Хлебные закваски
Hi, Rus! How are you doing? I hope you're doing well. I'm planning to make an unleavened flatbread. I am curious if I use CLAS in the dough and leave it in a warm environment (at 30C, for example) for several hours as I would when making a pre-dough (but without yeast this time), will the flavor of this flatbread improve even though there’s no yeast fermentation? Also, why do we always use yeast when preparing the pre-dough of CLAS bread? Why don’t we add all the yeast in the final dough? Thanks! Yippee
Rus, Yippee shared your information with me and I must say I am intriqued. Do you foresee any problems using the CLAS in my final dough, but instead of using yeast, using sourdough levain instead? Thanks for sharing... Dan Ayo USA
Hi Dan! In order to bake bread the dough should be "infected" with lactic acid bacteria and yeast cells. Depending on the bread type, proportion between them is different. For rye bread more lactic acid bacteria cells is required and for wheat bread more yeast cells. Using CLAS it is easy to get a proper proportion, since we can easy control the number of cells. Traditional sourdough contains cells of both types in the random proportion. If you would add traditional sourdough along with CLAS, the dough will have too less yeast cells and too much lactic acid bacteria, as result insufficient lifting power and sour taste. Of course, technically it is possible to bake with CLAS and without bakers yeast. For that you just need to get a collection of the yeast cells, free of lactic acid bacteria. Very common way for that is hops yeast, which uses the fact, that hop kills lactic acid bacteria Usually you will need about 36h to get hops yeast: http://brotgost.blogspot.com/2016/04/hmelzakwaska.html Then it is possible to mix them with CLAS, but the question is what for? Since traditional sourdough already contains a mixture of both. The main advantage of the CLAS is ability to control acidity and lifting power of the dough in very simple way. For doing that with traditional sourdough you need to apply, sometimes very complicated refreshment schemes, or also add bakers yeast. May I ask a question why do you hate bakers yeast? Maybe bear yeast of wild strains would be an option?
