I've finally gotten around to rummaging through my copy of The Lost Art of Real Cooking.
The material on yeast, and the differing strains thereof, set me a-thinkin'. Catching and taming wild yeasts, as suggested in the book, seemed a bit much work, and I wasn't quite ready to try using probiotic pills as leavening (apparently some of the bacteria in those might be appropriate), but I figured a stop at a brewers' supply store might yield interesting material, both yeast strains and fermentibles.
So, having errands to the north this morning, I swung by More Beer! in Los Altos.
The salesman insisted that beer yeasts are as inappropriate for bread as bread yeasts are for beer, and that I wouldn't like the results. Still, I bought a couple of packets of different varieties of dry yeast.
Home again, and experiment at making a mini-loaf of Boring White Bread with ale yeast. (I'd expect to use it in Interesting Mutigrain Bread, but wanted to find out what flavor it would bring.)
So: warm water, bit of sugar, sprinkling of yeast, stir, add white whole wheat flour until it starts getting doughy, spritz canola oil over the top, leave it sitting someplace warm for a while. OK, seems to be rising a bit. Add a bit of salt and some more canola oil, stir well, dump into a mini-loaf pan. Let rise for, I guess, an hour and a half. Bake.
The top of the loaf collapsed. Well, I had taken the incredibly-lazy approach; it wasn't even remotely properly kneaded.
Let cool a bit, slice, sniff. Smells OK, not like white bread, but certainly like a fermented grain product, and not disgusting like beer. Apply butter and eat. Yum.
So:
- Ale yeast does in fact work for making bread.
- The resulting bread has more character than the other ingredients would account for.
- It doesn't come out tasting like beer.
- It does come out tasting like unusual, but good, bread.
Maybe tomorrow I'll make a proper loaf of interesting bread.
(Bread: it's like solid beer!)
Footnote: Joy says it smells like beer, and doesn't want to taste it.
Footnote 2: small doses. I don't think all the, er, volatile organic compounds cooked out of this stuff. "We never eat bread, for they make it with yeast, and one little bite turns a man to a beast. Oh, can you imagine a sadder disgrace than a man in the gutter with crumbs on his face?"
Update: solid beer, yeah. I dunno what the actual VOC content of that stuff was, but I had a long afternoon nap, then stayed up late, then had a largely sleepless night with my brain whirring randomly. Not my normal reaction to a small dose of alcohol, and there's no way it was really a large dose, so I suppose there must have been some other post-Thanksgiving metabolic weirdness enhancing the effects.
I think I need to change the process in various ways next time I try that. Notably: more exposed surface area while baking.
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