little beasties

[coraa]

I started some wild sourdough starter. I've never done wild-yeasted bread before, but I've made a lot of bread, so I'm prety excited about trying this.

This kind of sourdough is made by mixing water and flour and just... letting it sit. Instead of being yeasted with packaged yeast, the wild yeasts that live in the flour (and in the air, for that matter) will breed, as will lactobacilli. The yeast and lactobacilli keep one another in check, and the acidity produced both gives the final loaf its sour flavor and kills other, less desirable forms of little organism.

A well-established sourdough starter made from wild yeast is supposed to have a lovely taste, so here's hoping.

Comments

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I believe there was a time when people used the barm from fermeting beer to leaven bread, since it's very yeasty. Obviously that used to be wild, too. I'd expect that modern commercial yeast is a strain of that, but probably a monoculture or a very narrow range of yeast cultures, because mixed wild yeast cultures have unpredictable rising schedules and commercial bakeries that make a lot of bread in batches have trouble with upredictable rises.

I'd love to see a cheese goddess, or a bread goddess.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Any of the grain goddesses (Ceres) would suffice for a bread goddess.