We make homemade yeast from fruits, berries, vegetables, herbs from the garden Author Elena Zheleznyak,
🔗There is another great way to bake healthy homemade bread without adding industrial yeast, but still using yeast - to make the yeast yourself from fruit, honey and water. In a couple of days you can get real natural yeast, which will contain everything you need and at the same time nothing superfluous to bake excellent bread with your own hands.
How to make them?Any fruits, herbs, vegetables, everything alive and clean, plucked from the garden or bought in the market from grandmothers, a little honey or sugar and clean water. The further process is even simpler: I don’t wash the fruit, so as not to wash off the wild yeast that lives on fruit shells, for the same reason we don’t clean it, but simply cut it into small pieces.
It will take about a handful of such fruits, plus, you can add a little raisins to bolster the yeast. We put the prepared fruits in a jar (I have the usual half-liter), fill it with water at room temperature, add a spoonful of honey or sugar, stir, close the jar with a lid and hide it in a quiet place for 2-3 days. Fermentation should begin in the jar.
After the indicated time, shake the jar, open the lid to release the gas, and again hide it for a day or two. We check: if, after opening the can, you hear a hissing, like from a bottle of lemonade, then the yeast is ready. I advise using them for 4-5 days.
In the photo on the left, yeast after 3 days, air bubbles are visible inside the jar. In the photo on the right of the bank on the 5th day, no bubbles are visible, but it sizzles if you listen, and is ready to go.In fact, we have yeast water and what is the concentration of yeast in it, I honestly cannot say, I just have no idea. I made this yeast exactly three years ago, and I remember that the concentration of yeast is not constant and changes: the longer you bake with this yeast, the stronger it is. If at the beginning of breeding, wild yeast raised the dough slowly (my first bread lasts about five hours), then by the second or third baking they were much more active, so much so that I had to reduce the volume of yeast water used in the recipe. I think this is due to two important points: the readiness of the yeast water and the maturity of the dough. It seems to me that during my first experiment, I put the first brew too early, I had to wait a couple of days for the fruit yeast to “mature”. When I used them, they bubbled and sizzled, it was worth waiting a little.
How do I use them? Instead of regular yeast, only the "dosage" needs to be adjusted periodically, because over time, their activity can change. Yeast water should be mixed with flour, covered and left for 12-15 hours until ripening. The dough should just ripen, be bubbly and porous, and it is not a sourdough that needs to be fed with flour, it is a dough that must be used all without residue, kneading the dough on it.
When I first started working on fruit yeast, I withstood the dough from ring to ring, not really looking at its real state, so my first bread with homemade yeast came up for a very long time and reluctantly, even the extra 50 ml did not help. yeast water added to the dough instead of part of regular water. This time it was different. Compare yourself, first try and second try:
first try
second tryFermentation time, temperature, amount of flour and volume of yeast are the same, in both variants it is apple yeast with raisins, and the difference is obvious.And there is also a huge difference in the way the bread approached, this time, after an hour, signs of fermentation were noticeable, the dough visually grew noticeably.
How to feed them, where to keep them?Despite the fact that yeast water is not a leaven, it also needs feeding, because it is also alive. Each time you pour a little yeast from a baking can, add a little honey or sugar to it, replenish the water loss and supply with a new batch of fruit (old fruit can be partially caught and disposed of). It is best to store a jar of yeast in the refrigerator, there definitely nothing will happen to it, it will not ferment or grow moldy. To re-bake bread with fruit yeast, just take out a jar, add honey or sugar, a couple of slices of apple or other fruit, and wait for the lemonade fizz.
How do they affect dough and bread?This fruit yeast has a wonderful effect on the dough, it becomes silky, very elastic and pleasant. Plus, they give their color and flavor to the bread. This is especially noticeable with dark berry yeast. I made it from bird cherry, the yeast turned out to be maroon, and the dough was lilac. Real magic! The finished bread also had this beautiful shade.
Fruit yeast also affects the porosity of the bread, more precisely, the pattern itself. Have you noticed that yeast and sourdough bread has a different crumb and pore pattern? So, it is also different for bread on fruit yeast. Bread can be perfectly loosened and baked and have unusual patterns in the cut, not like sourdough or yeast. This is clearly seen in the example of bird cherry bread.
I think this has to do with how this yeast water affects the gluten of the dough, or rather, it weakens it. If you knead the dough with a lot of yeast water, it will be a little strange consistency, at the same time silky and pliable, but at the same time sticky, not as strong and elastic as, for example, a dough made with lactic acid sourdough. I may be wrong, but I think this is due to the presence of alcohol in the yeast, and alcohol is known to destroy gluten. But in small doses, it gives an interesting effect, just influencing the structure of the crumb.
The taste of breadI won't say that fruit yeast strongly affects the taste of the finished bread, but the fact that this is an unusual bread is immediately noticeable. It is given out by subtle notes in taste and aroma, fruity, subtle, fresh, sweetish, believe me, ordinary bread does not smell like that. I baked a trial today and it's just delicious!
What can you make fruit yeast from?I already mentioned that they can be obtained from anything, even from greenery. I tried to make from bird cherry, from lemon and from apples with raisins, and it's hard for me to say which ones I liked more.
Whole grain with apple yeast
one more on apple
with caramelized garlic and olives on lemon yeast.
I put in the mint yeast from the peppermint stalks left over from the mint pesto, I want to try the baking with it.
What bread is fruit yeast suitable for?You can bake any wheat bread with small additions of any other flour on them, but rye, it seems to me, will not work. For rye bread, lactic acid bacteria are important, which should be present in large quantities in the dough, but fruit yeast cannot give this. There is a favorite rye sourdough for rye bread
By the way, while summer, you can dry all kinds of fruits and berries, from which you can then make pure fruit yeast.
