Wild yeast cultured from elderflower blossoms.
Wild yeast is in the air all around us, and it’s easy enough to capture and culture this natural yeast for baking homemade bread. Learn how to make your own wild yeast starter from common pantry staples and wild foraged plant sources.
Few people bake their own bread these days, and even those that do keep flour in the house for things like pancakes generally don’t have yeast on hand.
This spring the threat of a pandemic emptied supermarket shelves of bread and pantry staples, and seemingly overnight everyone had a keen interest in making their own homemade bread.
The problem is, supermarkets (let alone bread yeast manufacturers) just weren’t prepared for this drastic shift. There’s no baking yeast to be found anywhere.
We usually buy yeast in bulk, big one-pound packages of SAF yeast for about $10 (about a year’s supply for us, kept in the freezer). I watched those quickly sell out on amazon, and then re-sellers started listing them for $70 to $100 per pound. Those disappeared quickly too, and now there’s not a pinch of commercial bread yeast for sale at any price.
The thing is, yeast is free. It’s floating in the air all around us, and it only takes a bit of patience to catch it, before putting it to work naturally leavening homemade bread.
Natural Yeast vs. Commercial Yeast
To be fair, there’s a difference between specially selected strains of yeast bred for a consistent rise and the run of the mill yeast floating in the air.
Wild yeast will, in fact, raise bread. The thing is, it may not do it in exactly the way the bread recipe dictates. When you read directions like, “allow the bread to rise for 90 minutes, or until it’s doubled in bulk,” toss that time measurement out the window and just go with the visual, “doubled in bulk” direction. Easy enough.
The flavor may also be different. Believe it or not, yeasts release a lot of aromatic compounds as they ferment a substrate, and bread yeast has been selected to release that familiar “fresh baked bread” smell we’re all used to.
Many wild yeasts have a similar aroma, but others have, believe it or not, fruity or floral notes. There’s a reason that certain yeasts have been selected for wine, others for beer, and still others for bread. Brew beer with bread yeast, and the yeast will make it taste like bread, for better or worse.
In bread though, many of those aromatic compounds will bake off in the oven, and it’s not really a big deal.
Believe it or not, some breads are actually traditionally made with home cultured wild yeast starters. Amish friendship bread is made with a homemade potato starter, and artisanal pain a levain is traditionally leavened with a simple raisin-based starter.
In short, your wild yeast starter will not be exactly the same as store-bought bread yeast, but it will get the job done, and there’s a chance it may even make better bread than standardized commercial yeast.
Sourdough vs. Natural Yeast
One more note…there’s actually a difference between breads cultured with sourdough, and those made with just yeast.
Sourdough is a community of organisms; some yeast to be sure, but also other lactobacilli (like in yogurt). Those lactic acid bacteria give sourdough its characteristic sour flavor and actually help break down the flour into more digestible forms. The “sour” flavor comes from the lactic acids they produce, which believe it or not, actually helps sourdough bread keep longer than other types of bread.
Don’t like the sour flavor of sourdough? No worries!
Culturing wild yeast doesn’t necessarily mean sourdough. You can culture regular old bread yeast as well. Online you might find some of these yeast cultures called “sourdough,” but here they’ll all be organized by taste.
You can also raise bread with other probiotic cultures, including kombucha, sauerkraut juice, water kefir and yogurt whey.
Believe me, there are a lot of ways to make leavened bread without commercial yeast, and I’ll take you through every one I can find.
How to Culture Wild Yeast for Baking Bread
Since yeast is more or less everywhere, the biggest challenge is capturing it, and then nurturing it with starch, sugar and other nutrients until it’s concentrated enough to leaven bread.
There are two main methods for culturing wild yeast:
- Sugar/Starch Liquid ~ Add some tasty starches and nutrients to water, and then leave it open to the air until yeast land in it. This is more or less just an open-air trap. The technical specifics are a bit more complicated, but basically you’re trapping airborne yeast.
- Culturing Yeast from a Yeast-Covered Substrate ~ Some things, like crab apples and raisins, for example, are naturally covered in a bloom of wild yeast. Start with a good yeast source, and then feed it by placing it in a starch/water solution until bubbly. There are a lot of options here, and one beer maker even cultured yeast from his own beard hair…don’t worry, most choices are a lot more appetizing.
