Self-sufficient in YEAST for baking (and brewing)

Why reinvent the wheel? You can get two pounds of active dry yeast for about $3.50 - maybe less if you shop around. Like anything else, using the right tools and right ingredients results in a better product with less effort.

Howdy,

When you are ready to bake a loaf, but before adding any salt, fats or other ingredients, pinch off a piece of your dough and put it in the refrigerator (are you off the power grid also?).

Then, when you next are ready to bake, incorporate that ball of dough.

As long as you don't forget to save it, you are set from here on out.

All the best,

Beer yeast and bread yeast are distinctly differnet strains. Even within brewing strains there is enormous variation in the final product produced -- this isn't simply "consumerist" nonsense.

In general bread yeast makes poor beer -- most folks consider such beer unacceptable, but obviously this depends on the taster.

However, it may well be that beer yeast would be fine for making bread. The best thing to do would be to give it a try.

Hope that helps -- m

I once kept a sour dough starter going for 3 or 4 years. Always produced great bread from that. Did limit baking some bread/roll styles.

I have never heard of a good dual purpose bread/beer yeast. My first attempt at making beer over 30 years ago involved a can of Blue Ribbon Malt and Red Star bread yeast. What a disaster! I can't imagine a bread yeast working for beer. On the other hand, I have thought of using the yeast slurry from one of my beers for making a batch of bread. At least going that direction is a lot cheaper if you have to throw out the resulting batch.

I am sure you know about sour dough, but that is about all I have to offer.

Wayne Bugeater Brewing Company

I'm not sure I understand your comments.

I'm researching techniques used to propagate and maintain a yeast culture for breadmaking, and synergies with other craft activities (viz. homebrewing). A wholistic approach, perhaps.

If you think it is not possible to be self-sufficient in yeast for baking, perhaps you might like to clarify and elaborate on your opinion. Always interested to hear another baker's views. :-)

Regarding the cost of yeast, which you mention in your post. If cost alone was the criteria used for baking bread, I may as well rely on the corporations completely and retire from the craft.

Regards d

I'm not off the grid yet unfortunately. So, it's just keeping back some dough/water/yeast in a ball, somewhere cold.

If I save a ball of dough, when I next bake, what are you supposed to do ? Do you mix that dough in some water with sugar/flour to get it going... yeast propagating again ?

'Stepping it up' is the term used in brewing, where you grow the yeast colony so that's it's sufficient for optimum fermentation purposes.

Many thanks for your help.

Um, I believe they call it "sourdough".

HTH, Dusty

You simply said that you wanted to become self-sufficient and did not mention any other benefit from doing so. I pointed out that yeast is so inexpensive that it wouldn't be worth the bother. Now if you said that you wanted to make bread with some special quality not possible with commercial yeast, that would be a different matter. Of course I know that it is possible, and that many people bake bread using the starter that have been cultivating for years. I guess I wonder why stop with the yeast? Why not grown your own wheat, gather water from a stream, evaporate sea water for salt, and make your own wood fired oven? It might be an interesting intellectual exercise, but life is too short to fool around reinventing the wheel, in my opinion.

Expensiveness and bother are subjective variables. I respect your right to shopbuy your yeast, as I'm sure you will allow me to do otherwise.

You digress too far. My original posting is about being self-sufficient in *yeast* for baking. Growing wheat and the other activities you mention requires land and capital, whereas maintaining a yeast supply is something any peasant can do.

Thanks for your opinions. Very interesting perspective.

Hello again,

I wrote "incorporate" as in "mix in."

Even a tiny ball of such old dough will have billions of living yeast cells.

All the best,

snipped-for-privacy@invalid.invalid wrote:

The idea of yeast self sufficiency is rather weird. (Except maybe for the natural sourdough practitioners who has the diligence to maintain their starter for several years, even centuries).

IMO Only an eccentric type of person would think otherwise (culturing bakers and brewers yeasts for personal use), and I presume you are..... May I ask....Are you some kind of a survivalist entity living in a very isolated place far from civilization or doing some sort of self exile ? Anyway.... If you have (in your 'castaway' den) the facilities for microbiological study and culture then you can get a pure strain of either brewers and bakers yeast( when you come down from your hermetic existence and visit occasionally modern civilization) and culture them separately and use as needed. Bur regarding your question of using one type of yeast for baking and brewing; that was indeed done in the past. If we think about the origin of the commercial bakers yeast it was derived from the ale yeast. Saccharomyces cereviseae.... BTW, .the word 'cerevise' means beer I think as your are a brewer by heart, and a baker by necessity,you know that there are two main groups of beer yeast: The top fermenting yeast use in making ales and the bottom fermenting type for lager type beer. IIRC the name of the latter is Saccharomyces Uvarum or called elsewhere as Saccharomyces Carbergensis. Lately the classification for brewers yeast had come under the wing of saccharomyces cerevisease but to distinguish between the different yeast .However,the older classification still stick in the mind of the brewers and these folks are die hard fanatics of the older classification. The brewers type of yeast( ale yeast) is suitable for longer multi stage fermentation or the so called; sponge and dough' bread making method category, but less adapted to the straight and other short time process.They are less tolerant to higher sugar level than the modern strain of bakers yeast. Now regarding performance the ale yeast has a the temperature optima of degree 30 deg C ,it can be adopted to bread making( just like what our ancestors are doing) but not the lager yeast due to its slower activity( and lower temperature optima 25 degree C). In order to support your self-sufficiency doctrine and check for yourself the feasibility: You can also try using your cultured brewers yeast for breadbaking and see if it's suitable.

Roy

Personally, I'd keep back part of the sponge, not the dough. Practise varies across Europe and depends a bit on the type of bread being made. In some places they did keep a bit of dough, and some buried it to keep through the winter too.

Controlling the strains (for sourdough etc) seems to depend on what goes into the sponge, and the growth and storage conditions. I haven't seen any explicit explanation of how to manipulate the sponge environment for various outcomes. I think that this is why you see potato in so many sourdough sponge recipes, though.

If anyone knows or has a reference, I'd like to know more :)