For comparative purpose:
I get Red Star yeast in the grocer’s bulk section, $3.50/lb. It is not refrigerated at the store or at home.
Though I usually proof first, last night’s lahmajoon dough rose beautifully after simultaneous combination.
Miamouse, starting a sourdough culture is easy, but success depends on what indigenous wild yeast(s) is in your area. To date, the ones cultured here don’t have a pleasant flavour though giving good rise.
Yes and no. The yeasts that are already present in the flour are much more likely to be cultivated (at least initially) than any wild yeasts around your area. If you nuke your flour before trying to make a sourdough starter (thereby killing any microorganisms already on the flour), you’ll find it quite difficult to get it started, if you do get it started at all.
Yes, you can. I have a very, very basic recipe for bread that just uses ordinary flour. it works pretty well, but is best eaten the same day.
http://atomicshrimp.com/bread/
(note: that is intended to be the simplest of possible bread recipes)
Strong bread flour will improve the texture and keeping qualities, as will adding things like milk powder, egg, butter to the mix.
You can freeze batches of dough after the first session of kneading and proving - when you thaw it out, just knead again, prove and bake.
You might also be interested in my (successful) experiment to capture and tame wild yeasts for a sourdough starter:
I would try pullman bread or pain de mie. There are million recipes and most of them are similar. It’s a fine textured bread with a soft crumb and a soft crust.
These are the originals of “sandwich bread” and are usually baked in a pan with a cover (a pullman pan or pain de mie pan, clever these bakers) to keep the crust soft and flat on all sides. But you can bake them in any old pan or even in a bread machine if three soft sides are good enough.
Also…
It’s better to add too much liquid to begin than not enough - calming down a sticky, sloppy dough by adding small amounts of flour - just to keep it manageable - is a heck of a lot easier than trying to relax a stiff, dry dough by adding more liquid (in fact this is nearly impossible, as once it’s dough, it’s quite resistant to water)
If you want a really crisp crust, get a large metal tray that fits in the bottom of your oven - put it in there when you preheat the oven, so that it warms up. When you put your bread in to bake, tip a cup of hot water into the tray on the oven floor - the steam will make the crust bake crisper. This can affect the ‘spring’ (rising during the bake), so you may need to slash the loaves with a sharp knife to help prevent the crust baking hard and constraining the crumb from expanding properly.
That’s a good point about nuking the flour as means of isolation. I should be more discriminate about wild visitors as there is often concurrent cider, beer and mead making. And the odd fizzy bean thing, as though they weren’t gassy enough left alone.
If you refresh* the sourdough starter mix frequently while you get it going, this should enable flour-specific yeasts to prevail over other micro-organisms, in most cases.
*(i.e. chuck most of it away, saving a spoonful or two to mix into a new batch of flour and water)
Thanks for all the info! I am going to try this too. First kid got all squicked out when I showed him the yeast packet and told him that they were living organisms and they helped to make bread. He really freaked when I told him that there were beneficial bacteria living all over his body, he honestly walked out of the room so he didn’t have to hear anymore. I wonder what his reaction to this experiment would be? (great for middlekid’s science fair next year at any rate.)
This has been an interesting thread for me, as well. I love eating bread and I love baking bread, and I’ve been baking yeast breads (from recipes in Betty Crocker, for instance) since I was eight or nine years old.
My favorite kind of bread is sourdough – love the taste, texture, and smell – and I’ve had several different cultures going, off and on, for about 10 years. I guess I just wasn’t in a place, so to speak, to really maintain a starter until now. I started a sourdough culture, using Daniel Leader’s book Local Breads as a guide, several months ago.
With the first loaves I made, I thought, “I would buy this. In a store – in a high-end bakery. I would be happy to pay four or five dollars for this loaf of bread.” It cost pennies to make, but the texture, taste, crumb and crust were all something I would gladly pay to enjoy.
I’ve made many loaves since then, using both a liquid levain and a stiff dough levain (both of which are described in Leader’s book – and **Mangetout’s ** excellent Web page description is similar in style to Leader’s stiff dough starter).
There is absolutely nothing hard about making sourdough bread (or yeast bread, for that matter). In sourdough, nature does most of the work (although, for super-wet doughs, a KitchenAid or other stand mixer makes kneading much easier). As simple as it is to make, eating one’s own sourdough bread is an intensely rewarding experience (possibly because it is so simple) that goes well beyond the wonderful flavor and texture – it’s an “I did this, along with millions of bacteria that share my living space” that has lots of bang for the buck, so to speak.