How you go about culturing wild yeast will determine the yeast you catch and/or encourage in your culture.
Yeast culture recipes that include an acid (like lemon juice or pineapple juice) or salt will encourage cultures that thrive in those conditions. Namely, the lactic acid bacteria from sourdough.
A sugar/starch heavy culture, on the other hand, will call all the bread yeasts to the yard.
The method you choose should depend on your end goals, as well as what you happen to have readily available at home.
Homemade Sourdough Starter
Alright, here we’ll cover the “sourest” starters—if you want something with a mellow flavor, you may be itching to jump ahead. But much of the basic terminology for Yeast Starters is covered in this section, so skim over it before you move on.
Traditional sourdough starters are just wheat flour and water, lovingly fed over a long time. But here we’ll also cover a rye-specific method and one that’s gluten-free.
Traditional Sourdough (aka liquid starter)
Creating a sourdough starter is a time commitment—on average it takes 7 to 14 days for the starter to become active.
If you’re looking for a fast fermentation window, you’ll definitely want to use whole wheat flour initially. As this is the least-processed flour you’ll find in a store, it will have the greatest collection of natural yeast on it.
As you move into the feeding phase, all-purpose flour will be your friend—it has a good blend of protein and starch, which your yeast will love! But any flour will work.
You should aim to use filtered water for all of your starters. Tap water is often treated with chlorine and will disturb your yeast’s activity.
Using self-rising flour to feed your starter is generally frowned upon in the sourdough community. However, if that’s what you have, it will probably be fine, you may just not get consistent results thanks to the salt present in self-rising flours. Salt inhibits yeast activity. Additionally, self-rising flour has baking powder, an alkaline substance that may change the Ph of your starter.
How to make a sourdough starter:
- Pick a time when you can consistently feed the starter
- The starter prefers it, and it’ll also make it more likely you’ll feed it!
- Mix ½ cup whole wheat and ¼ cup filtered water together until smooth, adding more water if needed
- Cover your jar lightly, with a towel or plastic wrap
- Place the jar somewhere warm—75 to 80 degrees—for 48 hours
- Pro tip: place it in the oven or the microwave with the light on for a few hours
- You may see some discoloration or hooch (sourdough liquid) appear, that’s fine
- Don’t worry if your starter is bubbling, or even if it isn’t!
- Your starter will likely smell terrible, at this stage, that’s ok
- After 48 hours have passed, feed the starter:
- Drain off the hooch and remove half of the starter (aka the discard)
- Aim to remove any discolored bits, but you don’t have to take them all out
- Mix in ½ cup of flour and ¼ cup of water until smooth like yogurt
- Cover and warm
- Repeat the feeding process every 24 hours until your starter is active
And there you have it! You can test if your starter is active by plopping a small spoonful in a bowl of water. If it floats, it’s ready.
Potato Water Starter
Breads, biscuits, and vodka! People have been culturing yeast off of potatoes for centuries and there’s plenty to learn. We’ll skip the deep dive and instead dig our hands into three potato starters: Simple, Sourdough, and Amish Friendship.
Simple Potato Starter
Truly the simplest, this recipe just calls for a potato and water. Traditionally how yeast was cultured for vodka, you can use it in bread recipes by switching out a liquid for your potato water.
This will be a quicker process than feeding a floury sourdough starter. You can find directions online for the best time to begin making your starter and planning on how to use it in baking.
How to make a Simple Potato Starter:
- Place a single, peeled potato in a pot of (filtered) water
- Bring the pot to a boil and simmer the potato for 35 to 45 minutes
- Test your potato with a fork to make sure it’s fully softened
- Pour the water into a bowl to cool
- Mash the potato thoroughly
- Place the mash into a 1qt jar and fill the jar with the cooled, starchy water
- If you don’t have enough, you can top the jar off with filtered water
- Set the jar aside, lightly covered
- Check on your jar between 24 to 36 hours
- If you see bubbles, seal the jar and shake to move the yeast around
- Open, lightly cover, and set aside your jar again
- Wait another 24 to 36 hours
Once you’re seeing a LOT of bubbling, you’re ready to bake!
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