I dont remember where I found this but thought I'd share. Nor, have I tried it..
Prepper Baking 101: Making Your Own Yeast
Knowing how to replace the staples in the kitchen in some other way than a trip to the store is an important prepper skill. One of those things is bread. The first step is taking the time to learn to bake, which unfortunately is becoming a lost art in and of itself. The second step is to learn how to obtain the components of bread, such as flour, water, and yeast.
If you are ready to go beyond the basic sourdough starter (see below), try these yeast procurement methods for all new flavors and textures in your baking.
Feeding the Starter
Whether you are talking about a standard sourdough starter, or one of those listed below, you will see many recipes talking about “feeding” the starter. This means adding 1 cup flour and 1 cup water to the mix so that the yeast can keep growing. You will need to feed the starter daily if it is at room temperature, or weekly if it is in the fridge. If you don’t bake bread that day, you will also need to toss out one cup of the starter so that the ratios stay the same. This is an important step—and can be a great motivator to bake regularly so that none of your hard work goes to waste! Yeast starters are one thing you will not want to throw in the compost pile, as the bacteria can grow out of control and give you a very unpleasant result.
Grape Starter
Grapes, along with many other types of fruits (including apples, oranges, and grapefruit, to name some examples), contain natural yeast spores in the skin or peel of the fruit.
For grapes, stem them (do not wash them, as this will wash off the yeast that you are trying to grow), crush by hand, and place in a container covered with cheesecloth. Leave undisturbed for three days. You should start to see the liquid bubble, indicating that the yeast is growing. Strain the liquid (which now contains the yeast), and stir in 1 cup of whole wheat flour.
Leave your grape starter at room temperature for 24 hours. Save only one cup of the mixture, then add another cup of flour and a cup of water. Do the same thing for another day or two. You should have a very bubbly starter at this point. After this, just keep feeding it so you will always have some ready for your next loaf of bread.
As you experiment with different fruits (and even tomatoes!) you will find that each kind of starter has a bit of a different flavor. Find which ones you like best. Just remember, you need to use homegrown or wild fruits, since the store-bought ones will be covered with pesticides, wax, and who knows what else—probably not much yeast left to be found there. And don’t wash it off before starting.
Potato Starter
It is amazing the things that we throw away that are more useful than we know. In this case, that water you boiled potatoes in for dinner is one of the fastest ways to make a starter for your bread. Simply take a cup and a half of the potato water, add a tablespoon of sugar, and stir in flour until stiff. Cover and leave overnight in a warm place. If it is nice and bubbly the next morning it is ready to use. If not—start over.
Alternatively, if you do not usually boil your potatoes, or just want to try something different, cheat a little. Use one packet of store bought yeast (1 tablespoon), mix with a cup of water, a half-cup of sugar, and three tablespoons of instant potato flakes. Let it stand for 24 hours, then put it in the fridge. Feed every four days, but instead of the usual flour and water combo, use the same amounts of sugar, potato flakes, and water that you used to create the starter.
Drying Your Yeast for Storage
One practical challenge with creating and using your own yeast is storing and transporting it. We see this in one very practical example, when Israel left Egypt in a hurry during the Exodus, and did not have time for their bread to rise. Jews to this day commemorate God’s deliverance by abstaining from products with leavening during Passover.
If you want to be able to bake bread the instant you arrive at your bug-out location (if you ever need to take your own personal Exodus), then you will want to dry some yeast for use later.
Take any of your starters, spread very thin on a cookie sheet or baking stone, then dehydrate as you would anything else. If you live in a hot and dry climate, you may just be able to cover it with a cheese cloth and place in the sun. Otherwise, put on the lowest temp in your oven and dry it that way. Once the yeast is dry (not cooked, if it cooks the active yeast will be killed and rendered useless), you can crumble it and store in an air tight container. Just like store-bought yeast, it will last longer in the fridge or freezer.
Play around with amounts you use in recipes once the yeast is ready, as the potency of homemade yeast will be a little different than the store-bought version and you will probably need more of it for the same amount of bread (typically about a cup of starter in place of 1 packet of yeast, if using wet starter. If you’re using dry yeast, try just doubling the amount to start).
What you lose in time, you may find you make up for in flavor and fun. There is nothing quite like the smell of fresh baked bread to make you feel at home.
Beyond the Alcohol and Beer: Fermenting Foods
What does beer, bread, vinegar, black tea, cheese, chocolate, crème fraîche, soy sauce and pickles have in common? They are all fermented foods.
