Investigative Blogging and fermenting things at home: Baking with beer yeast

My flatmate James is a dude and (more relevantly) brews his own beer. Since I’ve become somewhat obsessed with bread making, we’ve had a number of conversations about combining out powers for good: that is, I will give him some bread for his brew, and in return he’ll give me some yeast as a starter for my bread.

In theory this should work fine. But in practise? It’s difficult to say. After I was given a huge plastic container of live, beery-smelling yeast, I decided that I should probably do some research instead of winging it (ie bunging it into a bowl of flour and hoping for the best).

One of the forums I looked at suggested using the yeast to make a sourdough starter (I think sometimes called a sponge) and picking up the bread making from there. Fortuitously, James has a copy of NZ Lifestyle Farmer which has a description of how to make and bake from your own sourdough starter. There was also a comment that the yeast made a slightly bitter bread, which I chose to ignore. I figure people have been doing this for centuries. Right?

This morning I decided to start the whole, epic process. I didn't manage to put the loaf in the oven until about 8.30 this evening!

I first took about half of the yeast that James had given me and put it into a bowl with a dough made of half a cup of water and a cup of flour. I did my best to combine this (not easy; very gluey) and then covered it with a teatowel and left it to grow while I went to school.When I came home four hours later the yeast had grown to a freakish size and had begun to eat my teatowel! A good sign though, because clearly my yeast is ALIVE.

The beer yeast in its original state. Things to notice: brown, bubbly, not very appetising

Step two involved throwing away half of this mixture, and adding a slurry made of a cup of water and a cup of flour. I combined these two together and went away for about two hours to do some work. The mixture doubled again, without a teatowel casualty this time.

The sponge/starter in a glass jar. Slightly more appetising than the yeast in its most basic form. Also: bubbles! It's alive!

Finally: time to make a dough! The instructions recommended combining two cups of the starter*, two teaspoons of sugar, two teaspoons of salt and two tablespoons of oil in a bowl and then kneading in three cups of flour half a cup at a time until the dough “felt right”. This is very vague if you’ve never made a loaf of bread before, so to clarify: it should feel silky, but not sticky. This part of the process made me long for my beloved no-knead bread because kneading lots really strains the unaccustomed hands.

The dough then goes into a warm place to rise. At this point I normally hope for “twice the original size” but the sourdough manual warned me that it might not grow very big. This was a fair assessment of the situation: while the dough grew a bit, it just didn't grow terribly much.

I then knocked back the dough, gave it a quick knead, put it on a tray and shaped it into something approximating a loaf, and left it to rise again. The second time around seemed even slower! After something like two and half hours I decided that I'd had enough and put the loaf in the oven at 220C for about 25 minutes - I was planning to do it for longer but it didn't need it in the end (and luckily James caught it before it had burnt to a crisp).

The finished loaf on a decorative teatowel

The texture of the bread is absolutely lovely, very soft and moist, and not crumbly at all. The crust is nice too. The flavour is a bit borderline - the lees in the yeast are very strong tasting, and the loaf has a kind of weird bitter after taste. However, I think if I persevere using the sponge that I started making, eventually the lees in the yeast will become less concentrated.

In conclusion: As a breadmaking method, it's worth a go, and I'm now quite keen to make a proper sourdough starter sometime in the future. I am in love with the texture of the bread - in terms of texture I think it's probably one of the best loaves I've ever made. However, the flavour is very much a downside and I hope hope hope that it will become less concentrated over time. Finally, it's probably best to leave the loaf to rise overnight at least because it takes so much longer than a store-bought yeast does.

You could give it a go if you have all these bits and about 24 hours at your disposal. I'll let you know how the second attempt goes.




 *The rest of the starter goes into a jar with half a cup of warm water and half a cup of flour. Because you need to feed that little dude!