Bad Bread

This is an image of a modern Bedouin woman in Jordan, baking.
But since the most ancient bread ever discovered is Jordanian,
I thought her image might could celebrate the frigging genius,
 the gift to humanity, who first brought
delicious bread to the world 14,000+ years ago.

Breadmaking is an ancient art, recently proved more ancient that previously thought.  It’s a complete mystery to me how it happened in the first place—there are so many steps to this process.  I mean, who thought that would work?  They say now that bread predated agriculture-- so folks just went out and found wheat, ground it up, mixed it with water, added yeast, got it nice and oveny, and called it dinner. 

Now that I grow my own yeasty things, it’s even more mystifying.  Someone made flour, got it wet a.k.a. super goopy and sticky, then just left it until they noticed it smelled funny and was getting larger.  Then they were like, perfect, lets cook that mess til it has a crust and put soup in it.  I mean, I make kombucha, which is ostensibly weirder because there is a slimy thick membrane growing on it, but still.  Hats off to the visionary who knew in her bones this was a good, edible idea.

Baking with yeast has always intimidated me.  You have to buy a packet of this mustardy looking stuff that is alive, and then there are all these steps and waiting and kneeding and whatever.  I tried to make cinnamon rolls once, and we can call that a failure.  Zero out of ten would make again. 

My cinnamon rolls were like that.

On the farm the girls made bread all the time and I was happy to eat it, but kept out of the kitchen during the whole process.  No thank you, voodoo ladies, I will keep to my messy art projects and leave the witchcraft to you.  Except for beerbread, which is basically made out of beer and butter and is delicious and deliciously easy to make.

But now I do my own fermenting witchcraft, and I got…curious.

Yeasts are eukaryotic, single-celled
microorganisms classified
as members of the fungus kingdom.

I mean, what even is yeast.  And what is dry yeast?   I know there is living yeast in many containers and communities in my kitchen, but how does that get dehydrated down to a powder while still not dying?  There are different strains of yeast…right?  Do they do different things?  What is champagne yeast and how is it different than baking yeast and why can I use either to start a ferment if I don’t feel like harvesting wild yeast?  And what even is wild yeast?!?

So I’m thinking about all this, and also about my peach bug situation.

Ginger beer does not have much alcohol.
But it also does not have no alcohol,
a lesson I learned by accident.

Also I started looking for this pic
searching "drunk girl".  I do not
recommend that search experience.

Because I know you care about my life, Reader, you know I

 have a ginger bug.  Ginger bug is what you call the ferment that happens when you add ginger and sugar to some water every day, and yeast happens (but what is it tho) and it gets bubbly.  It is used to make ginger beer, or really any other natural soda—you mix up a sweet flavored whatever, add some of the liquid from the bug, and let it sit in an airtight container for a couple of days.  The yeasts eat the sugars and poop out a little alcohol and a lot of carbonation, and when it gets where you want it to be, you put it in the fridge.  I have played with a couple of flavors, even though they all start with the ginger bug.

Science!!!

Then one day I started thinking, why ginger?  Is it just the flavor?  If you’re fermenting pickles, you can do it with any veggie…will other things work?

So I decided to make a peach bug.  I did the same thing as with the ginger bug, I added some peach and sugar every day.  I even put some ginger bug in there to begin with, to get the party started.  And it worked!  I have a new happy ferment colony on the kitchen counter!  I even made peach soda out of it.  It was lovely.

But not lovely enough.  Peaches cost more than ginger, and while the soda is good, it’s not good enough to keep me buying peaches.  The bug is alive and thriving, so I don’t want to kill it.  I made it (and paid for all those peaches), so I don’t want to waste it.  It needs to be tended every day like the ginger bug….but I don’t want to bother about it.  I am industrious enough to do all these projects but now I am doing all these projects and it is becoming a hassle to keep up with them all.  So what do I do with my peach ferment?

I make Bad Bread.

As mentioned in my last post, Bad Bread is sourdough unlimited by the confines of the scientific exactitude that good bread really requires.  I like to think of it as artisanal, closer in nature to whatever our breadmaking ancestors were doing before they actually knew how to make bread, a process which in today’s world is easily understood, accessed, and duplicated.

Ima do it anyway.

But that’s how you make good bread, and I was making Bad Bread.

I looked up all the recipes and they were like, sourdough needs a starter and you need yeast.  “Don’t tell me what to do,” I thought, and went to eye my ingredients.

