Sourdough vs. Yeast: The Truer Challenge?
The tang and nuances of a fine sourdough are great. Yeasted breads lack those characteristics. But purely from a flavor perspective, doesn't that then make yeasted breads the truer challenge?
It's like how making a great cup of black coffee requires mastering one core ingredient -- the coffee bean. Or you can make an unpalatably bitter cup and just add enough sugar or flavored syrup to make it drinkable. The same goes for bread. You can either harness every note of flavor from the wheat alone, or you can let wild yeasts and bacteria pitch in to make up for a lack of skill or mediocre ingredients.
Yes, of course, one can do incredible work with both the flour and the sourdough to make something mindblowing. That's the ultimate skill. I'm not questioning that.
I guess what I'm saying is, "If you really want to be a great bread baker, shouldn't you first prove that your skill with the wheat alone can wow the senses?"
P.S. I'm putting this question out there purely to have a spirited discussion. I'm curious about others' opinions.
One is horrible and the other near perfection. Good luck with your question.
Happy baking will never be yours:-)
and the horrible one can be made palatable by toasting and lathering with generous amounts of butter. :)
You are correct that I will never be at peace with anything I bake. It's agonizing, but I love it.
Using commercial yeast as an ingredient allows the baker to have at least one ingredient to remain constant, no matter what. With sourdough, everything is variable, every flour, every water source, every salt, every temperature, every altitude and every level of humidity. Therefore, mastering sourdough is the greater challenge, there is no assistance other than skill.
MJ Sourdough
I agree that mastering sourdough is the greater challenge, overall.
But, as many people here on TFL feel sourdough is ultimately superior in flavor, I think yeasted breads are the greater challenge in that department. It's fairly easy to make a sourdough that tastes reasonably interesting, while it's quite difficult to make a yeasted bread that won't make people yawn.
just to throw another towel into the discussion...
I'm not a great fan over overly sour anything, but a mild sour is fine. I have customers who positively hate it, so I make yeasted breads for them and sometimes myself. I don't see any point in using sourdough for sweet doughs either (although traditions excepted - e.g. pannetone) - and there's also time time factor - sometimes you want a batch of buns in a few hours so use yeast.
Each has their place though - I might make sourdough croissants, but as nothing more than an academic excercies - my regular ones use commercial (if organic) yeast.
-Gordon
"If you really want to be a great bread baker, shouldn't you first prove that your skill with the wheat alone can wow the senses?"
By this criterion, the baker using exclusively levain/sourdough would prove himself the "great" bread baker, as he would be sincerely using "wheat alone" (levain/sourdough being composed of wheat and water) to "wow the senses." The flavors that come from a levain reflect the environment of the baker and the baker himself, the decisions he has made in its management (the ingredients of its refreshments, the fermentation times and temperatures). But that is not to say that the fermentation vehicle alone can a great baker make -- I will concede readily that there exist poor bakers who work exclusively with natural sourdough, and that there exist great bakers who are using exclusively laboratory yeast. But working from your original question, I would say that the addition of laboratory yeast would divert necessarily from the idea of working with "wheat alone."
I guess what it comes down to is...
A. Most yeasted breads taste like nothing.
B. Most sourdoughs are at least mildly entertaining.
You can hand a novice baker some starter and walk them through the process of making a basic sourdough loaf, and they'll go, "That was kind of a pain, but I can see how people would get into that." Their bread will also not taste like cardboard; it will be ok. But if you took a novice baker and walked them through how to make a yeasted loaf that tasted marginally interesting, they'd go, "Why would anyone go through all of that? Oh my God. Why?!"
Again, a great sourdough is better than a great yeasted bread. That's not my argument. The argument is that it's way more difficult to make a great yeasted loaf.
P.S. - The "wheat alone" idea is that both sourdough and yeasted breads have yeast; sourdough has a different strain, yes, but it also has bacteria adding a lot of flavor. Also, not all "commercial yeast" is commercial. I work with ale yeast, which can either be commercial or taken from a long-running strain of a brewery.
