after that, though.
Brad
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Anyone tried making starter with whole wheat flour? Best I can remember, my grandmother (Mom's side) made her starter with whole wheat flour. No idea how she tended it after that, though.
Brad
Yes. Rye flour works better (it seems to have more bugs in it) but whole wheat will work. Unbleached all-purpose should work too. Malted barley would be interesting to try. You are cultivating the yeast and bacteria that naturally occurs on the surface of the grain. I have used raw malted barley to make a lactic acid starter for souring beer.
IIRC, you mix equal parts (by weight) flour and bottled water, and stir it up to make a batter. Then leave it in a warm place, with a cloth cover to keep flies out. After it gets going, you have to feed it with additional flour and water (can be tapwater now), and you probably have to throw some away to keep it managable. After about 2 feedings, you can put it in the fridge to slow it down -- just don't forget about it for 3 months :'(
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Anyone tried making starter with whole wheat flour? Best I can remember, my grandmother (Mom's side) made her starter with whole wheat flour. No idea how she tended it after that, though.
Brad
According to a youtube bread guru, any flour will work as a starter. I have sourdough starter on my counter right now that I accidentally started with cornmeal instead of flour. It is working, but I have been feeding it with AP flour.
The guru: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJEHsvW2J6M&t=742s
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According to a youtube bread guru, any flour will work as a starter. I have sourdough starter on my counter right now that I accidentally started with cornmeal instead of flour. It is working, but I have been feeding it with AP flour.
The guru: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJEHsvW2J6M&t=742s
That was a great video; thanks. But I didn't see where he said anything about making a starter from scratch. (I really liked the idea of frying the excess starter instead of throwing it out) He talked aout feeding your starter, and all purpose flour is fine for that. It will probably work for making your initial starter, but using someting less processed at the beginning will increase your chances of success. :)
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Years ago I tried a sourdough starter using boiled potatoes. Worked fine.
Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk
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That was a great video; thanks. But I didn't see where he said anything about making a starter from scratch. (I really liked the idea of frying the excess starter instead of throwing it out) He talked aout feeding your starter, and all purpose flour is fine for that. It will probably work for making your initial starter, but using someting less processed at the beginning will increase your chances of success. :)
Might have been one of his other videos that talked about making the starter. He has a bunch.
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30 years ago i bought a bread maker and liked it so much I bought my parents/siblings one also. It was fun, you just dumped in the ingredients, pushed the button, and the machine did all the work: kneading and baking as required.
I actually had some problems with the machine making great bread every time, sometimes it was flat, didn't rise properly.
But it came with 60 recipes and I had my parents/siblings send me their results, so I was able to assign a 1 to 10 rating on each recipe. From that, we were able to discern the better recipes based on consensus.
Boatloads of fun, but in the end I lost interest because the machine didn't work quite good enough. Probably better by now, but now I avoid carbs. They had their chance.
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I also bought a bread machine about 25-30 years ago.
Friends of mine told me I'd use it 3 or 4 times and then it would gather dust.
They were partially right... I used it, on average, 3 or 4 times a month for nearly 10 years until it finally burned up.
I never replaced it, but I often think about getting another machine because a couple of the recipes I had were absolutely fantastic.
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I just cut my first baton loaves; out of the oven about an hour. I started last night and made lots of mistakes, but the bread turned out good anyway. I thought it would have a very open crumb with big holes in it (75% hydration) but it didn't; perhaps because I overproofed it, then punched it down and proofed it again. It is nice and chewy, and has a good crust, just has lots of small holes instead of a mix of all different sized holes.
400g bread flour (it was supposed to be 300 but I wrote it down wrong, but then corrected the water and salt)
150g whole wheat flour
412ml water, divided (the "divided" part was another mistake)
10g salt
1 tsp instant dried yeast
I bloomed the yeast in 62ml water, and mixed the remaining 350ml with the flour and let it rest for an hour. Then I folded in the salt, then tried to mix in the yeast. What a mess! I got it mixed in, but tore the gluten matrix to shreds doing so. I covered it with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge overnight.
This morning I kneaded it for about a minute, then covered it back up with plastic and let it warm up. It took a long time to start rising, but when it did it went crazy and rose too much. I punched it down, transfered it to an oiled bowl (which I should have done this morning) and covered it up and let it rise again. An hour or so later it was risen again, and I divided the dough roughly in half. I pinched a little handful off the bigger half and put it in the fridge to leaven the next batch. I stretched to dough balls into basically fat sausages and put them on a piece of parchment on a cookie sheet and covered them up to rise one more time. Then I slashed the tops with a razor blade.
I put a lasagna pan half full of water on the bottom shelf of the oven and preheated to 400° (my oven runs hot). When the oven was ready I put the cookie sheet in on the top rack, and baked it until I could smell it. My smeller must be off a bit, because I used an instant read thermometer to check the internal temperature of the loaves and they were at 200° already (the target was 190.) But they are not burnt or scorched or anything. So I let them cool (let them cool too long) and cut into them and they taste great.
Hopefully the next batch will have a lot less drama. Next time I intend to dissolve the salt in the water and add it to the flour (I know the salt is supposed to go in later), and use the full measure of water from the beginning. So I'm not trying to mix a little more water into a stiff kinda dry dough. Then after it's rested ("autolyzed") for an hour I will either mix it the dried yeast or the leftover dough.
If it turns out the salt *really does* need to go in after the first rest, I will grind up some salt into a powder (like popcorn salt) so it will mix in easier. Also I think I will cut back the salt just a little; maybe 1.7 or 1.8% instead of 2%. The raw dough tasted really salty. The bread tastes about right, but I think it will still taste right with less salt as long as I don't go too far.
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I need to get a bread machine. My wife hates the mess I make in the kitchen doing bread or pasta.
ETA: thegirl now wants to start making pasta and she can destroy a crowbar in a sandbox.