Using brewing yeast for bread

[wunderbier]

It's totally a personal thing and I'm bound to swallow my own words one of these days, but I just haven't made yet a fast-ferment or quick bread that feels like it was worth the effort.

Though, I just remember that my pizza dough probably takes 1.5--2 hours from start to finish. And it's wonderful. Basically, for two thinnish crusts:

1 T of dry yeast, rehyrdrated if required. (about 30g yeast cake)
Combine with:
270g lukewarm H2O
30g orange / pineapple / etc juice (2 T)
1 - 2 T olive oil
1 t salt

Then I add a powdered (via mortal and pestle) herb blend. Basically it's a couple tablespoons of dried oregano, and maybe a teaspoon each of sage and (sometimes) rosemary. At this point the liquid smells like a really dank IPA.

Measure out 420g of durum wheat flour and slowly incorporate (preferably with a mixer). I just have a hand mixer, so I have to knead in the last 50g or so by hand. Depending on the humidity, you may not use all of the flour.

Place in a container and cover with plastic wrap or a cloth. Keep it somewhere in the 70--80 F range. Let double in volume. Separate into halves and form the crusts -- mine are usually about 18" in diameter, i.e. very thin. Cover the crusts and let them rest for 30 minutes before doing anything with them. Add sauce, toppings, whatever and bake at the highest temperature your oven can manage. Use a pizza stone or terra cotta planter bottom if you have them. Takes about 8 minutes for me at 300 C (575 F).

[EBone]

Anyone ever tried it? Any special precautions? Does it alter the flavor any?

Also, I heard from somewhere about bakers taking malted barley and grinding it into flour- Has anyone ever tried that?

The holidays are coming up and I was tying to think of something a little unique to share with the family.

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one that was curious about this subject. When I was in culinary school I had a project where the goal was to create a fully sustainable restaurant/ brew pub that used as many local sources as possible. The products for the restaurant side where easy to find and attain (I went to school near Burlington Vermont). However, the ingredients for the brewery where more hard to come by on a local level (they didn't exist). So I then changed my aim to see how much of the byproduct of the brewing process I could use and turn into a product. One of the products was beer bread. I worked closely with head baking instructor at the school and we came up with a couple conclusions. First, you can use the yeast cake from the bottom of the fermenter as a poolish (basicaly a one day starter), or as is. You could make a sourdough starter from beer yeast, hell from any yeast, however it is not what the industry would consider an actual sourdough starter. the best way to make a starter is the way that Ozwald outlined.

Second, you can't mill spent grains into a flour and use it as the sol flour. The best thing to do is to add 10% of spent grains into an already well establish bread recipe. This gives the bread a whole grain texture and adds a pleasant sweetness. One thing that I always wanted to experiment with was milling spent grains and adding vital wheat gluten back to that flour and see if that would help the flour be more elastic and allow it to rise.

Any way, long winded but that is my experience. I'm sure I left something out, but can't remember what it is. If you have a lot of spent grains and wan to use them in a cool way, you can use them to grow mushrooms.

[Cosmic Charlie]

In case anyone is interested, I'll post my attempt here, though it will take some time to complete. First I've made bread using bread yeast.



The recipe is 19oz flour by weight (I use 9.5 oz bread flour, 9.5 oz whole wheat flour), a squirt of honey, a tiny amount of salt, and 3 tbl of olive oil. The normal recipe calls for 1 and 1/4 cups H2O, but I upped it to 1 and 1/2 cups. Bake at 375F for ~35 minutes.

I will eventually make the same recipe 3 different times, using US 04, Danstar Windsor, and Danstar Munich dried yeast packs. Going into this, I suspect the bread will look the same and there will not be noticeable flavor differences, but there is only one way to find out. As a half-assed test for flavor differences, I have not told my wife I will use these yeast for breadmaking - I'll see if she says it tastes differently without prompting her.

Edit: I guess I should mention the process. I mix in a stand mixer with hook on low speed for 5 minutes. First rise is ~1.5 hours. Punch down, let rise again for ~45 minutes. Form into loaf, put in bread pan, slit top, and let rise for another 30 minutes.

[Cosmic Charlie]

Made a batch with the Munich yeast, and my wife did say something about the taste after the first bite - I forgot to add any salt. I spaced on the salt, man!



Neither one of us could detect any flavor difference due to the yeast however. It also took a long time to rise. For my other beer yeast breads, I'll start earlier so I can let them rise for longer. Maybe I'll resize the pictures too.