Foraging for Wild Yeast
(Page 3 of 6)
September/October 1980
By the Mother Earth News editors
After just two days, tiny bubbles appeared in the mixture . . , and we knew that the yeast was "working"! ( A single whiff of the fragrant concoction left no doubt in my mind as to the success of our experiment . . . it smelled like a miniature brewery!) So, armed with a vigorous starter, we set to work to produce some loaves of real sourdough bread.
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Before mixing the batter, we removed the berries from our sponge (they were no longer needed as a source of yeast . . . the culture could now perpetuate itself). That done, we combined—in a large bowl—1 cup of the starter with 6 cups of whole wheat flour, and added just enough water to make the mixture easy to handle. The next step was to knead the dough thoroughly (adding about 4 more cups of flour in the process) until it became stiff and no longer stuck to the sides of the bowl. Finally, we shaped the soon-to-be bread into two loaves and set them by the fire to rise. Well, you know what they say about a watched pot . . . it took three hours on the warm rocks for our dough to rise (but even then only by about 1-1/2 inches)!
We put that time to good use, however, by building a stone oven. The primitive cooker was fashioned by setting a large flat rock directly in the coals of the fire, then forming three sides with inch-thick stone slabs and covering the top of the enclosure with a fifth large chunk of rock. Next, we placed our two sausage-shaped loaves on the floor of the crude structure and closed the "door" with a final stone. (During baking, the heat was regulated by simply piling up or scraping away the coals around the sides of the oven.)
Finally, after we'd spent a full hour inhaling the mouthwatering aroma, our sourdough was cooked to perfection . . . we had two golden loaves of hot, wild yeast bread! Our hungry group ate slice after slice of the delicious, close-textured manna. It was as if we were eating bread for the first time! The taste of the homemade sourdough was full and genuine . . . instead of the flavored and preserved mimicry of the real thing that I'd grown used to in storebought loaves.
We discovered in subsequent bakings (you can bet there were quite a few, following that first success!) that it's important to use a fairly large amount of starter in the bread dough . . . or else the baked goods won't always rise. (We ate some rather shinglelike flapjacks until we realized the batter was short on starter.) Our recipes seemed to work best when they included about one cup of homegrown yeast for two loaves of bread. And by replenishing whatever we took from the sponge jar with equal amounts of fresh flour and water, we were able to keep our culture bubbling throughout the trip!
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