It is still true that most people do not like sour bread. It is without question that way, way more yeast bread, yeast water, barm bread and its derivatives has been made and consumed throughout history. It isn't even close and never has been - yeast bread wins hands down in a massive landslide. So to each their own.
I think part of the problem is in referring to a wild yeast / bacteria starter as 'sourdough'. As some master bakers have demonstrated, using a very fresh young levain makes something very far from sour. And it's not the difference in yeast ('wild' versus commercial dried) that makes the biggest flavour difference anyway, it's the bacteria (lactic and acetic) that create the different flavours in levains and naturally leavened breads, no? A baker using commercial dried yeast will manipulate these factors with the use of pre-ferments (poolish, biga), bulk fermenting times, temperatures, etc. so really, what's the big difference in skill requirements?
Lactobacilli will produce those nice lactic and acetic acid notes, depending on how they're handled., To me, though, the management of the amylase enzymes is paramount because they break complex carbs (starches) down into the simple sugars that feed the yeast and LAB, liberating the natural sweetness trapped in the grain and providing the raw material for whatever degree of sour you want. That's why scalds are such a great tool: yeast and LAB die at temperatures above 120F or so, while amylase activity peaks at 140-160F. Scalding some of the flour gives the amylases the opportunity to produce sugars without threat of metabolism by yeast/LAB.
Stan Ginsberg
theryebaker.com
activity of amylase a and b. So scalding a small portion of the flour at 140 F for 30 minutes creates 4 times the amount of sugars than it would at 68 F. You can, of course, create way, way more sugar without any yeast or LAB getting in the way, by autolysing the entire dough flour with the dough liquid at 72 F for 2 hours. I do like the additional flavor created by the Maillard effect of doing a baked scald at 150 F for 2- 3 hours though - where the scald goes a deep, deep brown. When combined with an autolyse you really get the best of both techniques.
I did a 2.5 hour rye scald for the rye bread posted today with an autolyse and couldn't be happier with the results.
Happy Baking
You are incorrect on two counts. First, the dependence of enzyme activity on temperature is nowhere near linear. The empirical rule you quote might hit near the mark to about 35 °C (which is why it is useful in judging effect on temperature on yeast fermentation), but beyond that it won't work. Second, the difference will be not 4 times, more like 10-12, that is if the pH of your autolyse won't start dropping which will make the difference even more pronounced. And of course the flours used in scalds are much richer in enzymes.
18 F is correct so at least 12 times would be the effect but 16 times is closer to reality My brewing charts and graphs. shows that amylase a activity is very linear up to 70 C and then falls off rapidly. Amylase b is linear up to 60 C and then falls off rapidly.which explains the two mashing hold temperatures - first at 60 C and 2nd at 70 C..
There are many yeasted bread flavours as well. Let's not forget the blandness of bread is popular too, that a food can pair up with every food and disappear into background flavours. Not everyone wants complex flavour to their food. Some prefer their bread not standing out.
Searching for flavour is relative. Some folks get board with a taste and want change, others will base their opinion on a particular plain taste and don't want change. Everything exists between the two poles. Some are led to believe one taste is better than another, and to tell you from experience, folks will often swing back to a favourite, one in their youth and compare all others to it, even when it lacks multiple layers of flavour. There could be multiple reasons for doing this.
I bake with various sourdoughs and yeast and I am stressed to put one over the other. Bread cultures have been so used to eating yeasted breads and introducing mass produced breads and cakes to other countries and cultures that basic naturally leavened and un-sweetened baked goods get pushed aside in the demand for products that are time saving, simple and predictable and depending on who you talk to, too often sweeter than they should be.
The sweet is a great selling trick, especially in Asia. Cake is more popular than bread, and the soft sweet box shaped sandwich toast loaf reigns not only as a standard but a status symbol of western culture. It is desired no matter how it tastes. My opinion is that if the sugar and added flavourings are removed, there is no taste. The demand for better tasting flour is rising, thank goodness, but sourdough is tricky to control without refrigeration with widely fluctuating temperatures and humidity. Even with AC, my SD knows it is warm outside and as an opportunist, wants to grow.