Cindy, Natural yeast is everywhere, floating in the air, on the
skins of fruits (like grapes), on the grains we use to bake with,
wheat and rye, etc. Baking bread with natural yeast starts with a
process to encourage the natural yeast still in the flour after
milling to grow and concentrate. A few months ago I posted a note
here about starting a sourdough bread from rye flour, then using the
rye starter to bake a both a sourdough rye and sourdough white
bread. Rye is one of the easiest flours to build a starter with.
If you want to do an experiment, get a bag of rye flour, preferably
stone ground (stone grinding is cooler than metal blade grinding so
more of the natural yeast survives the milling process). Temperature
is important and some types of impurities in the water (like
chlorine) can kill natural yeast.
Take one cup of rye flour and mix it with 3/4 cup of bottled water,
cover and let stand at 80 deg F. for 24 hours. This early starter
should be "airy" with bubbles and may smell a bit punky but it will improve.
Dilute the mixture with 1/2 cup bottled water, then add another cup
of rye flour, cover and let stand for 24 hours at 80 deg F.
Throw away 1/2 of the mixture, dilute the remaining mixture with 1/2
cup bottle water and add another cup of rye flour. Let stand for 24
hours at 80 deg F.
Again, throw away 1/2 of the mixture, dilute the remaining mixture
with 1/2 cup bottle water and add another cup of rye flour. Let
stand for 24 hours at 80 deg F.
By now the starter should be more than doubling in volume and should
smell sweet and yeasty. You can use this starter to bake bread
without commercial yeast. Natural yeast take more time to rise than
commercial yeast so each bread making stage takes longer. There are
many procedures for preserving the starter and literally hundreds of
recipes for baking bread from starters on the web and here in the archives.
When you bake bread from natural yeast you are following an ancient
process. Have fun,
Werner