Today we primarily think of fermentation as the result of adding something, typically powdered yeast or what marketing departments around the world call “beneficial bacteria”, but fermentation is a natural process, and both yeasts and beneficial bacteria are naturally occurring in hundreds of foodstuffs. Before there were cultured yeast strains for bread and beer, long before pressure canning and freezing, there was wild fermentation.
Growing Your Own Bread Yeast
Most people are familiar with sourdough bread. It has recently made a comeback among the health conscious because, despite the carbohydrates, even white sourdough bread has proven beneficial for blood sugar levels. Today you can buy a powder sourdough starter in the grocery store, but you can just as well grow your own.
Simply mix 1/2 cup of water with 1/2 cup of flour in a glass jar, screw the lid on and keep it somewhere warm for two days. After two days, the mix will hopefully have started to make small bubbles and smell slightly sour. Add 1/4 cup of flour and 1/4 cup of water and leave for another day. Repeat this step once. You should now have a bubbly natural yeast mix. Use 1/4 – 1/2 cup of the mixture instead of yeast when baking bread, and increase the leavening time by several hours. Keep the rest in the jar and feed it regular – bi-daily if kept at room temperature, weekly if in a refrigerator.
If you want to be certain to catch some of that wild yeast, grating an apple into the initial mix provides both the necessary sugars and extra yeast. The apple itself will dissolve within a few days.
Fermenting Vegetables
There is no secret recipe to making sauerkraut, kimchi and pickled vegetables. The key is simply to make sure all of the vegetables are submerged in liquid, whether that liquid is brine or wine. Nearly any vegetable can be fermented and, since you can spice up your vegetable ferment with anything from seaweed and chili, to dill and caraway, the available flavors are endless.
To get started, why not try a simple sauerkraut? Measure 1-2 tablespoons of sea salt in a cup, depending on how salty you want your vegetables. Grate 2 lbs of cabbage and place it inside a large bowl. Sprinkle salt over the cabbage as you layer it. Pack your cabbage tightly, pushing it down, nice and tight, with a spoon or a hand. Place a plate or lid on top of the cabbage and a heavy weight on top of that to ensure continuous pressure on the cabbage. Cover it with a towel and leave it for 24 hours, occasionally pressing down on the weight to help release the liquids from the cabbage.
After 24 hours have passed, check on your sauerkraut. If it has not released enough liquid to submerge the bottom of the lid, add a little salt water. Now leave the sauerkraut to ferment, checking on it every other day. If mold starts growing on the top, simply skim it off. It is a surface phenomenon and what happens when the bacteria interact with the air. Your kraut is not getting any air, so it is not getting moldy. Around day five, your kraut will start tasting tangy and you can start eating it. It will develop stronger flavor over time.
For a more interesting sauerkraut, you can add your favorite vegetables and fruits (from grated carrots to apple slices) at the layering and salting stage along with your favorite spices.
Making Yogurt at Home
Fermenting wild yogurt and dairy products from scratch is more about luck than skill, but you can cheat by starting with an existing strain. To make yogurt at home, simply buy a good quality yogurt with live culture and use that as a starter.
Heat milk to 110 degrees and stir in one tablespoon of your starter yogurt. Pour the mixture into a warm sterilized jar, put the cap on, insulate the jar by wrapping it with a tea towel, and leave it in a warm place for 20-24 hours. After 24 hours it should have thickened and become tangy.
Store the yogurt cold and save a tablespoon of your homemade yogurt as a starter for future batches. If you are vegan or lactose intolerant, you can use soy milk and even coconut milk to make yogurt the same way.
Wild Alcohol
It used to be that all beer, cider and wine were fermented naturally. Today, large-scale commercial wild beer is made only in a single valley in Belgium. If you are interested in making your own, a home brewing club may be the best place to start.
Grains are not quite as easy to ferment as fruits, vegetables and flowers, so if you are looking at a simple home brewing experiment, why not begin with this sparkling elderflower wine?
Pour one gallon of hot water into a clean bucket and stir in 1.5 lbs of sugar until completely dissolved. Mix half a gallon of cold water with the juice, the zest of four lemons, and two tablespoons of white wine vinegar. Stir the lemon-vinegar mix into the bucket of sugary water and add 15-20 elderflower heads. Cover the bucket with a clean tea towel and leave in a cool place to ferment. Check on the bucket every few days. When it starts getting foamy you know that it is fermenting and you should leave it for another 4-5 days. Strain your wine and decant it into sterilized bottles. Store the wine in a cool place for at least a week before drinking.