And now, I’m going to go eat the PB&J – on sourdough bread that I made – I brought for lunch today.
Am I a freak for not liking sourdough bread? I love rye–which makes it weird that I don’t like sourdough. I love things like a really hearty whole wheat (12 grain, etc type of thing for store bought) or a pumpernickel … but sourdough doesn’t “do it” for me…
I don’t think so. I really dislike sourdough as well. Though, honestly, I’m kind of a bread heathen. I grew up on a lot of processed foods and that’s what I like. I can’t stand the taste of whole wheat bread or “wheat bread” as per the store. I’m hoping that making my own (since I’ve never made my own anything but basic white bread) will be better. I figure if homemade white is so much better than store white, maybe it means homemade wheat will be tasty enough that I’ll eat it. Otherwise, there may be no hope for me.
“Wheat bread” a la Wonder is GROSS. I only like whole wheat that is really good, like Arnold’s or Pepperidge Farm.
I was inspired by this thread and broke out the bread maker that we got for a wedding present 4 years ago. Nevermind all the dead bugs I found in it (Why were they there? We’ve never used it.), I figured it could be a cheap way to get bread. For some reason the recipe called for dry milk, but I didn’t have any so I went without. The bread turned out all right if a little heavy.
Does anybody know what the dry milk is supposed to do?
If you’re like me you probably eat porridge to save money as well. Leftover porridge is a fantastic addition to the dough - just plop it in together with the flour (use a little less flour, but just a little). Makes it chewy and fragrant.
I seem to remember you can mash leftover boiled potatoes and use in the dough.
It improves the texture - makes the crumb more fluffy.
You can just substitute milk in place of some of the water, if you don’t have any milk powder.
I’ve been making our bread and buns for about a year now and when I first started making the bread it came out to about 30 cents a loaf for me. I haven’t done the math lately, but I know it’s gone up.
I will admit I do cheat and use a bread machine for mine.
As far as yeast and flour, I use bread flour purchased as Sam’s Club for about $10 a bag for 25 pounds and the yeast there I can get 2 pounds of instant yeast for just under $5. I’ve had no problems using that yeast in any of my recipes.
The two recipes that I use are Crusty Cuban Bread which has more of the sourdough bread texture and the Softest Ever Bread Machine bread, which is my husbands favorite. It’s very soft and not crunchy at all.
Dry ingredients are used in the bread machine recipes so people can leave them on a timer for half a day later. The only wet stuff is on the flour that is put in right after the water. This way you don’t get spoilage before the bread is made. You can use liquid milk instead of the water and dry milk. The same is for buttermilk. Just be sure to make the bread right away.
While this is the reason for dry vs wet milk, I suspect the poster wanted to know why milk was being used.
Simple answer, is that it softens the crust, and lightnes the crumb on the loaf. Not a big deal if you omit it.
I ordered this book yesterday. I really don’t know a thing about bread making, but I want to do it more often, and understand what I am doing. I currently make the Amish White Bread recipe mentioned above but with only 1/3 cup sugar - it was too sweet otherwise. I am hoping the book will allow me to understand what it is I am doing and how to modify a bread recipe successfully.
For instance, I have been planning on trying Mangetout’s bread recipe (very interesting website and videos by the way) just to see what would happen, but I don’t know why it differs from the Amish recipe or what affect the differences have. I would also like to put it in a loaf pan to make regular slices, but I don’t know what kind of affect that will have. I have learned from this thread that milk apparently makes bread lighter. So I will try adding some to my next batch of Amish bread and see what kind of difference it has.
Some times my bread doesn’t congeal very well and becomes kind of powdery and crumbely when you slice/manipulate it. And I am not really sure how to knead. Well, I know HOW to knead, but everything I see always tells me to knead for like 10 minutes, but I usually only knead for like a minute or two - maybe 50 or so iterations before the dough becomes like a rubber ball and is really resistant to being stretched or folded anymore. But it looks “smooth and elastic” to me. I hope this book I ordered can take some of this mystery away for me. Maybe I should take a class too, so that I can actually see what “10 minutes of kneading until the dough looks smooth and elastic” actally looks like.
And I will have to say that even with my inexperience I still manage to make somewhat successful Amish bread so I bet that any idiot can do it.
Any advice on how to get the bread out of the loaf pans? I don’t know if I should grease them or not - won’t that just fry the bread?
I use PAM (cooking spray), and the loaves always pop right out. Of course, my pans are probably seasoned enough that the bread would pop out without any oiling.
Don’t use low smoke point oils to grease your pans, you’ll end up with burnt looking loaves.