Southern Bread

Last time I showed how to make a loaf of great sandwich bread using some modern conveniences like store bought flour and instant yeast. Over the next few posts I’ll show you how to make the same bread, but completely from scratch. There is only one place where I’m gonna cheat: the bread flour. Bread flour is just all-purpose flour with wheat gluten added to it. Wheat gluten can be made at home by kneading down a blob of dough under running water until only the protein is left. It’s not hard, but really not worth the extra effort. The taste isn’t any different and the point here is to learn the craft. As long as you know what you could do if you needed to, that’s the point. So I’m going to list “bread flour” in the final ingredients list.

Ok, the first thing we’re going to need is yeast so that’s what we’ll cover today. Have you ever been making bread and wondered what people did before instant yeast? Well, they either didn’t leven their bread or they cultured their own yeast in the form of “yeast water.” It’s actually very simple.

Yeast Water:

Dry Ingredients:

• 1 Handful of Raisins
• Pinch of Sugar

Wet Ingredients:

• Quart Sized Jar full of Tap Water

Instructions:

1. Put raisins and sugar in a jar full of water. Something about the size of a pickle jar should do. But, please don’t use a pickle jar unless you want some dill bread.
2. Leave the jar open and sitting on the countertop for 5 days.
3. When it smells strongly of yeast, you have yeast water!

Yes, it really is that simple. The yeast that is naturally occurring on most fruits and vegetables will begin to eat the sugar and replicate into a nice yeast colony. Now, using the yeast water involves replacing your 5 ounces of water in the original recipe I gave you with an equal amount of yeast water. But instead of mixing it with the milk/sugar/oil, we will mix the yeast water into a “pre-ferment.” I’ll show you how to do that in the next post.

* I learned about making yeast water from this great site: http://originalyeast.blogspot.com/