Prepper Baking 101: Making Your Own Yeast
Knowing how to replace the staples in the kitchen in some other way than a trip to the store is an important prepper skill. One of those things is bread. The first step is taking the time to learn to bake, which unfortunately is becoming a lost art in and of itself. The second step is to learn how to obtain the components of bread, such as flour, water, and yeast.
If you are ready to go beyond the basic sourdough starter (see below), try these yeast procurement methods for all new flavors and textures in your baking.
Feeding the Starter
Whether you are talking about a standard sourdough starter, or one of those listed below, you will see many recipes talking about “feeding” the starter. This means adding 1 cup flour and 1 cup water to the mix so that the yeast can keep growing. You will need to feed the starter daily if it is at room temperature, or weekly if it is in the fridge. If you don’t bake bread that day, you will also need to toss out one cup of the starter so that the ratios stay the same. This is an important step—and can be a great motivator to bake regularly so that none of your hard work goes to waste! Yeast starters are one thing you will not want to throw in the compost pile, as the bacteria can grow out of control and give you a very unpleasant result.
Grape Starter
Grapes, along with many other types of fruits (including apples, oranges, and grapefruit, to name some examples), contain natural yeast spores in the skin or peel of the fruit.
For grapes, stem them (do not wash them, as this will wash off the yeast that you are trying to grow), crush by hand, and place in a container covered with cheesecloth. Leave undisturbed for three days. You should start to see the liquid bubble, indicating that the yeast is growing. Strain the liquid (which now contains the yeast), and stir in 1 cup of whole wheat flour.
Leave your grape starter at room temperature for 24 hours. Save only one cup of the mixture, then add another cup of flour and a cup of water. Do the same thing for another day or two. You should have a very bubbly starter at this point. After this, just keep feeding it so you will always have some ready for your next loaf of bread.
As you experiment with different fruits (and even tomatoes!) you will find that each kind of starter has a bit of a different flavor. Find which ones you like best. Just remember, you need to use homegrown or wild fruits, since the store-bought ones will be covered with pesticides, wax, and who knows what else—probably not much yeast left to be found there. And don’t wash it off before starting.
Potato Starter
It is amazing the things that we throw away that are more useful than we know. In this case, that water you boiled potatoes in for dinner is one of the fastest ways to make a starter for your bread. Simply take a cup and a half of the potato water, add a tablespoon of sugar, and stir in flour until stiff. Cover and leave overnight in a warm place. If it is nice and bubbly the next morning it is ready to use. If not—start over.
Alternatively, if you do not usually boil your potatoes, or just want to try something different, cheat a little. Use one packet of store bought yeast (1 tablespoon), mix with a cup of water, a half-cup of sugar, and three tablespoons of instant potato flakes. Let it stand for 24 hours, then put it in the fridge. Feed every four days, but instead of the usual flour and water combo, use the same amounts of sugar, potato flakes, and water that you used to create the starter.
Drying Your Yeast for Storage
One practical challenge with creating and using your own yeast is storing and transporting it. We see this in one very practical example, when Israel left Egypt in a hurry during the Exodus, and did not have time for their bread to rise. Jews to this day commemorate God’s deliverance by abstaining from products with leavening during Passover.
If you want to be able to bake bread the instant you arrive at your bug-out location (if you ever need to take your own personal Exodus), then you will want to dry some yeast for use later.
Take any of your starters, spread very thin on a cookie sheet or baking stone, then dehydrate as you would anything else. If you live in a hot and dry climate, you may just be able to cover it with a cheese cloth and place in the sun. Otherwise, put on the lowest temp in your oven and dry it that way. Once the yeast is dry (not cooked, if it cooks the active yeast will be killed and rendered useless), you can crumble it and store in an air tight container. Just like store-bought yeast, it will last longer in the fridge or freezer.
Play around with amounts you use in recipes once the yeast is ready, as the potency of homemade yeast will be a little different than the store-bought version and you will probably need more of it for the same amount of bread (typically about a cup of starter in place of 1 packet of yeast, if using wet starter. If you’re using dry yeast, try just doubling the amount to start).
What you lose in time, you may find you make up for in flavor and fun. There is nothing quite like the smell of fresh baked bread to make you feel at home.
Beyond the Alcohol and Beer: Fermenting Foods
What does beer, bread, vinegar, black tea, cheese, chocolate, crème fraîche, soy sauce and pickles have in common? They are all fermented foods.
