Yeast defection

By the fourth day, my starter was really going nuts.  I had moved it up to a quart sized jar, and it filled to the point where it was starting to compress against the lid.  It had developed a very beery and more pleasant aroma.  It had also become quite liquid.

I separated out about a half cup of the mix and stored it in the fridge.  With the remainder, I made a simple dough of bread flour, salt and water, using a recipe from Baking With Julia for Pain de Campagne, which is a French bread made using only wild yeast.  The dough looked quite promising.

As per the instructions, I let it rise for five hours.  It had not done much in the first five hours, but according to the recipe, this is normal.  I then shaped a simple loaf and transferred it to a floured, linen lined basket for the final rise.  The final rise was supposed to take four or five hours, and is supposed to result in a dough that has not doubled in size, but has "risen perceptively".  Unfortunately after five hours, my loaf still hadn't done much of anything except spread out in the basket.  It was actually flatter now then when I first put it in, since the gluten had relaxed and it had essentially become a puddle.  I moved it to a much warmer spot and gave it 3 more hours.  Still nothing.  It was getting late, so I went ahead and baked it off, hoping there might be some magic when it hit the hot oven.  No dice.  I might as well have been firing clay in a kiln.  I now have a lovely deep golden brown brick, with an interesting yeasty, almost nutty aroma.  I may try cutting into it when it's cool, but I need to go find my hack saw first.

Oh well, it was an experiment.  I may try again by following the recipe from the Julia book to the letter and see if I get a different result.  Their technique for the initial starter is quite different from what I did.

What a difference a day makes

There is definitely something alive in there now.  Moving my starter over to a warmer spot made a big difference.  The aroma is not terribly sour at this point.  It actually smells sort of like a dive bar at 7 AM...a subtle mix of beer, booze, and bacteria.  I'm going to move it to a larger jar, give it a good stir, feed it with some additional flour and give it more time to develop.  Apparently rye flour is a good choice for boosting the sour notes, so I am going to try that.

Wild Yeast Experiment - Day 2

Not much has changed with my starter.  It's turning a slightly unappetizing shade of grey on the surfaces exposed to the air.  The aroma is not sour at all, but it does seem a bit wheatier than yesterday.  I don't think the cool weather we are having in Austin right now is helping.  Apparently the ideal temperature for the yeast is between 75 - 80 degrees fahrenheit.  Right now the temperature in my house is hovering around 70.  I am moving my jar over next to my stereo equipment where it's nice and toasty.

Wild Wild Yeast

I love baking, bread baking in particular.  There is something really satisfying about it.  The notion that you can take three basic items: flour, water, and yeast, and transform them into hundreds of different breads, by making small changes in the quantities and/or technique is what keeps it interesting.  Today, nobody should fear taking a stab at making a loaf of bread.  Modern commercial yeasts are extremely reliable.   Combine that with a good sturdy stand mixer or even a food processor, to do the heavy lifting, and really anybody an do it.

Modern commercial yeasts are built for speed, but they don't bring much to the table in the way of flavor.  Sure breads made with them have a pleasant yeastiness to them, but if you want something with a little more going on you need patience.  More complex flavors take time to develop.  If you slow things down, by proofing your dough in a fridge for a couple of days, you get a much more interesting result.  Whenever I make focaccia or even pizza dough, I make the dough in the evening, then park it in a zip top bag in my fridge until I am ready to use it, a day or two later.  This produces a great crust, a pleasantly chewy texture, and a slightly tangy, fermented flavor.

If you want to go further down the tangy flavor road, you need to start with something other than commercial yeast.  Sourdough breads are made with wild yeast, which is not nearly as speedy as commercial yeast, allowing much more time for the fermentation process to take place.  In addition, the wild yeasts themselves have a much more complex flavor.  There are many different strains of wild yeast, which is part of the reason a loaf of sourdough bread in San Francisco tastes quite different from say a pain au levain in France.

I made sourdough years ago using a "San Francisco" starter I bought at Whole Foods, and it was quite good, but I want to try harnessing some wild yeast on my own.  I read about a very basic recipe, where you start with nothing more than a cup of whole grain flour and a cup of water, mix it together, put it in a jar, and wait.  The piece I read stressed starting with a very fresh whole grain flour, preferably from a local mill, because you are relying on the yeast that is naturally present on the grain itself.  I thought, "in Austin...good luck".  Then, to my amazement, at the farmers market this morning, Richardson Farms, purveyors of some of the finest pork in central Texas, was selling fresh ground whole wheat flour.  I shop there every week and have never noticed it before.  I grabbed a bag, and headed home to take my first shot at a homegrown sourdough starter.

I used bottled water.  Chlorine can kill the wild yeast.

I packed the dough in to the jar, being careful to get rid of most of the large air pockets in the bottom of the jar.  I don't know if this is actually necessary, but it sure seems like the right thing to do.

Here's what it looks like at the beginning of the process.  The starter has a nice mildly sweet aroma right now.  We'll see how it turns out.  Making a starter in this way is very much the luck of the draw.  Hopefully there was enough wild yeast in the flour and in the air to get it going before any funky bacteria or mold takes root.

I'll post a photo of it each day to show how it's coming along.

Well this isn't good news.

The day after I ate the first of my cactus pear popsicles, I felt sort of achey, and the skin on my back was sensitive.  I asked my older daughter how she felt, and she was fine.  My symptoms lasted about a day.  Last night we had popsicles again, and this time my three year old joined us.  By about midnight, I was experiencing the achey feelings again.  Shortly there after our three year old came into our room and proceeded to hurl all over our sheets.  She had a rough night, but as of this morning she seems fine.  Both my wife and older daughter experienced no symptoms.

I did a quick Google search, and discovered that about 1% of adults and up to 2% of children have an allergy or at least a sensitivity to carmine, the chemical that give prickly pear fruits their color.  It is apparently a commonly used food additive.  The list of potential symptoms for this allergy is about a mile long, but both nausea and aches made the list.

I don't know for certain that this is what we experienced, but neither of us will be eating any more of the popsicles, just to be safe.  At some point in the future, I need to get both of us tested for the allergy.  It's never bothered me before.

Bummer.