This is how bakers have explained it to me. Salt in the recipe will restrict the growth of yeast but it’s mainly that the little fungi kill themselves by being huge slobs and wallowing in their own delicious and intoxicating filth.
Although not fermentation per se, I have amused myself by referring to honey as “bee barf.”
The bread I make gets 4 risings. First there’s a sponge stage; then after it’s risen add the rest of the flour, any oil and/or salt being used, knead it, let it rise again; when it’s about doubled, punch it down and let it rise a third time; turn it into loaves, let it rise the fourth time in the pans.
I get a very nice-flavored bread without adding any salt. I don’t know for sure whether it would work if I left out the third rise, though (it would be impractical to leave out any of the others.)
IME, if you forget about it and leave it too long, it’ll eventually partially collapse; though quite possibly not before it’s flopped over the sides of the bowl.
Unless, of course, you forget about it in the sponge stage. In which case it will definitely climb over the sides of the bowl and make an unholy sticky mess over everything downhill from it, which is really really hard to clean up well and may be uncleanable from some surfaces. (Yes, I speak from experience . . . )
I recommend a timer; and/or setting the alarm on your phone, if you’re carrying it around the house.
Oh yeah, I’ve had that too: big hole in the bread.
I suspect it’s less a matter of how much yeast you start with, and more a matter of how much in nutrients is available for the yeast. However much you start with, there will very shortly be twice as much in there, after all. And so on.
Indeed. Over the years I’ve managed to accidentally leave out every ingredient except, probably, for not putting any liquid at all or any flour at all in the bowl. The time or so I forgot the yeast, it became obvious it wasn’t rising, so I put some yeast in later and it worked out OK. When I forgot the salt, I still liked the bread, and so did everybody I fed it to; so I took to leaving the salt out on purpose. When I forgot the oil, except for oiling the bowl after the first rising and oiling the baking pans, it worked fine, so I kept doing it that way too. I generally use three flours (whole wheat, unbleached white, and something else for added flavor, often corn or rye) but it works with any combination that’s got a fair amount of wheat flour (for the gluten). I used to put dry milk in, now I just use water. I used to put eggs in, now I don’t. I’ve forgotten the sweetener, and that works also, but I think I get more consistent better rising if I add a couple tablespoons of honey (the batch makes 3 loaves, 2 go in the freezer for summer, when I don’t make bread.)
All of those results were highly edible, though they didn’t all have exactly the same flavor or texture.
– it falls apart when sliced if it’s not kneaded a lot. But I like kneading bread.
I’ve seen “nutrients” referred to several times. What does yeast consider to be nutritious and in what quantity?
You know, aside from sugars, you got me. Now I’m curious: anybody know what else they need to eat? or if it makes any difference which sugars?
I’ve never used it in bread making, but in brewing there is yeast nutrient that is made of diammonium phosphate and food-grade urea.
In baking, there is diastatic malt powder which helps promote a strong rise. Most sugars will help, except for lactose, which the yeast isn’t good at chewing through.
But with a healthy bakers yeast, flour is food enough.
As for over-rising, I have experienced deflated doughs due to inattention, and the result is a denser loaf, sometimes inedibly so. I had this happen to me a couple weeks ago with a cold ferment pizza dough that I meant to use on day 3 (and looked beautiful), but couldn’t for some reason, so I tried on day 6, and the damn thing would just not wake up. I made the pizza, but it was a much flatter crust, rather than the nice holey one upthread.
Ooof, if my wife forgets to add the salt (pretty easy to do) I can tell, and the result is…edible, but not good.
There are also quite a few recipes which call for raisins, as that apparently can provide whatever additional nutrients the yeast wants over and above the sugar. You can absolutely grow yeast in just sugar water, but I guess it’s not super happy and results in off-flavors.
I’d forgotten the salt once. Let’s just say I’m glad I don’t buy bread in Tuscany.
How many risings does your bread have?
What flours are you using?
Do you generally have salt (whether or not added by you) in almost everything you eat?
– the only other thing I can say is, it’s not just me. I’ve offered that bread to quite a few people over the many years since I quit putting salt in it. They nearly always ask for more.
Bubbly sponge, normal rise, in-the-pan rise, so 3. Some mix of oatmeal, ww flour, white flour (King Arthur brand, usually). Yes, we go through an alarming amount of salt.
I’m sure that with the right recipe and type of bread and the right usage a saltless bread can be delicious. Or that one can learn to like it that way. But, hey, I gotta get my iodine somehow, right?
That’s interesting. Because I’ve literally thrown away bread that I realized didn’t have salt in it and I couldn’t even pass it off on my kids, as they noticed right away. And the bread is exactly the same otherwise. And this has happened at least twice. Same report from a friend of mine who bakes every single day. He’ll just dry that bread for breadcrumbs, though.
Maybe we’re just more used to salt that its absence is a fatal flaw in our breads. Or perhaps you breads with more varied grains/flours other than just wheat that makes it more interesting. I’m the same way with butter. But this is all with breads that have been cold fermented and/or with sourdough cultures. (More in my friend’s case for the latter. My failures were three or four day cold ferments with regular yeast.) I usually have a mix of salted and unsalted butters at home, especially Kerrygold which is cultured only in its unsalted variety, but if I use it on a slice of bread without adding some salt to it, it doesn’t hit right.
It might be that. I put what I consider to be a lot of salt on a few things, and usually no salt at all on other things. When I do eat processed foods, often they taste very salty to me, and very often they don’t taste of anything much other than salt. That puts me off a lot of things, but is OK by me for something like, say, corn chips, which I do like salty; but I think a lot of people are so adapted to salt in everything that nothing tastes right to them without it.
Maybe the other people who love my bread are all also people who don’t have a lot of salt in everything they eat? That seems moderately unlikely, but considering the people I usually wind up eating with, not entirely impossible.
There might be something about the fourth rise, or about the cornmeal-or-rye addition, that’s affecting it also. But that doesn’t really look to me to be drastically different from what tofor is doing.
I have the same experience with pancakes. My pancakes have whole-wheat, rye, corn, and oats. But if I forget the salt, I know it almost immediately and don’t like it. Nobody complains (maple syrup cures all ills) but I am very quickly fixing it. I’m sure I could phase out the salt if I thought it mattered and we’d all get used to it.
It was baguettes, so I used high-gluten flour with two or three rises (not counting the pre-ferment). It was the first time all four loaves survived the first twenty minutes of life.
They made pretty good french toast the next morning, though.
Scientificly, a nutrient is anything that an organism needs to build and maintain itself. The bulk of which is CHON (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen). But many other elements are necessary is smaller amounts, such as sulphur, calcium, phosphorus, sodium, potassium, and others. The limiting factor in growth is whichever of the essential nutrients runs out first.