Today we primarily think of fermentation as the result of adding something, typically powdered yeast or what marketing departments around the world call “beneficial bacteria”, but fermentation is a natural process, and both yeasts and beneficial bacteria are naturally occurring in hundreds of foodstuffs. Before there were cultured yeast strains for bread and beer, long before pressure canning and freezing, there was wild fermentation.
Growing Your Own Bread Yeast
Most people are familiar with sourdough bread. It has recently made a comeback among the health conscious because, despite the carbohydrates, even white sourdough bread has proven beneficial for blood sugar levels. Today you can buy a powder sourdough starter in the grocery store, but you can just as well grow your own.
Simply mix 1/2 cup of water with 1/2 cup of flour in a glass jar, screw the lid on and keep it somewhere warm for two days. After two days, the mix will hopefully have started to make small bubbles and smell slightly sour. Add 1/4 cup of flour and 1/4 cup of water and leave for another day. Repeat this step once. You should now have a bubbly natural yeast mix. Use 1/4 – 1/2 cup of the mixture instead of yeast when baking bread, and increase the leavening time by several hours. Keep the rest in the jar and feed it regular – bi-daily if kept at room temperature, weekly if in a refrigerator.
If you want to be certain to catch some of that wild yeast, grating an apple into the initial mix provides both the necessary sugars and extra yeast. The apple itself will dissolve within a few days.
Fermenting Vegetables
There is no secret recipe to making sauerkraut, kimchi and pickled vegetables. The key is simply to make sure all of the vegetables are submerged in liquid, whether that liquid is brine or wine. Nearly any vegetable can be fermented and, since you can spice up your vegetable ferment with anything from seaweed and chili, to dill and caraway, the available flavors are endless.
To get started, why not try a simple sauerkraut? Measure 1-2 tablespoons of sea salt in a cup, depending on how salty you want your vegetables. Grate 2 lbs of cabbage and place it inside a large bowl. Sprinkle salt over the cabbage as you layer it. Pack your cabbage tightly, pushing it down, nice and tight, with a spoon or a hand. Place a plate or lid on top of the cabbage and a heavy weight on top of that to ensure continuous pressure on the cabbage. Cover it with a towel and leave it for 24 hours, occasionally pressing down on the weight to help release the liquids from the cabbage.
After 24 hours have passed, check on your sauerkraut. If it has not released enough liquid to submerge the bottom of the lid, add a little salt water. Now leave the sauerkraut to ferment, checking on it every other day. If mold starts growing on the top, simply skim it off. It is a surface phenomenon and what happens when the bacteria interact with the air. Your kraut is not getting any air, so it is not getting moldy. Around day five, your kraut will start tasting tangy and you can start eating it. It will develop stronger flavor over time.
For a more interesting sauerkraut, you can add your favorite vegetables and fruits (from grated carrots to apple slices) at the layering and salting stage along with your favorite spices.
Making Yogurt at Home
Fermenting wild yogurt and dairy products from scratch is more about luck than skill, but you can cheat by starting with an existing strain. To make yogurt at home, simply buy a good quality yogurt with live culture and use that as a starter.
Heat milk to 110 degrees and stir in one tablespoon of your starter yogurt. Pour the mixture into a warm sterilized jar, put the cap on, insulate the jar by wrapping it with a tea towel, and leave it in a warm place for 20-24 hours. After 24 hours it should have thickened and become tangy.
Store the yogurt cold and save a tablespoon of your homemade yogurt as a starter for future batches. If you are vegan or lactose intolerant, you can use soy milk and even coconut milk to make yogurt the same way.
Wild Alcohol
It used to be that all beer, cider and wine were fermented naturally. Today, large-scale commercial wild beer is made only in a single valley in Belgium. If you are interested in making your own, a home brewing club may be the best place to start.
Grains are not quite as easy to ferment as fruits, vegetables and flowers, so if you are looking at a simple home brewing experiment, why not begin with this sparkling elderflower wine?
Pour one gallon of hot water into a clean bucket and stir in 1.5 lbs of sugar until completely dissolved. Mix half a gallon of cold water with the juice, the zest of four lemons, and two tablespoons of white wine vinegar. Stir the lemon-vinegar mix into the bucket of sugary water and add 15-20 elderflower heads. Cover the bucket with a clean tea towel and leave in a cool place to ferment. Check on the bucket every few days. When it starts getting foamy you know that it is fermenting and you should leave it for another 4-5 days. Strain your wine and decant it into sterilized bottles. Store the wine in a cool place for at least a week before drinking.
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