Taming the Wild Yeast

by Zora Margolis, photos by Molly McDonald Peterson

Home baking expert Peter Helffrich calls himself a fitness fanatic, but the bread that emerges from his Bethesda, Md., oven isn’t a dense whole grain health loaf. The bread he craves, the bread he bakes, is crusty with a tender, chewy, sweet—not sour—white interior, interlaced with holes. And it tastes, in a quite literal sense, of home.

Home, in this case, is a tidy house a few blocks from Wisconsin Avenue, where he lives with his wife of 25 years, Lee-Ann. It was in this house that Helffrich, 53, first captured wild yeast to create his starter culture in 2005, dubbing it “Maple” after the street where he lives. He’s been using wild yeast instead of store-bought to bake bread ever since.

“Maple continues to get better with age, and is very dear to me,” says Helffrich, an executive recruiter and part-time yoga and fitness instructor.

Maple lives in a pint-sized yogurt container, and stays in the refrigerator on days he doesn’t bake. Peter uses about 90% of Maple’s volume for each two-and-a-half pound loaf of bread Hellfrich bakes. The remaining 10% is replenished with flour and filtered water. After sitting on the counter for 24 hours it’s ready for another loaf.

Hellfrich’s method has its roots in the very first bread ever made, estimated to have been around 4000 B.C., when someone – probably an Egyptian, posits Harold McGee in “On Food and Cooking” — left their flatbread dough unattended long enough that it began to bubble and ferment and eventually rise.

From there humankind learned to tame wild yeast, capturing and nurturing it in leaveners that breathes life into loaves.

There are various ways to create a starter, but Helffrich used the high hydration or “poolish” method to create Maple. A poolish starter begins as a mixture of roughly equal parts of flour and water, the texture of pancake batter, left in an open container on the kitchen counter. After about five days, wild yeast spores fall onto and colonize the mix and begin to digest the natural sugar in the flour. The byproduct of this activity is carbon dioxide —bubbles — and the tangy aroma of fermentation. It takes several replenishments with fresh flour and water over the course of three to four weeks until a new starter is potent enough to bake it’s first loaf.

There is a world of difference between bread made with a wild yeast starter and one made with commercial packaged yeast. Maple, explains Helffrich, is not a sourdough starter, in which sugar has been transformed into lactic acid to provide the sour tang. Instead, Maple, which he refers to as a natural leaven, is sweet. The depth of flavor and unique taste of home that natural leavening brings to his bread is well worth the small amount of effort it took to create it and keep it thriving—about as much work as caring for a favorite house plant, says Hellfrich.

Many bread baking enthusiasts don’t have the patience to see the process through, but Hellfrich is almost messianic in his enthusiasm about Maple.

“I’ve only made starter once,” says Helffrich. “Using Maple, I’ve made countless loaves of bread and have refined and developed and internalized that process to where it is natural and easy and allows everyday people in everyday kitchens to make great bread.”

His daughter Arielle took some with her to college in Vermont, and shared it with friends. She now lives in San Francisco, and Maple is with her—a reversal of the process by which the renowned San Francisco sourdough starter migrated eastward since the late 1800’s.

When Helffrich blogs about his bread on thefreshloaf.com, a popular home bakers website, he uses the online moniker “Pedro Pan.” The bilingual pun (pan is the Spanish word for bread) is a nod to his childhood lived in Colombia, Brazil,and Spain, where his father managed overseas branches of an American steel company. And there’s a youthful hint of Peter Pan in Helffrich’s personality, too.

His bread is a direct link to the rustic food he ate in Barcelona, where he and his parents and three brothers moved when he was 13 years old. Summers were spent on the Costa Brava. There was a bakery a block away in both places, and he would be sent every day to bring home a boule, still warm from the oven. It is this sense memory that first sparked his interest in baking his own bread.

Helffrich’s bread-baking method is his own version of the “no-knead” bread developed by Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery in New York and popularized by Mark Bittman in the New York Times. Helffrich’s version also uses a very moist dough that is briefly mixed and then allowed to rise at room temperature for 14 to 18 hours prior to being baked inside an enameled cast iron casserole in a very hot oven. But he uses Maple instead of commercial yeast, and he has developed his own method of folding, shaping, and proofing the dough in a cloth-lined basket, that allows him to easily transfer the sticky loaves into the preheated casserole.

“I’m not interested in making thirty different kinds of bread,” says Helffrich. “I have one basic bread that I tweak.” He varies it with additions: raisins, walnuts, and blue cheese; cumin and Swiss or cheddar cheese; rosemary or olives.

Helffrich, a master of the science and craft of home bread baking, is planning to offer small group classes in starter making and bread baking in his Bethesda home. For further information, go to pedropansbread.blogspot.com, or contact him at: peterhelffrich@starpower.net.

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PEDRO PAN’S METHOD FOR CREATING A PURE STARTER FROM SCRATCH
(flour, water and the airborne wild yeast in your kitchen)

Mix 1/3 cup white all-purpose flour with 1/3 cup filtered water in a small see-through plastic container. Blend adding teaspoons of flour as needed until you have a thick pancake-like batter. Scrape clean the sides with a rubber spatula and mark the level of the batter on the outside of the container. Allow it to sit uncovered on your counter top for four hours, then cover with a damp kitchen towel secured with a rubber band.

