Wild Yeast

One of the questions people ask me most often is why you need to discard a portion of your starter every time you feed it. The answer is — you don’t; you can bake with it instead, if you’re in a baking frame of mind. However, as far as perpetuation of the starter is concerned, you’d better be taking some of it out regularly, or you’re going to be in trouble fast.

Think about what happens when you deliver a meal to those microorganisms — yeast and bacteria — that live in your starter. They gorge themselves on flour and then go about the business of procreation. Now they’re out of food, but there are even more mouths to feed. Unless you expeditiously dispose of some of those little mouths — into a bread dough, the compost pile, the trash can, whatever — you will need to bring in exponentially larger and larger meals for them, and your little dinner party party will become seriously out of control within a matter of days.

To illustrate: say you have a rather small amount of starter, 60 grams. At each feeding, you need to feed in proportion to the amount of starter you start with, around three times the flour and with an equal amount of water. If you kept feeding without taking any out, after one feeding you would have 60 g starter + 180 g flour + 180 g water = 420 g of fed starter. After the second feeding you would have 420 g starter + 1260 g flour + 1260 g water = 2940 g of fed starter. After three feedings, 20,580 g.

After just three days (six feedings), you would have 7,058,940 g of starter. You’re going to need a pretty big jar, not to mention a pretty big budget to afford all that flour.

This is not to say you must always take some out. If I have 60 grams of starter at night and plan to bake bread the next morning, I would keep and feed the entire 60 grams, giving me 420 grams. This is enough to bake a few loaves (in a few hours, once it has a chance to become hungry again) and still have 10 grams left over to keep the starter going.

Image courtesy of SF Food Wars

Attention Bay Area bakers, eaters, and drinkers — mark your calendars and start your ovens, SF Food Wars is going yeast!

On January 31, SF Food Wars and the San Francisco Baking Institute will sponsor Yeast Affliction! All-out Artisan Bread Bakedown & Craft Beer Tastiness. Twenty of the Bay Area’s most fearless bakers (including yours truly) will go head to head at Thirsty Bear in San Francisco to see whose loaf will win over the judges and capture the imaginations and the taste buds of the attendees.

Bakers: If you want to do battle, get your application in now. But consider yourself warned — you (and I) will face some seriously formidable competition from several of my SFBI classmates. Not only are they very talented, but they’re very competitive. (Did I say I was fearless? I lied. I’m scared, and you should be too. These people make good bread.)

Eaters: Tickets go on sale on Wednesday, January 13 on the SF Food Wars website. A ticket means you get to come and taste all the bread. Of course, you are free to vote for whichever bread you think is well and truly the best. (If you are in my family, however, you might do well to remember which side your bread is buttered on.)

Drinkers: A ticket also gets you a free beer to go with the bread.

So, see you there?

Especially during the holiday season when sweet breads abound, you may run across recipes that call for osmotolerant yeast (also called SAF Gold, as it comes in a gold-colored package; SAF is the brand.)

Osmotolerant yeast is a special strain of instant dry yeast that performs better in high-sugar doughs than other yeasts do. In small amounts, sugar enhances fermentation, but when the amount of sugar exceeds about 5% of the flour weight, it impedes fermentation by pulling water away from the yeast. (If you’re a science geek, you probably know that sugar creates osmotic pressure, and if you’re not, you probably don’t care.)

SAF Gold is available from a number of online sources. However, if you can’t get it and have recipe that calls for it, you can use regular instant yeast (SAF Red, for example), and just increase the amount by about 30%.

If you’ve been waiting for just the right time to order a Super Peel, one of my favorite tools, wait no more. As promised, Gary has a limited-time deal for Wild Yeast readers: $5 off the regular price, plus an extra cloth belt with the purchase.

That’s a $52 value for $41, and shipping is included.

Enter “wild yeast” (without the quotes) into the Discount Code space on the Super Peel order form, and the discount will be automatically applied.

Go for it while you can — through tomorrow (Sunday, November 22)!

