Quote Originally Posted by Old Hippie View Post
Instead of capturing a wild culture, stir some flour and water together and add a quarter-teaspoon of yeast. The first few times you use it, it will be pretty bland -- but let's face it, yeast mutates regularly in response to its environment. As you keep using it, it will develop more flavour.

Particularly when you're using sourdough, long room-temperature rises are good. The cooler temperatures put the yeast and lactobacilli on a more even footing, so the sourness can develop before the yeast is blown out.

I find even with yeasted breads that cutting back the dose of yeast and going for long rises really helps develop the flavour and texture.
I've tried using a cheater like that. It works for about two weeks and then the nasties creep in. So, while it does work, it peters out just about the time the flavor would really be developing. I'm thinking therefore that it isn't the strain of yeast in the area, but rather the lactobacilli here. Or some other bacteria that creeps in from the ponds in the area. Indeed, some days the ponds cause the whole neighborhood to stink, so....

I like to go for long rises myself sometimes, but I am a rather impatient cuss. I rise for about an hour first rise, form or pan my loaves, then rise in the pans or on baking sheets for another hour or so. NOt sure about how others would handle it, but the way I do my bread I get a nice really dense crumb and a flaky/crumbly but still chewy crust. When I was doing sourdough in our old apartment, I would do rises of about 4-5 hours.

One thing I think I'm going to start doing when I bake is to use bottled water. I don't know if anyone else has run into this in their community, but here in Aurora at times there's so much chlorine in the water that cutting open a fresh loaf just a few minutes to an hour out of the oven it can smell like opening a bottle of bleach. Ewww. Given some time, however, the smell dissipates and it doesn't really have an effect on the taste.