I have peach bug a-plenty, and theoretically that is full of the same yeast (WHY IS IT THE SAME YEAST, HOW DOES ANYONE KNOW THAT, WHO IS THE YEAST PSYCHIC, DO YOU OFFER CLASSES??).  How much peach bug is equivalent to the amount of dry yeast that other, less brave, more interested-in-the-quality-of-their-final-product souls might use?  Meh, I don’t know.

Throw it out?
What if I need it later??

I have whey, because I overferment my kefir constantly so I strain it to make farmers cheese and I can’t bring myself to throw anything away. The internet says you can use that in place of water, and that’s more yeast right there.

I have regular flour that’s not the bread making flour that the internet suggests. 

And I have non-iodized salt.  We’re totally doing this.

I am nailing it.

The internet says to measure baking ingredients by weight, not volume, so I get out my trusty food scale.  There was a whole adventure there that basically centered around me thinking I was a crazy person for a while but we can sum it all up with: the food scale is broken.  It works, it shows numbers.  It’s just wrong.  Like way wrong.

So I go back to doing this by volume, and measure out five and a half cups of flour.  I am not precise about it, because I just went through a whole thinking-I-was-crazy adventure and I have become frustrated.  Reader, if you have ever baked, you know that it is a scientific process and the details matter, the quantities matter, and precision matters.  I also know this.  I just...didn’t care anymore—frankly that ship sailed when I decided I could probably just invent sourdough out of the wrong ingredients. 

Nailing it.

So I get it close enough, and I add a cup of the peach bug juice.  Why a cup?  Because it’s a nice round number.  Whatever.  For the rest of the liquid I use the whey.

Now you’re supposed to let it sit for an hour, so all that liquid can soak into all that flour.  This activates the gluten and also the yeast is doing something and really I don’t know, I just skimmed the recipe. 

Nailing it.

After a while you’re supposed to start pulling the bottom dough up and stretch it over the top like a happy gluteny blanket every 30 min or so, for like 3 hours.  I am not Johnny on the spot with the 30 minutes, so I do it for longer, and in this time it is supposed to get a little air-pocket-y and more or less start to seem like a dough ball and not a pile of wet flour.

This does not occur.

 My..my yeast is perfect....

Undeterred, I look up the next step—let it hang out in the fridge overnight.  Well.  This just seems ridiculous; I am a little concerned (and maybe slightly oversensitive) about my homegrown yeast which is perfectly good yeast, thank you very much, but not doing much in the air pocket-making department at this point.  If there’s one way to shut yeast down, it’s by getting it cold.  So insteaaaaad I do the opposite of that, and put it in the garage overnight.  Just on the floor in there, with a towel over it—it’s nice and warm in the garage, and probably there aren’t inquisitive mice or bugs to get into it, but who really knows, I spend most of my time in the actual house. 

The next day there are more bubbles!  The yeast is yeasting!  But the dough is still…sloppy.  Gloppy.  Not dough-ball-y.  Idk if this is because my flour-to-liquid ratio is off, or because my yeast isn’t doing, or because of any of a number of other reasons why my innovative, resourceful, not-based-on-science recipe might not be behaving like regular recipes should.  I try to do that “wrap in a gluten blanket” thing some more but at this point the dough is not having it.  I look up troubleshooting websites, and they tell me my dough might be 

Gloriously off the map.

overfermented.  This means my yeast has actually over-yeasted, which feels like a particularly unkind suggestion given my sensitivity over the matter.  But, the websites assure, also maybe not that—maybe lots of things; how would one know, we are off the map here.

I put it in the fridge at one point because dough wants to go in the oven cool, apparently.  It….is not structurally sound, however.  All the recipes are like, this is where you form it into the shape you want it to bake in, with all the cunning and charming designs you score into the top of it, so it comes out ready to dazzle and delight!  My dough is more of a free spirit; it will not be hussied up to dance to society’s expectations. 

This is not what sourdough should look like.
But it was yummy!

I put it in a casserole and I bake it.  Aaaaaaaand….it was ok.  

It was ok!  It had a great flavor, but the consistency of a hockey puck.  People ate it....though something in it made “Andy” have a lip-swelling allergic reaction.  Maybe wild yeast is wilder than I thought.  I still have peach bug left so I’ll probably make it again, and just warn “Andy” first.

I chalk it up as a win.

Bad Bread for life.