Wine yeasts
Hello,
This is not an advertisement. In reading the Handbook of Dough Fermentations, there is a small blurb about some people using wine/brewers yeasts for bread with mixed results. (But it does not go into detail about it).
Anyway, since it was cheap from amazon, I bought a few packets of all of these:
http://www.lalvinyeast.com/strains.asp
Anyone have any experience with making bread from... say... Champagne yeast? :)
I have not tried yet. Still sitting in the packaging. Just curious. I did perform a search on TFL and found a few things but not a whole bunch.
I will try it out and see. But for me I don't bake all that often so I don't think I can set up a head-to-head taste test.
Was wondering though -- any negative issues with trying to spike my natural sourdough culture with a tiny little bit of the wine yeasts? Just to give it a bit more variety?
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/17414/pain-de-champagne-no-that039s-not-misspelled
David G
I wonder how you structure a fair competition between a wine yeast and your standard sourdough starter. I think you would like to have approximately equal (in a logarithmic sense) populations of each and refresh through at least 20 cycles to allow for relatively small survival advantages to accumulate over many generations. So before you combine the two, you need to transition the wine yeast to a flour/water substrate and arrange for the population density to stabilize; then using a pair of starters at the same phase (perhaps fully domed or just after they flatten out) you combine equal weights and feed the combination. The first question will be whether the wine yeast competes with the LAB - which I think you should see in a few refresh cycles (and perhaps sooner) as an increase in pH if the wine yeast is effectively depleting the sugar(s) that the LAB is consuming. But since the LAB doesn't normally use all of the available maltose in a batch of starter it might take longer for this effect to show up. At the moment I can't think of a definitive way to distinguish between wine yeast and sourdough yeast - except perhaps for speed which is not very definitive. If there is a flavor component that the wine yeast adds to the mix, then perhaps you could use that as an indicator, but it is somewhat subjective without doing liquid phase chromatography.
I know this has been brought up in regards to beer yeast. While not ideal for bread, beer yeast may work a little better for bread simply becasue beer is a grain based beverage. Yeasts are like people and have appetites for what they were raised on and just work better at fermenting those particular sugars. Wine yeasts work really well to ferment fruit and grain yeasts work really well to ferment grain (bread/beer). That doesn't mean it won't work in another medium-just maybe not as well.
I know when it came to making homemade ginger ale (I only did this once), commercial bread yeast produced a more bread-like flavor profile with lots of sediment and large bubbles. Champagne yeast was more wine-like with much finer bubbles and a LARGER amount of gas(I had to make sure the bottle didn't explode). For a beverage, I used a smaller amount of champagne yeast than bread yeast.
If you want a more wine-like flavor to bread, research "fruit yeast". Endless possibilities. I know we have 1 poster (RonRay) who has really done a lot of delicious research and posted in great detail for us. We have several other posters who have also posted wonderful pics and ideas. The fruit yeast can make a big difference in the final bread flavor.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/23779/survival-fittest-%E2%80%93-which-fruit-yeast-water-keep
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/23923/sourdough-and-yeast-water-combinations
So experiment and see what works.
Thank you very much, davidg718, Doc, and clazar123. Much food for thought.
Some day I need to get a good pH meter.
I haven't tried my alternate yeast species yet, but I will.
Cheers, and thanks again.
-gvz
gvz - you have mentioned this before, so if you insist
http://www.phmeters.com/products/IQ150handheld-meters.htm
The probe has to be replaced after 24-36 months so it can be expensive for occasional use. It also takes 10 to 20 min to rehydrate the probe and calibrate depending on how long it has been unused so it is not like a thermometer in terms of responsiveness. You have to actually prepare to use it, take the time to get it calibrated, recheck the calibration often, and keep it clean. On the other hand the ISFET probe is much more robust than glass probes and can be (must be) stored dry.
Doc
Yes, I have 'threatened' to measure pH, sugar levels, and all sorts of things... :=)
Unfortunately I'm not a Doc.Dough. :) I wish I were sometimes....
:-) :-)
I am 10,000% thankful for your thoughts. Attempting to capitalize upon them is a different story! :)
For now, I will try a few poolish'es with the wine/champagne yeasts, and see if I detect any flavor differences. I'm not going to try to bridge a wine-yeast to my sourdough yeast culture for now. But thanks for the advice on how it I should, if I wanted to try.
Honestly, I don't expect any significant difference in flavor from a wine yeast bread. But it is fun, and it wasn't expensive or anything...
I could be surprised though. Who knows! :)
-gvz
Hey Doc,
I think Ananda might have been right about mashes in the higher temps, to try to get more glucose vs. maltose.
Reason being: Apparently the LAB have little sensors on their cell walls that detects the presences of sugar food, and they will eat up all of the glucose first, before going to the maltose. I know it is a lot more complicated than that, but that is my simplistic reading of it.
So another words, if you make a mash intentionally favored toward glucose production at a higher temp, it could be that all of that glucose will be consumed by the yeasts.
This is the key part, measuring glucose and maltose.
But the fact that LAB will go after glucose first, is something.
The LAB use of glucose vs maltose is a function of which LAB you are dealing with. There are LAB of both types in various sourdough starters (lactobacillus sanfranciscensis prefers maltose and leaks glucose back into the dough; it will use glucose when/if the maltose is depleted). And I suspect that the maltose/glucose ratio in a mash is dependent on the specific amylase(s) involved and the starch, temperature, hydration, and time available. One of the notable things about rye flour is the lower activation temperature of the naturally occuring amylase enzyme. I have read that it is necessary to acidify 100% rye dough to pH<4.0 to disable the amylase and enable the rye flour to be turned into rye bread (and if you don't disable the amylase, the enzyme begins to convert starch to sugar before the structure of the loaf has stabilized and degrades it into a gooey mess of glop).