Hi.. Hope all of you are in excellent health, at home and safe. I was working on a list of recipes I wanted to share with you and came across this dilemma that a lot of the ingredients that are available here might not be available near your place and vice versa. Like there are a lot of basic ingredients I can not get my hands on, including vegetables, eggs and bread. Yes, no bread where we stay. What to eat for breakfast becomes a BIG question on some days.
We are so accustomed to bread in our daily diets, that non availability is an issue worth solving. So I thought why not tell you a bread recipe that you can do at home. But then another problem rose its horns and came charging towards me like a raging bull in the bullring. Where to get yeast from? I had read a couple of days back that a lot of bakeries are finding it difficult to get their hands on yeast, so if manufacturers are having an issue, how can a home baker procure it? And the solution is not that difficult, a little time consuming maybe, but not at all hard. All you need are 3 ingredients – Flour, Water and Patience.
Yeast is a micro organism that is present all around us. We just need to harvest it and use it as required. Being a micro organism, yeast needs food to survive, along with water and a favourable environment. The way bread leavens is when the yeast gets activated by the sugar in the dough and starts respiration that results in releasing of Carbon-di-oxide, which gets trapped in the mesh created by kneading the dough. Yeast plays an important role in fermenting a lot of products like breads, beer, wine, etc.
Cultivating yeast is a very simple process. Like I said before you just need a couple of things to start your own culture. The basic process is as follows.
Ingredients:
Whole Wheat Flour
Refined Flour
Water
Method:
1. In a glass jar, add 50 gms of whole wheat flour and 50 gms of water. You will need to measure this as per weight and not consider the volume as both flour and water have different volumes and a cup measure will not be able to give you proper measurements. For example, one cup of refined flour would give you around 140 gms of flour and the same quantity of water will give you around 240 ml/gm. So, using one cup of water and one cup of flour will make a slurry and not the consistency that we require for this to succeed. If you do not have a weighing scale at home, you can take 1/3 cup of flour which is almost equivalent to 40 gms and then add around 1/6 cup of water to that (fill half of the 1/3 cup to make it 1/6). Put both of these in the jar and mix with a fork. If it looks very dry add a little more water, maybe a tbsp. Lightly cover with cling film or a lid (do not fasten the lid), and keep in a warm dry place away from sunlight.
2. You have to keep feeding the yeast culture frequently in the first few days and then more once a week maybe to keep it active, as it is a living organism and it needs it food supply time and time again. Let the first proof sit for around twelve hours, so you can start in the night and let it stay overnight. After 12 hours, you will be able to see some bubbling of the mixture, this is the yeast getting active, but it does not mean that you are ready to use it in your bread now, surely the yeast has started to work, but it has not formed an active culture yet. The bubbling can vary from place to place as there are a lot of different variables required for the activation, like temperature, humidity, etc. So to make the culture from the activated yeast, you’ll need to feed it more. For this, I would suggest to remove half of the starter from the previous night and discard it, adding the same amount of whole wheat flour and water, the next day. The basic concept here is that you will need to add double the flour and water the next feeding, the double of the whole quantity that you are left with in the next and it keeps on increasing. For example if you start with 50 gms, the next time you will be adding 100 gms, the third time 300 gms (50 gms first time + 100 gms second time x 2). This way your culture will take in a lot of volume and it would be very wasteful .Removing a part of it during prep makes more sense that using that big an amount of ingredients, as the consumption would not be as large as the quantity produced. So, remove half of the mixture and induce the same quantities of flour and water you started with. Mix and keep aside, lightly covered.
3. In the evening of the same day, after twelve hours, you will need to feed it again. For this, remove 2/3 of the mixture and add the same amount of starter ingredients used before. we are not removing half now as I had explained earlier, the amount of mixture in the jar needs to double in each feeding, and we already have 60 gms of flour there ( half of 40 from the first feed and 40 from the second). Removing 2/3 will get us back to 20 gm and then we can add another 40 to it. This time around, start using Refined flour. Repeat the same process in the next twelve hours.
4. You will start seeing that the fermentation process has quickened, with the mixture frothing up substantially before going back down. The smell of the mixture needs to be kind of tangy and not a bad, rotten one. If it is like a rotten smell there has been some error and you need to start over. Sometimes, a bad bacteria is introduced in the mixture due to an unclean utensil being used or unfiltered water. So always use a clean and dry jar and filtered water.
5. Sometimes you will have to keep doing this for around 6 days. Depending in the temperature and humidity, like I pointed before. I had to wait for around the second half of the 4th day to get to the desired state. The yeast culture was doubling in almost 2 hours and then in a couple more, asking for more food (once the mixture deflates, it is asking for more food). At this stage, feed it once more and once it starts to deflate again, you can refrigerate. Just close the jar with the lid, at put it in the fridge.
6. But the yeast will still needs to feed and you can do it once a week, adding double the mount of flour and water, and leaving it outside to breathe and grow.
7. Before using this culture, feed the yeast and let it rise for around 4-6 hours before adding it in the bread dough, as it will help speeding the fermentation of the dough. Once you reach the peak fermentation, you can add the yeast in the dough, putting the rest of it back in the refrigerator for future use. You can keep feeding it and using it for all your baking recipes.
P.S. – I will be sharing some recipes for breads in the near future that are easy to do. You can also do yeast cakes and desserts like doughnuts. So try your hand on it. Happy Baking!
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