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.