Building a “vigorous” ready-for-baking starter

After two to four days you should see signs of fermentation. There should be bubbles in the batter, the volume should increase and there should be a tangy smell. If fermentation has not occurred, discard the mix and start again.

If fermentation has set in, the starter development process begins.

Day 1: In a recycled 16 oz yogurt container with a lid (or similar plastic container) mix half of the fermented starter (discard the other half) with 1/2 cup flour and 1/4 cup water, blend with a plastic chop stick and add more flour as needed until you get a rough, shaggy, slightly coherent dough, neither wet and runny nor smooth and plump as a kneaded dough. Clean down the sides with your chop stick or rubber spatula, cover with the lid and let sit for 24 hrs.

Day 2: The starter should show visible signs of activity. It will not necessarily be double in size (it may have doubled then fallen) but it will be very tangy and sweet smelling and there will be multiple bubbles visible on the surface. Mix it with your chop stick. Discard 75% of the mix and blend in 1/2 cup flour and 1/4 cup water until you get a rough and shaggy dough. Clean down the sides with your chop stick, cover with the lid and let sit for 24 hrs.

Day 3: The starter should show visible signs of activity. Mix it with your chop stick, discard 90% of what’s in the container and add 1/2 cup flour and 1/4 + cup water until you get a rough and shaggy dough. Clean down the sides with your chop stick or rubber spatula. Cover with the lid and let sit for eight hours.

If the starter has doubled or more after eight hours you have a “vigorous” ready-to–bake starter. If not, let it sit another eight to 12 hours, then repeat directions for day 3.

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PEDRO PAN’S INSTRUCTIONS FOR STARTER MAINTENANCE AND BAKING NO-KNEAD BREAD

You can keep your starter in the refrigerator or on the counter. The refrigerator retards the growth of the starter, so is better for those who plan to bake just once or twice a month.

Counter Method:
Optimally, refresh once every 24 hours: Mix the starter using a plastic chop stick. Discard 90% then add 1/3 cup purified water, mix to dilute the 10% remaining starter with the water, then vigorously blend in 1/2 cup flour until you get a rough, shaggy, slightly coherent dough, neither wet and runny nor smooth and plump as a kneaded dough. Clean down the sides with your chop stick or rubber spatula, cover with the lid and let sit for 24 hrs. You can go 48, even 72 hours between refreshments but your starter will become increasingly acidic and sour. This is easily remedied by getting back to a 24-hour schedule.

A note on the ratio and volume of flour and water used in refreshing: The volume: 1/3 cup water, ½ cup flour leaves the perfect amount of starter (after reserving 10% for the future) to leaven my 2.5 lb loaf (recipe below), so there is no waste. This ratio creates a relatively stiff starter which holds gas well and leaves no doubts as to its strength six to eight hours later as it grows quite dramatically. Dryer starters are also less sour than wet starters.

Refrigerator Method:

Once your starter is active and vigorous it can be maintained in the fridge in a tightly covered container of some kind: a 16 oz yogurt container, glass jar, ceramic crock, etc. It must be well covered to keep contaminates and odors out. Every time you bake bread you will use 90% of your vigorous starter, and the remaining 10% will be refreshed with 1/3 cup water and ½ cup flour and stored in the fridge for the next time. During the bread making process, always refresh your starter first. Think of it as the continuation of the species safely stored for the future!

Put the “refresh” in the fridge 30 minutes after you make it. The 30 minutes gives the yeast and water a chance to permeate the flour but not really start multiplying. The cold of the fridge will make the yeast go dormant; it will wait patiently until you take it out and allow it to come up to room temp. You should not let the starter go for more than 30 days in the fridge without a refresh.

Refreshing a refrigerated starter for baking:
At last 16 hours before you want to start your bread dough, remove starter from fridge and leave at room temp for at least eight hours. Refresh by stirring down, degassing then discarding 90% and adding 1/3 cup water and ½ cup flour to the remaining 10%. Cover and let sit at room temperature for at least eight hours. It should be a vigorous starter (a vigorous starter will at least double in size in six to eight hours at room temperature). If not, refresh it again. It usually takes two to three refreshments to bring a dormant/refrigerated starter back to full strength.

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PEDRO PAN’S BASIC NO KNEAD NATURAL LEAVEN BREAD RECIPE FOR A 2.5 (+-) lb LOAF or (2) 1.25 lb LOAVES

Bread made from natural leaven should sit out of the oven for 6 to 8 hours before eating for best results. It should not be stored in the fridge or in an airtight package. A plastic bag folded lightly, not sealed, is best. It freezes very well. Allow it to rest out of the oven for the 8 hours before freezing, then freeze in an air-tight freezer bag. When defrosting, keep it sealed in the same bag until completely defrosted. Once defrosted completely, 10 minutes in a 300 oven will give it that fresh-out-of-the-oven crunch.

