Cultivate Your Own Wild Yeast Starter

hi everyone it's roofing the king's roost and today I'm going to talk about growing your own East if you bake you undoubtedly done to the store about east and those tiny little packets and try to help granules but if you're like me why buy commercially produced refined product when you can just produce it at home yourself used as all around us in the environment in fact a lot of you strains live right on the very grains you're probably baking with now so why buy it at the store when you can grow your own that's much more natural it's less processed and less refined it's really cheap to do it's not that difficult and some people have less sensitivity to baked goods using a natural yeast some people call what we're producing here starter or levan and that is what I'm going to be showing you how to produce and to maintain in this video today the container you choose is important here's my starter I keep it in a wax jar which is a 1 quart glass jar so that you can see what's going on inside 1 quart is the minimum size that you need you need to give it room to expand and it needs to have a lid but not be airtight any rubber gasket that might be on the on the wet jar you want to remove or if you've got a screw on lid like a ball jar you want to not tighten it down too tight it has air tight oxygen can't get in and co2 can't get out and that's important see these bubbles that's the co2 you were going to need some kind of container to keep your yeast starter in I'm gonna use this jar right here to start the sourdough culture from scratch now if you have a friend who has a sourdough starter going the easiest thing in the world to jumpstart your process is to just get one from get a scoop from a friend but if you don't have that then we're gonna need some water and some flour and we're gonna start one from scratch right now for your initial mixture you're going to need equal parts water and flour by weight the easiest way to do it is to use two tablespoons of water to 3 tablespoons of flour and that is almost exactly the same way twice for water you need to make sure you use distilled or highly filtered water because almost all water contains chlorine and chloramines now and those inhibit the growth of organisms and will possibly could kill your yeast for your wheat flour you're going to any store-bought flower will do you can do all-purpose flour bread flour holding flour since I mill my own flour I use whatever grains I have lying around sometimes I even mix them up and can use rye hard bread hard white amaranth mine corn whatever there is this is actually a hard white wheat so I'm going to give you a shortcut for your initial setup instead of using your two tablespoons of water and this is optional I like to use two tablespoons of pineapple juice on the sweetened planful juice that helps lower the pH and provide a little extra natural sugar for the yeast to get started on you're gonna end up with I found that you're gonna end up with a better result and a quicker active starter so you're going to take 3 tablespoons of flour and whisk that together and mix it really well with 2 tablespoons of pineapple juice or water if you're not using pineapple juice whisk them until they're completely incorporated and then cover it loosely with your lid just set it on top don't screw it down and set it aside on the kitchen counter at room temperature and all that you're gonna do between now the next 24 hours is give it a quick stir two or three times so we're gonna repeat that process every 24 hours adding 3 tablespoons of flour in two tablespoons of water remember don't use pineapple juice anymore that was only for the first one every 24 hours until you start to see bubbling which should take between 3 and 5 days you're gonna stir 2 or 3 times each day to give these some oxygen after a few days you should start seeing the air pockets forming and if you smell your yeast starter you should smell sort of a sour doughy a little bit acidic than a curry kind of smell to it that smells really good okay so we've got bubbles now it smells really good a little bit sour but it's a good smell and so now it's time to talk about ongoing feeding and maintenance of your starter if you make about once a week which is what most people do you can keep your starter in the fridge and that will slow the growth down enough that you only need to feed it once a week if you're gonna bake a lot then what you can do is just store your starter the kitchen counter and feed it every day feeding what that is so what you're gonna do is when it's time to feed it if you just keep adding like we were doing during the initial stages you're just gonna end up with way too much and because you now have an active culture you're just gonna end up with a lot of like really broken-down flowers so that's why you do need to discard half when I use my starter I take out half I use it in a recipe and I build it back up to that level using equal parts by weight of water and flour and just pop it right back in the fridge for another week here's a few tips you can play with your starter you'll get to know it really well you can play with the texture and the consistency of it but here's a couple things to keep in mind if it's gone bad you will know it it'll smell terrible or you'll see some weird colored molds on it if that happens just toss it and start again if you find that there's liquid on the top that's perfectly normal and it's called hooch and bakers know about it it's a very common thing just pour it off and the next time you feed it you can use a little less water if you're interested in developing different flavors I can cover that in another video for example if you want to make a sourdough suffice it to say you can ferment it a little longer keep the batter a little thicker you'll start to get more of a sour to a flavor to your breads whether you like a more sour starter or a more mild one I know that you will absolutely love the flavor of cooking with wild piece homemade bread is so amazing

Channel: The King's Roost

Views: 2,172,456

Rating: 4.9025249 out of 5

Keywords: Yeast (Product Ingredient), Food (TV Genre), Baker's Yeast (Food), Health, Bread (Food), Sourdough (Food), wild yeast, starter, cultivate, Do It Yourself (Hobby), baking, natural, organic

Id: 0wTt8VGyBdk

Length: 6min 5sec (365 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 03 2015