I like to bake my own bread. I still buy cheap Kroger brand white sandwich bread because it’s easier for PB&J for school lunches (the boy likes it and it’s $1.19 a loaf), but I’d rather bake my own fancy bread than spend $5 at the “artisan” bakery at the grocery store.
We are lazy about it. We have a bread machine, which I make the dough in on the dough cycle, before transferring it to a baking pan to do a finish rise and bake.
My wife does a Challah that way which is one of the best Challah’s I’ve ever had.
I’ve also been doing boules using a pre-heated Dutch Oven to give it a thick crust.
One of my favorite things to do is replace the water with some other liquid to see what it will do. Apple juice is sweet, milk gives it richness, I just did one that used coffee that has a nice flavor but requires a lot of sugar to neutralize some of the bitterness.
I did an egg bread using a cup of half-and-half that was reaching its expiration date and it turned into one heck of brioche.
I have been baking more since the Coronacrisis started since the shelves were picked clean of store bread for two weeks. You can’t really stockpile bread (I’m not talking about the canned stuff) but you can stockpile bread flour, sugar, and yeast.
My brother works at a local micro-brew and is an award-winning apprentice brewmaster.
I’ve talked to him about getting some of the krausen from the beer he brews and using that for bread yeast, which is the way bakers have been baking for centuries before packaged yeast came along.
In the days before the pasteurization of bottled beer for transport, beer was a live culture food like yogurt. Beer bread used the live yeasts in the beer to start a rise.
My brother launched into an explanation of the different yeasts used for different beers and how that affects the flavor and fermentation.
This has given me an idea.
I am going to try baking bread with different krausen from different beers made with different yeasts. I will keep the recipes simple (flour, water, sugar, salt, yeast) and use the same procedure (dough cycle with a final rise in a loaf pan) for each to maintain consistency.
I’d like to see how the different yeasts affect the bread, including flavor and rise.
I will document and post as this occurs. This will be a long term process as they do a new batch every few weeks.
I think this might be a fun little science project.
I once made some beer with bottle-conditioned homebrew stout to provide the yeast and liquid. It was wonderful!
Sounds like a good/fun science project. You can get your yeasts from home brewing supply houses if your brother can’t supply them.
So get your yeasts and beer making supplies, make yourself some beer, keep the left overs for baking bread.
When I tried this a number of years ago. (I ran out of regular yeast and had a supply of other yeasts). I found that there were a couple of issues to keep in mind. One was the amount of CO2 that was generated. Some beer/wine yeasts generate a great deal more than bread yeast. two was the time it takes to develop. Figure on over night raises. three) Yeasts designed to make lots of alcohol don’t always taste good.
Have fun and let us know the results.
Spent grain from brewing is very commonly used for bread and pizza crust. I’m not sure what gets used for yeast but there’s precedent so it should work.
Kitchenaid mixer with a dough hook. If you do baguettes (not very hard, but a lot of kneeding) then it saves a lot of work.
I’ll be very interested in what you find out.
Some years ago, back in Silicon Valley, I wandered into a homebrew-supply store in search of different yeasts and grain products.
The guy minding the store warned me that beer yeast wouldn’t make good bread, but I wanted to try anyway.
The results were interesting. The bread rose just fine, and came out with a lot of character. Rather more character than I’d anticipated. Wasn’t bad, as such, but… well, the expression “greatest thing since sliced beer” doesn’t see much use, does it?
The past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing around again, albeit with the boring active-dry-yeast-in-a-jar. Starting a day early and mixing just a pinch of yeast with a light slurry of water and flour, then letting it ferment for many hours, seems to work well, and I presume using most of the fermented slop for the current batch of bread and a little of it to seed the next day’s culture would work until such time as something nasty invaded and took over from the yeast.
I don’t figure on getting too experimental just now, as resupply of flour and yeast is currently problematic. Got enough to last a while if I don’t waste it, but the usual suppliers seem to be sold out of everything.
… Yes, I have a few pounds of wheat berries, and a mill, and I suppose I can have a go at growing a small patch of wheat in this summer’s victory garden, but I expect the supply chain to catch up long before harvest time.
Just curious how this is going to work with Passover and Unleavened Bread coming up in just over a week. Is that going to delay the results?
Reading this post has made me want to go buy a bread machine and start experimenting.
Good luck finding a bread making machine. Of course all you really need is some time.
For anybody interested in baking bread at home, this is our bread bible:
_Bread Alone_ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0688092616
The only real suggestion I have for anybody making bread from scratch the first time is USE A TIMER!
All good bread books talk about the moment when the gluten forms and you the dough turns “silky” and smooth. Until you have actually experienced it, you don’t really know what it is like.
So use bread flour, follow the rules, and kneed for the indicated time, using a timer. You will get to different stages as you work/kneed the dough. And each time you will go “Wow! I can tell I’m at the silky stage, that’s amazing.” And then you knead it a bit longer and the dough changes again, and you go “Wow! It is so much different now. I’m glad I kept going.”
Have fun. A home made loaf of bread smells and tastes amazing!
Last comment: When you pull that first loaf of bread you made out of your oven, you are going to have the almost irresistible urge to cut it open and chow down. Don’t! Let the bread rest a bit and finish baking.