No yeast in the supermarket? No problem!
Personal story of patience and persistence. My experience of baking bread during the COVID-19 lockdown, when I could not get the yeast in the local store.
All three times I went to the supermarket during the lockdown, I have never got yeast for bread. I heard the shopkeeper saying to another customer that all the yeast they daily put on the shelf is taken in the morning hours. In our country, only disabled, elderly people, and pregnant women can enter the store in the morning hours, and I do not belong to any of these groups. I am not sure whether it is still difficult to get the yeast, but I did not want to be dependant on it. That is why I was looking for other solutions on how to make bread. The experience I got not only taught me how to make bread in different ways but also enriched me with how some things in life need time to mature and us to be patient while working on it.
You can call me a bread-maker!
I am not one of the people who just started baking bread because it is a trend or because they do not want to buy it in the supermarket for the sake of caution. I and my partner have been baking bread for the last few years. I am not sure why exactly we started with it, but making our homemade bread is natural to us as cleaning the teeth before bedtime. We do it very spontaneously and regularly in the middle of doing other things. We simply enjoy baking and eating homemade bread. :)
First attempt with a dried dough
My first attempt at baking bread differently during lockdown has started when I still had one package of an already very precious yeast. I baked bread as usual and saved a piece of dough, which served as a yeast starter for the next bread. This is how my grandmother used to make bread her entire life.
I left a piece of dough in the fridge during the night to multiply the yeast inside the dough. The next day I spread it on a flat surface and dry it on the radiator. When it was dry, I broke it into small pieces and put them into a glass jar.
The next time I wanted to bake bread, I took a big spoon of that dry yeast and put it in the warm water mixed with milk, little sugar, and flour and left it on the room temperature overnight. The next day I used this yeast starter to make a bread dough. I waited with the baking until the size of the dough has doubled — which was after several hours. Besides, I repeated the procedure from the last time — took a piece of dough, put it in the fridge overnight, and then dry it. The bread I made was fine, it was full of small holes inside, but was not the softest one. However, it served its purpose of feeding us for breakfast.
The second attempt with wild yeast — sourdough starter
Right in the middle, when I was already happy with the way I was making bread, I saw a video where a Slovenian sourdough bread enthusiast was teaching the viewers of the morning TV show to make their wild yeast in 7 days. Each day she had a video call in the ether and gave further instructions. I was curious how this works and joined the movement of making own yeast. So did my mum. Besides the progress of coronavirus, we had another topic to talk about.
But how does it actually work? There are wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria in the air and on the surface of the kitchen accessories. When you give them the right environment with food (flour) and water, they grow and multiply. Besides, you need some patience and a strong will of wanting to succeed.
Long and patient journey
My mum gave up after 5th day because her mixture was too liquid and did not grow enough (and we have lost one topic for conversation). However, she had few packages of yeast in her freezer, so her will and need for this experiment were not as strong as mine.
It got me thinking about how we are not used to the situation when things do not come easy. I tried to encourage her to continue with her work with wild yeast, but I was not successful (she must have lost her patience after raising 4 own children and hundreds of others in the kindergarten). I was even more determined that I will work on it until I make a bread full of nice big holes and leaves ornaments on it, as seen in some beautiful pictures. Disclaimer — I am still working on it.
It takes one week to make the wild yeast — sourdough starter, and only after that, you can bake your first bread. Each day you need to add an amount of flour and water into a small glass jar. For the first two days, I added 20 g of flour and 20 g of water and mixed the content each day. On the third day, I enlarged the amount to 30 g flour and 30 g water. On the fourth day, I took half of the content into another clean glass jar and added 30 g flour and 30 g water again. For the last three days, I did every day the same — added 30 g of flour and the same amount of water. You must never close the lid of the jar tightly (you never really screw the lid on). This way, the yeast and bacteria from the air can enter and do their job.
Ta-da! Fresh bread directly from the oven!
Woo-hoo, not so fast. It is good that we have more time these days since making bread out of wild yeast takes some time. With this, I mean days. Sorry, I told you to be patient.
One evening before the baking, you need to feed your wild yeast with flour and water. If your yeast is truly working, the content in the jar must double overnight. The second day you make the dough for bread following these instructions (I won’t write the recipe here since you can find it everywhere on the internet). On the third day, you can finally bake bread.
During writing this article, I have just baked my third sourdough bread. The whole flat smells nice. I think I have finally succeeded since there are those big air holes in the bread. My first two attempts were made in a hurry, not following three days instructions, but rather reducing hours for rising (the result was not so soft bread with big holes inside). I learned there is no fast lane with the sourdough bread. Patience, Ana. However, I must still work on those carvings — nice pictures of leaves on the bread surface. Let’s leave it as a challenge for the future.
Bonus — Additional products
I have even used the sourdough starter for making another two products — pizza and Potica cake (Slovenian dessert especially eaten for holidays such as Christmas and Easter). They were also done with shorter rising hours as they should be, which turned out not to be the perfect products. However, we still enjoyed them very much, so did our neighbour downstairs (we gave her a piece of Potica cake for Easter).
