The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Yeast Water question

Cher504's picture
Cher504

Yeast Water question

Today I made these Rustic durum baguettes [formula was posted by isand88] with my yeast water made from concord grapes. They were a hit! Here's some photos

They were difficult to score and maneuver, but they still bloomed nicely in the oven. My first attempt at baguettes! And my second bake using the yeast water - the first one was a 1,2,3 loaf that had a noticeable hint of grape aroma and flavor...so awesome!

I have a question about using the yeast water in general - I'm planning to bake the 75% whole wheat levain bread from FWSY. If anyone is familiar with the Forkish formulas, this is one of his hybrid loaves. It's basically a sourdough bread but it calls for a scant 1/2 tsp of yeast in the final dough. I was thinking about using yeast water instead since it helps with moisture and a more open crumb. So how much yeast water should I use? The entire dough is a little over 1800g, and it has 360g of levain. Would I use the yeast water in place of part of the water in the dough? Or should I mix it with a small portion of the flour and make a kind of yeast water slurry? 

Happy Holidays to everyone - I've been drooling over all the holiday baking posts. What a wonderful community this is!

 

Cheers!

Cherie

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

is to make a small poolish using YW and flour and deducting the from the recipe water and flour.  The size if the YW poolish depends on the amount of the yeast in the recipe.  For this small amount, I would use 25 g of YW and 25 g of the dough flour  to make a 50 g poolish and let it double in time to put it in when you add the SD to the mix.  Don't be surprised if the YW cancels out the sour of the SD though.

YW really opens up the crumb of heavy whole grain breads. 

Cher504's picture
Cher504

I will give it a try that way. On another topic, I've been experimenting with sprouting some whole grains. Here's some pix of wheat berries and some barley. 

sprouted wheat berries  

and here's the barley:

barley

Drying

drying sprouts

and the ground up flour - (I used a coffee grinder)

80g sprouted wheat flour

I threw out those barley seeds which didn't sprout at all (I later learned I had used hulled barley instead of un-hulled...who-knew?) and sifted out the hard bits of the wheat flour to feed to my levains; which makes them really active! Does all of this look about right?

Next adventure will be to actually use the sprouted flour in a bread recipe. I'm trying to  determine what percent of the total flour can be sprouted flour? From my reading of a lot of posts, it seems like the sprouted flour has unique properties....I was thinking of trying your multigrain sourdough sprouter. Or do you think that's a bit too complex for a beginner like me? I do have some rye berries that I can start to sprout - I'll have to go and search out some other whole grains too. 

thanks again for any advice and Happy New Year!

Cherie