Yes, it’s still all about baguettes, through this week anyway.

Here’s a very quick tip: if your tips lift up, making your baguettes look like canoes, your oven might be too hot.

In class last Friday, we mixed three doughs. These gave us plenty of opportunity for the all-important hands-on baguette practice, of course. They also illustrated the relationship between mixing time (and corresponding level of gluten development) and fermentation time, and the effects that these parameters have on the bread.

(These are my very own baguettes. You can see that my shaping and scoring needs work. And as the middle one clearly indicates, I cannot count to six.)

Let’s compare these babies, shall we? (Read more…)

One week down, 23 to go. During my first five days at SFBI, my routine went something like this:

• 5:00 am: Out of bed.
• 5:10 am: Coffee. This step must not be omitted.
• 6:00 am: Hit the road. Unfortunately, my route to SFBI coincides with that to the airport. I have learned that every man, woman, and child in the Bay Area catches an early-morning flight each and every day.
• 6:45 am: Arrive at SFBI. Try to resist breakfast pastries. Fail miserably.
• 7:00 am – 1:30 pm: Get patient instruction and constructive feedback from Frank, our  talented and knowledgeable bread instructor. In the classroom and in the bakery-lab, learn about flour, water, yeast, salt, scaling, mixing, fermentation, proofing, scoring, baking, cooling, staling. Learn shaping of boules and batards (which I thought I knew, but didn’t). And practice baguettes, baguettes, dozens of baguettes! These babies are, hands-down, the hardest bread there is to shape and score properly. Say “uh-oh” (in reference to my own clumsy but thankfully improving efforts) several times an hour. “Oops” can be used interchangeably with “uh-oh.” And then, every once in a while, sometimes when I least expect it, there’s a “well, that didn’t turn out too badly after all, now, did it?”
• 1:30 pm: Lunch, prepared by SFBI staff. Always includes fresh bread and more irresistible pastries.

(Read more…)

First, a huge and heartfelt thanks to everyone who donated to my Team in Training fundraising to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. You all rock! With your help, I reached my $2500 goal with plenty of time to spare before my marathon in October. Of course, additional donations will not be refused and will go to a most worthy cause.

I am happy to announce that my friend Patricia, author of the wonderful Brownies for Dinner, is the winner of the Sony camera fundraising raffle. I’m also happy to announce that my friend Cora (Cora Cooks and says she doesn’t bake, but she really does) has won the BlogHer Food ticket that I am unable to use because I will be out giving my feet a 22-mile trial on conference day.

Last weekend I did my longest training walk so far, 16 miles. If my daughter M were here, she would say “Do you want a cookie?” Yes, I do, thank you very much. Chocolate chip will be fine.

I like this blog to be informative. Looking at the search terms that land people here helps me know what information they are looking for. Sometimes, though, I think they’re let down because I haven’t really addressed the topic in the way they probably expected.

I don’t like to disappoint, so allow me to address a few of those search terms now:

firmament baking stone — It’s not hot enough in the firmament for a baking stone. Try going in the other direction.

potatoe bread — I only do potato bread, but Dan Quayle may be able to help you out.

does putting bread yeast in my septic do any good? — I’m not sure, but I put my yeast in the refrigerator, and that works fine.

how to make a miche slip cover — I don’t slipcover my miches unless I’m having company, and then I usually just get one of those cheapo ones from Target and add a few beads for that personalized touch.

my eclair cannot pop up — I’m always getting spam about remedies for this. I’d be happy to forward some of it on if you send me your email address.

As my dad used to say, “Call Walter Cronkite!” Almost a year later, it looks like my earth oven might finally be dry.

I fired it up last weekend and lo and behold, it actually got hot. So hot, in fact, that I burned the bottoms of the loaves because I haven’t exactly got the temperature-gauging thing down yet. But after that layer of carbonized crust was lopped off, the bread was actually quite good. Maybe I can do this.

(Read more…)