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Th Kitchen Yeast Myth

Lots and lots of preferment and starter questions these days as industrious home bakers gear up to make Christmas panettone, stollen and other festive breads. One question keeps recurring and it is: what’s the best way to encourage the unique wild yeasts in my kitchen to grow into a starter? The answer, unfortunately, is that there really is no practical way to culture the wild yeasts that occur in your home.

There’s a pervasive myth out there — and I don’t know where it started or who started it — that homemade starters are local yeast capture devices. Which is to say, that home starters grow because wild yeasts in the kitchen invade the flour slurry and start growing there. In actual fact, home-grow starters grow because the yeast that’s already in the flour when you buy it starts to multiply and thrive.

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They Ain’t What They Used to Be

Reader Michael writes:

We were sitting around talking about why pastries from bakeries are nowhere near as good as they used to be. It came to me that it may have something to do with lard vs shortening vs oil. My brother commented that Panera used to have cherry danish that was awesome, then they changed the recipe and the result was not worth the effort so he quit eating it.

Perhaps we got our bakery recipes ruined by the corporate mentality that has given us cardboard flavored tomatoes. Then again it could be that the healthy dining freaks have succeeded in making our former “treats” so tasteless that they are not worth eating.

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Potato History, Short & Sweet

Once, the sweet potato was the only potato any that self-respecting Brit or European would eat. When a basket of potatoes — both sweet and starchy — was dropped at the feet of Queen Isabella by Christopher Columbus her reaction, in a word, was “yuck”. And so potatoes weren’t terribly popular in Spain nor anywhere else in Europe for quite some time. Up until the 1700’s or so they were mostly used as animal feed and as a food of last resort for farmers, fishermen and sailors.

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What makes rye flour so great for bread starters?

It’s because it comes pre-contaminated, reader Glen. Rye is odd stuff as cereal grains go. So odd in fact that it wasn’t widely cultivated until about 400 A.D., many thousands of years after wheat was first domesticated. The reason, probably, was because rye didn’t (doesn’t) make especially good bread, even though it’s a very close cousin of wheat.

Rye has other virtues, however. It grows well in poor soil. It has big thick roots which help it resist drought. It can withstand temperatures that would kill most other cereal grains, it’ll even stay alive when it’s covered with snow. That’s a handy thing, and indeed many North American farmers like to plant rye in the fall after other crops have been harvested, because a covering of rye helps prevent soil erosion and compaction in the off-season.

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How to Make Rye Starter

A rye starter is basically the same thing as a white or whole wheat starter: a fermented mass of wet flour, only with rye flour as a base instead of some other type. Rye flours are quick to ferment for reasons that will be discussed later this week, meaning you can make one in a bout half the time of a white wheat starter: about three days. All you need to do is mix maybe an ounce of rye flour with an ounce of water, stir it and let it sit out overnight. The next day add two ounces of rye flour and two ounces of water and again let it sit out overnight. The next day add four ounces of rye flour and four ounces of water…and you should have a ready starter about four hours later. Bingo.

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What does it mean to “build” a loaf in “stages”?

Reader Richard, I’d be happy to tell you. Imagine yourself as a peasant living somewhere in Europe anytime before, let’s say, World War II. Bread is a staple of your family’s meager diet, but being a laborer you live in a one-room hut somewhere on or near the land you work. You have no oven, no kitchen to speak of either. You bake your bread off-site somewhere in some sort of communal oven apparatus run by the owners of the estate that employs you.

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Grades of Flour

This applies only to North America I need to emphasize, and really most of this information isn’t terribly relevant to home bakers, but you know I like to be thorough. So here goes.

You’ll perhaps remember from the below post the “fairly coarse, fairly dark” flour you get when you grind the whole endosperm of a wheat berry with the bran and germ removed? Well that’s what we in the States call “straight” flour. We generally don’t bake with it, we sift it, though the French frequently use it for bread flour. Just another reason why replicating French breads in the US is difficult.

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Egg Yolk

That’s a very pretty, upstanding yolk, no? It’s the mark of a fresh egg. If you’re ever in a position where you need to evaluate the relative age of an egg, a yolk is a good place to start. If it’s fairly roundish and bright yellow, and is sitting high atop a slightly milky-looking mound of almost gel-like egg white, your egg is extremely fresh. Make cake, cookies or muffins out of it. Or better still cook it up, because fresh eggs make mighty good eatin’.

Old eggs are very different in their appearance just out of the shell. The white becomes very clear and watery due to a progressive change in the pH of the egg, which begins as soon as the egg is laid. That change in pH causes the proteins in the white to drift away from each other, dispersing the large aggregations that formerly made the egg white jelly-thick and whitish. As that happens the membrane around the yolk starts to weaken. More water from the white enters the yolk, diluting its pigments and giving it a pale appearance. As that happens the yolk membrane stretches out, causing the yolk to lie almost flat. If you’ve ever tried to separate an old egg, you know just how weak that membrane is after many weeks of sitting. If the egg is sitting at room temperature, the pH change happens many times faster.

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Egg (Whole)

A post on eggs could go on almost indefinitely. However since I want to focus on the egg as ingredient, I’ll do my best to keep this short and useful. The logical place to start is: how are eggs used in the pastry kitchen? I can think of three main categories of use: as a structural component in cakes, as a thickener in custards and creams and as a foam in batters, meringues, frostings and the like. It’s a pretty crude taxonomy when you consider how much eggs offer the pastry cook in terms of flavor, enrichment and color, but it seems functional to me.

Eggs come in different colors, sizes and grades. For our purposes I’ll focus on the basic white, large (as opposed to “peewee”, “small”, “medium”, “extra large” or “jumbo” as defined by the US Department of Agriculture) chicken egg, since that’s what most pastry recipes printed in the States call for. They’re also the most commonly available egg for home bakers and commercial bakers alike. Those that use shell eggs, anyway. Large eggs weigh about two ounces. The white weighs about an ounce, the yolk about half an ounce and the shell accounts for the rest.

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Sorghum

Sorghum syrup is, generally speaking, something you only see in households in the upper Midwest. Sorghum, like sugar cane or wheat, is a grass. It produces heads the size of corn ears that contain small seeds, about the size of millet. Farmers once grew sorghum for cattle feed. The grain itself is nutritious, and the stalks can be stored and fermented into silage, i.e. edible compost that cows can live on during the winter.

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