Day 11 out of 40

At home, I can’t control the exact time it takes for the wild yeast and bacteria to ferment the flour. And I don’t want to. I don’t see the work my mother culture is doing, but I get to experience the time while watching the leaven rise. So much of the work around food in our lives are invisible. We buy a bag of beans and can’t connect with the journey it took for those beans to reach our table.

I am interested in unique loaves of bread and unique eating experiences that baking at home provides. and I get to play a part in the process.

When I started teaching myself how to bake with wild yeast, I made a list of steps and wrote them down in my bread notebook. There are steps between those steps but also steps we can skip.

Here a sample of one of those pages

1. Take mother culture from the fridge
2. Take a portion from the mother culture and make leaven and let it rise to make bread
3. Feed the mother culture, let it rise, put back in the fridge
4. When the leaven rises and is ripe and bubbly, mix with flour, water, salt (other ingredients also)
5. Let it rise to almost double, turn dough during bulk ferment
6. Shape bread
7. Second rise, proof
8. Score
9. Bake
10. Cool
11. Enjoy