What Is Sourdough and Wild Yeast?
If you want to join me on my sourdough journey from scratch (and I mean from scratch, from being completely green and making my own starter!), you can do that now! First, let’s quickly look at what wild yeast is - and why you need a starter.
Yeast Is All Around Us…
…And so the starter grows. Sourdough bread is bread made without using any commercial yeast. At all. Instead you use a starter, meaning a fermented mixture of flour and water. Did you know that yeast is all around us? Well, yeast is naturally occurring in the air, on our skin, on our food, basically in all sorts of places. And when you make a starter for your sourdough, you are “capturing” that wild yeast (no running around required!) and using it to ferment the starter so it continues to live and produce its own natural yeast.
The bubbles in yeast is what helps the bread rise when you bake. Commercial yeast is bits of yeast that were found to be especially active and therefore isolated and cultivated, and there’s certainly no shame or problem with using commercial yeast to make your baking quick and easy. But for anyone who has tasted sourdough bread, and knows how wonderfully flavourful it is, it’s definitely tempting to have a go at making it yourself. Especially for us passionate home cooks - I feel like creating your own yeast is pretty next level in terms of cooking from scratch. How more natural can it get than using the wild yeast that exists in your flour, water and your home?!
Because of the more diverse bacteria in wild yeast, it seems it is much better for our gut health - especially with everything we are learning about the importance of our gut microbiota and how we need to feed it a varied combination of foods. We are also learning about how fermented food is possibly more important to our health than we ever realised, again linked to our increased understanding of the importance of gut health.
What are your experiences with sourdough? Did you know about wild yeast vs commercial yeast? Message me on Instagram @TheFromScratchBody!
