Baking with ambiant yeast

[nancylebov]

An excerpt from The Lost Art of Real Cooking describes how to collect local and random yeast to make a starter, with a claim that commercial home-baking yeast sacrifices flavor to get speed.

He just describes doing this himself, and I'm willing to believe he's getting great sourdough, but I was wondering if anyone reading this has tried their own ambient yeast and what the results were.

He's also got a theory that it's easier to follow recipes that are just written in prose, without the ingredients at the top. I'll probably be trying his book out-- following recipes does feel like an unnecessarily nervous process of keeping track.

Comments

[twistedchick]

There are similar recipes in the first edition of The Tassajara Bread Book, which are excellent.

[green_knight]

Having read about people's sourdough experimens where 'there was a lot of scum in this, and I wasn't certain it would be safe to use' I must decline.

I am allergic to penicilin. The last time I ate a pepper from a bag in which another one had gone mouldy, half my lower legs were covered in a rash. That's a bit too risky for my taste.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

Some people do well with recipes written in prose. Some people like to make sure they have enough of all the ingredients BEFORE they start a recipe. I belong in the later category. If I need 4 eggs at room temperature, or 3 cups of Whole Wheat Pastry flour, I'd rather know about it before I get started. I don't always have eggs and they are kept under refrigeration, and I usually only have Whole Wheat Bread Flour. If I don't find out about that until some place down in the recipe, I would be annoyed.
I prefer a list of Ingredients. Then you can write the recipe any way you want. Prose works for me as well as the numbered list.
When I write recipes, I write the ingredient list, then free write what I do with them. I can then go back and numbered list it, but don't always. Some times as I write it out, I get reminded of an ingredient I forgot to list, and go back up and add it. Pinches of this or that are the easiest to forget.
And I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. And have occasionally gotten Amazing air born yeast. And sometimes things look so ugly, it is best to throw it out. First you must learn the difference. And once you have caught something amazing, you really need to keep it Alive and Growing. Every sour dough company has a Mother Dough that is 100+ years old. And every sour dough company bread has a different taste because of it.
Frankly Commercial Yeast exists because someone found a yeast that would consistently make a Nice Loaf of Bread and figured out how to sell it. It you look for it, there are even some Sour Dough yeasts available commercially. It isn't magic, just practical.
The saddest thing these days is the death of the little sour dough bread companies and the loss of their Mother Doughs with their own weird collection of yeasty beasties. :(

[sashajwolf]

I regularly make sourdough bread with wild yeast (I'm more used to that term than "ambient"). I've had the starter for about eighteen months now, and it's going really well. If you have a look at my "bread" tag on DW or LJ (same username both places), some of the early entries have descriptions of how I did it and how I make a basic white sourdough loaf, and the others have reports of how various variations in the recipe turned out. Some of my particular favourites are rye bread and banana-and-chocolate bread.

[nancylebov]

I was guessing for what to call yeast from the local air-- I'll try to remember wild, though I think I've heard that some of that yeast is actually feral.

[mama-hogswatch.livejournal.com]

I've made soursough bread that way.

In fact, about ten years ago, I moved about 500 miles from home and we were BROKE BROKE BROKE.

Did I mention we were broke?

We also lived not too far from King Arthur Flour. We bought a 50 lb bag of flour and a bin. I made bread from that sourdough starter and that flour for months. Between that and garden veggies people were giving us (THey didn't realize we might be getting hungry. It was a fruitful summer and were just giving away too much produce) we actually ate VERY well!

[wouldyoueva.livejournal.com]

I'm with him on following recipes in prose. When I copy a recipe, that's how I do it. If I feel like it, I underline the ingredients.

If I had someone to share the bread with, I might be tempted to make my own starter. In NO RESERVATIONS, there's a chapter about an eccentric bread baker he knew, who made his own starter, called "the bitch." There's a lengthy description of what they went through to "feed the bitch." He made the resulting bread sound amazing.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

If I don't have a list to check off, to make sure I've got all the ingredients/parts/tools/..., I'm apt to be partway through and discover I'm missing something.

Hmmm.... That sounds like what my officemate told me about men's vs. women's giving directions. (And that's a genuine research finding.) I wonder if it's partly a male (like me) / female (like you and, I infer from LJIDs, both the other commenters) thing? ... But not that author, it seems.

[terriwells.livejournal.com]

I don't think so. I'm MUCH more comfortable following a recipe with the list of ingredients at the top, so I can make sure I have everything before I start.

[demonspawnmom.livejournal.com]

I've made sourdough bread that way. Sometimes I'd get some really good, light, delicious bread, but there were enough times that the bread wouldn't rise, or the bread would taste "off" enough to go back to using commercial yeast.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Oh, man. First I started buying better quality store-bought bread--not just whole wheat, which I was raised with, but whole wheat with decent ingredients and no corn syrup. Then I got a bread machine, and would sometimes make bread that way--better, but a bit dense. Then I finally learned how to make bread by hand. It's delicious, but takes so much time that I can do it only rarely because I'm just not usually home and awake for that long. Now, I'm apparently not really getting the good stuff unless I catch my own and feed it every day. I think that might be a little too hardcore for me.

Since I'm a complete snob about from-scratch baking and never cooking out of a box, I suspect this is a case of everyone driving slower is an idiot and everyone faster is a maniac.

[henrytroup.livejournal.com]

Somewhere over 25 years ago, my (now) wife and I did a pile of baking & brewing in SCA and other things. We got some amazing yeasts from things like wild oats. Literal, roadside volunteer oat plants, from a lot that had once been a farm. I think there's a Home Depot store there now. There sure was a slow/flavour tradeoff. Some of those breads needed twelve to twenty-four hours rising. There were also some clunkers, yeasts that didn't taste good.

I agree

[(Anonymous)]

Guys, You are all absolutely right. Does take a lot of time, mostly in rising though. As for a list of ingredients, it's just flour water and salt. Measurements don't matter really. And yes, sometimes it doesn't rise right, is too sour or off. But when it hits, most of the time, it's incredible stuff! Happy baking and cooking! Ken Albala