[Mike Nolan]

You understand, by 'fresh yeast' they probably mean liquid yeast in a 5 gallon bucket, not yeast cakes. The only place I know of to get the yeast cakes right now is NY Bakers, and by the time you throw in fedex delivery it gets pretty pricey.

[Mike Nolan]

The links in the story to their ongoing research look pretty promising, too. I forwarded the link on to Deb Wink and posted it on the BBGA forum.

[Mike Nolan]

I've always found it odd that home sourdough instructions nearly always recommend throwing away half of your starter at every feeding or using it for something other than bread, commercial bakeries do not do that (because they couldn't afford to!) They feed their starters a few hours before they plan to start another batch of dough, then take the half they would have thrown away and use it to inoculate a day's worth of dough, and the starter is at its most active point by then, too.

Maybe it's just because most home bakers don't bake bread every day, like a bakery does?

[Mike Nolan]

I think that recipe is in the recipes section here under two or three different names, I've heard it called crazy cake, cake-in-the-pan, no-egg cake, etc. The recipe supposedly was developed during world war II when eggs were in short supply.

One caution I will make on this recipe is don't top it with aluminum foil to store it, the low pH causes it to eat right through the foil. (It may not be all that great on metal pans, too, but we usually do it in a glass 8x8 pan.)

[Mike Nolan]

We had kraut dogs for supper tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

We used up the last of the hot dog buns for supper tonight, I'll have to make some more soon, they were very good for hot dogs and made great hamburger buns. (This is the Hamelman 'soft butter rolls' recipe.)

I'm getting ready to take on another of the Ginsberg rye recipes, because I think my new rye starter is about ready for use, the pH was down to 4.65 this afternoon.

[Mike Nolan]

There are several different types of pre-ferments/sponges, varying mainly on how much water they have in them. It is common for them to use 1/4 to 1/2 of the total flour in the recipe.

Almost any yeast bread recipe can be adapted to use a pre-ferment.

Let's say your recipe calls for 30 ounces of flour overall and 20 ounces of water, which would be 67% hydration. I tend to like pre-ferments that are a little looser than the final dough, say, 75% hydration. I think the additional water gives the yeast a boost.

You could do a 75% hydration biga starter with 12 ounces of flour and 9 ounces of water, plus 1/2 teaspoon of yeast. (A poolish is wetter, such as 12 ounces of flour to 12 ounces of water, again with a small amount of yeast.)

A pate fermentee (old dough) is also a type of sponge you can make up the day before if you don't have a previous day's dough to work with. It will often have some of the salt in it, as dough from a previous batch would. (Not too much, it can inhibit or kill the yeast.) In fact, you can make up a big batch of pate fermentee and it'll keep in the refrigerator for up to 4 days. (After that it starts acting a bit more like a sourdough starter, which expects periodic feedings and starts to take on a sour tang.)

Whatever you use for the pre-ferment, subtract it from the total when making the final dough. If there's sugar in the recipe, you could add some of it to the pre-ferment, that will also give the yeast something to munch on.

Let it sit overnight, it should be bubbly by morning. I often add another 1/2 teaspoon of yeast to the final dough, but that's still less than half of what a recipe that uses 30 ounces of flour would probably call for, and probably less than a third of what a recipe written in the 50's would use.

I used to keep track of how long a pound of yeast lasted me, 2-3 months wasn't unusual. These days it is more like 6-8 months, because there's just the two of us and I've been making more recipes that use a pre-ferment or my rye starter so they don't require as much commercial yeast, sometimes none at all.

[Mike Nolan]

What's likely to happen is the producers of both flour and yeast are going to ramp up to fill the shortages in the distribution channels, but at some point demand is likely to slow down a little, and then they'll have to slow down a bit as the channels get full. I could see a second cycle of shortages a few months down the road, especially if a lot of the newcomers decide they like baking their own bread.

I don't really want a small jar of yeast, and certainly not the little paper packets, which are way too expensive, I'd rather buy a one-pound package, though I've still got one unopened package in the pantry. (I'll probably need to open it next month, though.) I've never had liquid yeast to try it, you have to buy it in large buckets and it has a very short shelf life.

I may have to try the Deb Wink/Jeffrey Hamelman raisin bread recipe again, it starts by putting some raisins in water and letting the yeasts naturally present on grapes go to town. I tried it once, but I got a grey mold, which, according to Deb's instructions, was probably Botrytis cinerea, the fungus often present on grapes that is responsible for the 'noble rot' that produces the finest dessert wines, like Sauternes. However, it won't make bread.

[Mike Nolan]

As I recall, KAF shut down their 2nd version of the BC in May of 2016. Swirth and a few others were saving recipes furiously during the month or so that KAF gave us to save stuff.

Zen set up a site, too, but it didn't get a lot of traffic and it looks like it hasn't had any activity since 2017. She supposedly downloaded all the recipes that people had posted on the KAF BC but I don't think she ever posted them to her site. I've emailed her a few times asking if she'd send them to me, but I never got a response. (I'm sure I could have figured out a way to process them and load them here.)

I think there were over 6000 recipes there, we've got about 2400 of them here.

Deb Wink was one of the more active posters on the first version of the KAF BC, most of that before I joined there. (I think I discovered it in 2005.) I've had a few email discussions with her lately, on sourdough, of course. I was hoping to take her sourdough class in March, but it got cancelled due to COVID-19.

[Mike Nolan]

I cut up 4 more heads of cabbage for sauerkraut today, some I added to the four-gallon crock to top it off, since it had compressed down to below the half way point. The rest I put in the one-gallon after cleaning and sanitizing it. This gives me around 24 pounds of sauerkraut in the crocks, plus 2 pounds or so left from the last batch. We're enjoying having fresh kraut on hand and we've promised some of it to a friend.

[Mike Nolan]

We're delighted to see you here, kimbob. We really miss the BC crowd who haven't come over here. A few have probably passed on by now, I haven't heard from Grizzlybiscuits in a very long time. KidPizza is still around, though he doesn't post much, sure hope he's OK, he's in a limited care facility these days and those haven't been the best places to be with COVID-19.

[Mike Nolan]

I like Swedish meatballs, but I'd leave out the garlic, it just gets in the way IMHO.

[Mike Nolan]

Gluten-free mixes usually have something like xanthan gum in them, it thickens very quickly. You generally need to mix a cake mix long enough to get the flour mostly if not fully hydrated. With the GF mixes and recipes I've tried, that's always a bit of a challenge, I often wind up leveling it out with a spatula. When I make a GF recipe from scratch, I wait until it has mixed for a while before I add the xanthan gum, assuming it isn't already in the GF flour.

[Mike Nolan]

Sorry about that, I'm never sure with WaPo and WSJ which things are behind their paywall and which aren't. (The Times of London is easier, aside from the front page, which has maybe a paragraph of each story, everything's behind the paywall.)

Here's another link that might work:
Ikea Meatballs

[Mike Nolan]

Bagels freeze fairly well, and toasting them helps, I find they're usually good for 3-4 days, so that's why I seldom make more than 9 smaller bagels (3.5 ounces each) at a time.

[Author]

Posts