Yeast Shortage? Use This Prepper Hack To Make Bread

A helpful article on making bread when availability of ingredients can be challenging. Below is a helpful article on how to make your own yeast for baking.



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Making your own bread starter is a great way of simplifying the bread-making process and there are a few advantages to this. By making a starter, you significantly increase your chances of making perfect bread. That’s because when a starter is established it already has the yeasts activated and the fermentation process naturally occurring. You can read more about the process here. As a result, once the starter gets going, you’ll never need yeast for bread again because the starter will be collecting wild yeast from the air.

Bakers get better results with their breadmaking when using boiled potato water than they do when they use activated yeast bought from the grocery store. These are the advantages to using a potato starter:

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a reply to: infolurker

I find it ironic that something that people have done for centuries is now considered a "prepper hack".

I'm using a starter I got from my grandmother that her mother gave her... it "started" over 100 years ago.

Prepper hack indeed.

/facepalm

a reply to: infolurker

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I remember reading that people put their breads outside so that the yeast would start growing. Also sourdough starter.

Hundreds of years ago, before there was packaged yeast, bakers used sourdough starter to keep a supply of yeast alive and handy. They kept a pot of live culture in a flour/water medium, and "fed" it daily or weekly so that the yeast remained alive and active. To understand how sourdough starter works, let's look at how you can create a batch of starter using live yeast that is floating in the air!

To perform this experiment you will need:

A pottery crock, plastic container or glass jar, preferably with a loose-fitting lid
A wooden spoon
A piece of cloth
Some flour (preferably without any preservatives in it) and water
To start a culture, mix two cups of flour and two cups of water in a glass or pottery bowl (in the old days, a baker probably had a special clay crock for starter). Lay a cloth over the top and let it sit on the kitchen counter. It turns out that there is yeast floating in the air all around us all the time, and some of this yeast will make its way to your flour/water mixture. It will then start growing and dividing.

After 24 hours, you pour off about a cup of the mixture and feed it with another cup of flour and another cup of water. In a few days, the mixture will become frothy as the yeast population grows. The froth is caused by the carbon dioxide that the yeast is generating. The starter will also have a bacteria, lactobacilli, in it. This lends to the slightly acidic flavor of the bread by creating lactic acid! The alcohol that the yeast creates and the lactic acid together are the source of sourdough bread's unique flavor!

Supposedly you can put the dough outside in a wooded area and spores will land in the bread dough and it will build a culture. I think That article was written by a crow.

a reply to: infolurker

What are the odds ? I just made bread in my dutch oven. I was thinking about that trick while I was baking it.



How it looks ?

originally posted by: rickymouse
Supposedly you can put the dough outside in a wooded area and spores will land in the bread dough and it will build a culture. I think That article was written by a crow.

Not exactly the dough. It's a mix of flour and water, but more the consistency of wallpaper paste than dough. Keep feeding it every day, more flour plus more water (ONLY well water or distilled bottled water, the chlorine in tap water will immediately kill sourdough.) and watch bubble form. Then use this starter in your bread recipe, and make sure you knead the hell out of your actual bread dough because the formation of long chain gluten will work with your sourdough starter to make a well risen loaf.

a reply to: infolurker

Thank you for posting this. S&F. I find this fascinating. I had no idea.

Stupid question: How come there is a yeast shortage? My guess is more people staying at home baking bread and stuff that requires yeast.

a reply to: ChiefD

Exactly. Baking bread is pretty easy but most people rarely do it due to time.

If you suddenly are home all day, why not.

I keep at least 50 lbs of assorted wheat berries on hand, and run them through my Magic Mill as needed. I have several types of yeast and also keep a live culture going. I have spelt barley and other grains as well. I like to put a little barley flour into my sour dough loaves to give it that San Francisco chewiness inside, and a crunchy crust

Store bought yeast comes from brewers yeast lift over from making beer.

Sourdough starter is made from flour and distilled water. do not use tap water as the chlorine will kill the yeast.

Every part of the country will have their own tasting sourdough as the yeast in the air is different in different parts of the country.

Once you have a good starter every time you use part of the starter you mix a little flour and water with what is left of your original starter and let it ferment and then put it in the freezer till the next time you make bread.

Some of us old time moonshiners only use sourdough starter to make our sour mash for distilling.

Anyone using store bought brewers yeast is missing out of the taste of good wine, beer or moonshine made with sour dough starter.

Another alternative to yeast bread is Irish Soda Bread. I've seen this made with a variety of ingredients so if you don't have buttermilk you can always search for a recipe that uses something else. You can also make a kind of "buttermilk" substitute with lemon juice and milk.



Sal

a reply to: infolurker

a reply to: SallieSunshine

I love soda bread

If you don't have buttermilk, adding some lemon juice to normal milk does the same thing.

a reply to: visitedbythem

I had flour that expired in 2015 in a plastic bag. It seems to bake and taste fine.

originally posted by: infolurker
a reply to: visitedbythem

I had flour that expired in 2015 in a plastic bag. It seems to bake and taste fine.

I probably have only 20 lbs of flour. I keep it in food grade color coded 5 gallon buckets with Gamma lids that have a screw top, and rubber seal. The way I do it, is, I put a small chunk of dry ice in the bottom of the pail, then fill it with your flour, rice and beans, then put on the Gamma lid. I close the lid until the gasket is just touching, and allow the C02 to fill the bucket around the product. After the ice is melted, I close the lid tight. Things like rice have tiny pantry moth eggs in it, right from the store. The C02 will suffocate any insect from hatching.

My large sacks of assorted wheat and other whole grains go directly into a large deep freezer out on my patio, until use. They stay fresh a lot longer, just like green unroasted coffee beans do. They don't begin to degrade for several years.

My deep freezers (3) are able to run off my solar powered battery bank if we lost grid power. Deep freezers use very little power. It takes about 1500 watts to initially kick on, but goes way down to 50-150 watts. And they don't run as often as a refrigerator