The Wide and Wild World of Wild Yeast Starters
In the beginning of March I took an intensive weeklong Artisan Bread Baking class from the San Francisco Baking Institute. I had taken my first class there back in November where I learned many of the fundamentals of bread baking. The class was an amazing experience and I vowed to get back and take the next class as soon as possible.
SFBI was started by Michel Suas, a world-renowned pastry and bread baker, and is the only school in the country dedicated to a 100% artisan approach to instruction. The passion he has for baking and the school is readily apparent from the first time you meet him. His excitement fills the room and all you can think of is getting to the kitchen to bake some more.
The March class I took continued the teaching of the fundamentals of bread baking, including proper mixing, fermentation, shaping, proofing, scoring and baking. However, this class focused on breads leavened with wild yeast starters. Now the whole thing with wild yeast is that is takes your bread from “eh, that’s pretty good bread” to “wow, that is some serious flavor”. Wild yeast imparts lots of benefits for the bread…first, flavor. Lots and lots of flavor. This is from the acid produced via the bacteria in the starter. This flavor isn’t always sour (though that’s its most recognizable form). Oftentimes it just adds a level of complexity; when added into a sweet bread such as Chocolate Cranberry, the acidity is not apparent at all but it helps to balance the sweetness. One aspect of wild yeast starter that I was intrigued by is how the flavor of a sourdough bread will change over the course of a few days as the acidity in the bread matures. Whereas with commercial yeast in which the bread is best the day it is baked, a sourdoughs can be enjoyed from 1 hour after baking when the acidity is rather mild to about 6 hours to a day after baking when the sourness tends to peak. I made a 3 pound loaf last month, which the recipe recommended to eat over the course of 4 days to see how the flavor changed. It’s a remarkable property and adds another level of complexity to something so simple as flour and water.
The second thing wild yeast provides is strength…this has lots of importance on the production side as more strength gives greater flexibility in terms of time and effort. Greater strength also means the structure of the bread will hold up under greater pressure. For example, a ciabatta bread has lots and lots of water in it which translates into the characteristically large holes in the final bread. Now the bread itself can only support so much because at some point the strength of the dough isn’t strong enough to capture all the air leading to a deflated and very sad ciabatta. But, when you add a significant amount of sourdough to leaven the bread instead of, or in addition to, commercial yeast all of sudden there is greater strength in the dough to support even larger air holes meaning you can get even more water into the dough. And voila, really great ciabatta.
The third thing wild yeast adds to bread is shelf life. The acidity has a preserving effect on the bread. Just as you add vinegar to cucumbers to preserve them in the form of pickles, so adding acidity to flour and water results in a bread that lasts longer before molding or going stale.
So anyways, back to the class…We started each of our own wild yeast cultures on the Monday of the class with only some flour and water in a bowl, and by Friday the culture had developed to such as state that we were able to bake with it. I’ve still got mine going on my counter and most of the breads baked in the next round of the box will use them.
In the class we compared how using different types, different hydrations, different flours, different proportions of starters all affected the final bread. We baked about 20-25 loaves a day individually and performed side-by-side comparisons at the end of each day. It was a fascinating and enriching teaching method, not to mention exhausting. Some of the breads we made included Extra Sour Sourdough, Mild Sourdough, Walnut Raisin Bread, Olive Bread, Ciabatta, Challah, Multi-Grain, Rye, Whole Wheat, and French Country Bread. Plus we baked another 5 types of bread to taste test the variability between starters.
Many of the breads you’ll see in this round of the box are from the class while others are variations that I have been working on in my month of self-training between the class and the CSB. My goal is to expose subscribers to the subtleties of wild yeast breads and hopefully get people as excited about them as I am!
Our “classroom” at SFBI.
Whole Wheat Sourdough Boules proofing before being baked.
All of our starters bubbling away…
Braiding a 6-strand challah!
Look at how beautiful it is!
Final display of all the breads we made during the class.
