Daily Bread

When our oldest daughter was about 2, I started making bread with her on Saturday mornings.  It was a fun, relatively messy, slightly educational thing we could do each week together, with an added bonus that we could have fresh, still-warm bread for lunch afterwards.  With cheese and marmite, yum!

Occasionally, we'd take a loaf when invited to someone's place. People would invariably ask me for the recipe.  My secret recipe is:

1. Buy a packet of yeast from the supermarket.
2. Follow the instructions on the back of the packet.

...which was invariably met with a disappointed reaction from those seeking the secrets of the baker.

We started making more loaves on Saturday; enough to last us all week, because home-baked bread is much yummier that shop-bought bread, and what with Argentinian inflation and devaluation, turned out to be increasingly cheaper too.

This was before we started getting sucked down the zero-waste, greeny, californian red worm-hole. It was just an easy daddy-daughter hobby that got a little out of hand.

Fast-forward to last Saturday when, after dissolving the yeast in water as usual, my still-nascent zero-waste consciousness was confronted with this...

...the crappy plastic yeast sachet, which has no recycling number on it.

It's small, but annoyingly landfilly.

How can I make this waste nearer to zero?  In NZ, you can buy dry-active yeast in jars as well as sachets.  But not in Buenos Aires.  You can buy it in cubes that you crush up before dissolving, but the packaging is plastic.

Hmph.

Well, in the olden days, I'm sure they didn't get their yeast from the supermarket.  It turns out that yeast is naturally-occurring pretty much everywhere.  "Sour-dough" bread is made with natural yeast, for example.  How does that work?

The internet tells me that you need to cultivate a "sour dough starter", which you feed every day. Once it's ready to go, you use a part of it to make bread, and keep feeding the other part for next time.

Do you really have to do this?  Can't you just start with some shop-bought yeast?  I put aside a couple of chunks of my dough, with the idea of mixing them into dough next weekend, to see if the yeast will still work.  Not sure if it will survive a whole week, but presumably cold will slow down its metabolism, so I put one chunk in the fridge, and the other in the freezer, and we'll see what works...

Then I thought that the internet sour-dough people probably know more about this than me, so I figured I'd try following their instructions too, and compare the results.  It's pretty easy, really, add and mix 100g flour and 100g water every day for 5 days...

So with a little help from a little helper, we've got the starter started...