Baking of the Week

This week's baking is fairly simple, due to the summer heat. I'm baking a loaf of 100% whole wheat, long-rise sourdough, or pain au levain. It's not the wheat that makes it "au levain" it's the long-rise sourdough. I use 100% wild-caught yeast. In the previous post, I addressed feeding the starter. In future posts, I'll address catching the wild yeast and specific baking. For now it's enough to note that this is how I ususally bake. While I still have some commercial yeast, it will likely be my last year using this, and my last jar. Once I finish this, I will no longer buy my formerly beloved Red Star yeast. I used to prefer cakes of fresh yeast, but I can no longer find them. I never really enjoyed buying Fleishmann's after first trying Red Star many years ago. It's just too iffy in quality. Then, after reading about the Fleishmann heiress' political dealings of years ago, I couldn't feel happy supporting them, even with less than a dollar of my money. Since I don't live in the geographic area where Red Star sells it's cakes of fresh yeast, I had little choice if I wanted fresh. Fortunately, here at the cottage I was able to catch quality yeast. At first I only used it for my pain au levain, but now I've expanded my skill set. It's much easier than I feared it would be. The results are spectacular. It's hard to even try baking with commerical yeast now. In fact, I wonder how it ever caught on so pervasively. The bread is nowhere near the quality. Could previous generations not tell? Did they not care? How could this have happened? Here at the Cottage, at least, we'll be enjoying our wild, slow bread.