what beer should I use in sour dough bread starter?
My mom used to make sour dough bread, and she used a little bit of beer in her starter for yeast, and I was wondering what kind/ brand of beer should I use if I wanted to make my own starter.
My mom used to make sour dough bread, and she used a little bit of beer in her starter for yeast, and I was wondering what kind/ brand of beer should I use if I wanted to make my own starter.
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Favorite Answer
You don't really need beer, however you can add it for it's own unique live cultures present even after pasteurization........sour dough starter is just using the bacteria that are naturally airborne and letting them multiply........
I have the SAME SOURDOUGH STARTER TODAY THAT I HAVE BEEN USING SINCE MY PARENTS GAVE ME A SOURDOUGH STARTER KIT FOR CHRISTMAS IN 1968..........
So, with that starter, I've given people (THOUSANDS) enough to "start" their own starter.......It's kinda like a pet, you have to feed and burp it every now and then in the fridge..........
http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/bread/recipe-sourdough.html
Check out that link, it's a good start for starter......(pun intended ;)))
Christopher K.
Brian X
Well, first you're not exactly creating a true sourdough starter; it's more of a barm (i.e. yeast foam) starter. You may in fact get a sourdough out of it if you've got the right bacteria kicking around, but it won't be quite the same thing. It'll still work though, similar to an old dough starter.
That said, the key thing you need is a beer that is bottle fermented. For a long time people used to use the yeast from Sierra Nevada Pale Ale for English-style ales, culturing it up to a fairly large quantity using wort (unfermented beer), but I think SNPA switched over to a filtered product a few years back. Without a national brew like SNPA, you're kind of stuck with two possibilities. One is a local craftbrew that has visible sediment in the bottom (a bottle from a homebrewer friend will usually have this as well); that's the yeast you want, and it's usually the same kind of yeast as in bread, although usually a rather different strain. Bread and beer have a long history of intertwinement going back to the Sumerians, so using this yeast will work just fine.
The other possibility is getting a bottle of hefeweizen, preferably one imported from Germany. German wheat beers usually have some yeast as well, but it's a slightly different kind of yeast usually used for lager beers, which they add to carbonate the beer after bottling, and which results in a slightly cleaner flavor. However, you're getting off into the weeds a bit there; this yeast isn't the yeast that the beer is fermented with, and the actual yeast (if there's any left in the bottle) has been bred over the centuries to produce some rather interesting, fruity/solventy off-flavors typical to the style. If there's still some of the fermenting yeast in there, it may do some strange but potentially tasty things to your bread. (Many Belgian beers are also bottle-conditioned, but if you're siphoning off the dregs of a bottle of Chimay, what I just warned you about with weizen yeast goes double. Belgian yeasts are *weird*.)
Marvin
1
mark
Most beer does not have live yeast in it anymore, so most beers won't work. Keep in mind that sour dough means wild yeast and beer means brewers yeast (commercial yeast), so even if you found a beer that had live yeast, it would likely be commercial brewers yeast.
Organic grape skins work best for cultivating wild yeasts. Wild yeast will even grow with nothing to kick start things given enough time.
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Sourdough Beer