Timing:
12 to 36 hours prior to mixing dough: invigorate a refrigerated starter.
After mixing dough, allow 14 to16 hours for the bread dough to rise. Overnight is almost always necessary.
Allow another one to two hours for the second rise, and 45 minutes to bake.

Equipment:
● Mixing bowl large enough to accommodate a tripling of the initial bread ingredients.
● Flexible plastic bench scraper, a very robust one piece rubber spatula, steel bench scraper (optional but useful)
● Shaping vessels: bowls, vessels, plates, colanders that are similarly shaped but slightly smaller in size/diameter than the baking vessel you will be using. Colanders are ideal for round loaves; oval plastic baskets like you get in fast food outlets for 1.25 lb oval loaves or large oval serving platters for 2.5 lb oval loaves.
● Baking vessels must have lids and be able to withstand a 500 degree oven: cast iron casserole, stainless steel pot, ceramic bakers. For a 2 ½ pound loaf, vessel should be at least 10 inches in diameter, or an 11-12 inch oval. It be at least 6 inches deep to accommodate the bread growing while baking. For the 1 ¼ pound loaves: if round, 7-inch diameter, if oval 9 to 9 1/2 inches long and 4 inches deep.
● Tightly woven dish towels or other cloth (pros use canvas) no terrycloth.
● Cooling rack

Ingredients:
1 cup stirred down vigorous starter (about 90% of the last refresh)
2 cups purified, spring or de-chlorinated water
4 cups bread flour plus extra for surface dusting and shaping vessels.
2 teaspoons salt
1-2 tablespoons corn meal

1. In a large ceramic or plastic bowl add water and 90 percent of your starter. Refresh the remaining 10 percent starter, and set it aside for cold storage and the next bread you bake.
2. In a separate bowl whisk the 4 cups flour with the 2 teaspoons salt. Now whisk the starter and the water together until blended.
3. Add the flour to the water and starter and mix the dough in the large bowl. Your goal is to distribute and evenly moisten the flour making sure there are no dry spots or pockets of flour. Start at the edges incorporating the flour and liquid, then begin reaching the spatula down and folding and turning the dough over. Add water if the dough becomes impossible to work (1 teaspoon at a time). If it is too wet add a little flour (1 teaspoon at a time). After 3 or 4 minutes of mixing you should have a shaggy, moist, evenly mixed dough. It should be dry enough to hold form (not so wet it puddles out) but still glisten with moisture. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and set on a counter top for 14 to16 hours. You have not and will not knead this dough.
4. It will have almost tripled in size and the surface will be smooth and lumpy with bubbles. The mass itself will be very soft, pillowy and wobbly. Flour a surface area and with a flexible plastic dough scraper or strong rubber spatula, gently scrape the dough out of the bowl onto the floured surface, being careful not to deflate the dough. Do not punch the dough down. Dust your hands with flour and very gently extend the mass into to a rough rectangle. Using a steel bench scraper, fold the smaller ends of the rectangle over the center of the dough. Picture folding an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper prior to inserting it into an envelope. Dust hands with flour again and gingerly pick the whole mass up and turn it over seam side down. Do the folding maneuver only once.
5. Place a clean dish towel in your shaping vessel and generously coat the surface that will contact the dough with a 50/50 blend of flour and corn meal. This step is very important, otherwise the wet dough will stick to the cloth, causing a big problem later when you try to invert the dough into your baking vessel. Err on the side of too much flour/corn meal.
6. Place the dough seam side down in the prepared shaping vessel. Cover loosely with another dish towel set aside to rise for 1 to 2 hours. You are looking for about a 25 to 35 percent increase.
7. Preheat oven, baking vessel and lid to 500 degrees for at least 30 minutes.
8. The dough is ready to be baked when you can poke a finger into it to a depth of ¼ inch and the indentation remains. If it springs back it is not ready.
9. Carefully remove the now super hot baking vessel from the oven and place it on top of the stove. Lift your shaping vessel containing the risen dough and, holding the kitchen towel taut with your fingers, tip the shaping vessel over into the baking vessel. The dough will plop gently down seam side up. Do not slash the top of the dough; the seams will open to allow gas to vent and create a very dramatic and unique finished loaf. Place the hot lid on top and return it to the oven. The lid captures the steam escaping from the the dough and creates a moist environment that is vital for oven rising and crust development.
10. If it is a single 2 ½ pound loaf, bake covered 30 minutes, reduce temperature to 450, remove the cover, bake uncovered 10 minutes, then remove the loaf from the baking vessel and place on an oven rack to bake 10 minutes more. If you are baking two 1 ½ pound loaves, bake covered 20 minutes, reduce temp to 450, remove the cover, bake uncovered 5 minutes, remove loaf from vessel place on oven rack and bake 5 to10 minutes more. Uncovering and then removing the dough from the baking vessel allows the steam to dissipate and for the crust to brown uniformly.
11. When bread is done it should have a nice brown crust and it will register between 215 and 220 degrees on an instant read thermometer. Remove from the oven immediately and set on a rack to cool.