Be careful what you joke about. After watching a food challenge cooking show, I joked that Kent and I should come up with challenges for each other. He immediately challenged me to make my own yeast for bread making. Well, I couldn’t back out of it so I started researching.
There are actually several options for making your own yeast. Most sources talk about using potato water but they called for hops. I didn’t want to mess with trying to track down hops so I kept hunting. Finally, I came across a site with a recipe for yeast water that seemed like something I could easily do with what I already had at home. It uses raisins.
http://originalyeast.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-to-make-yeast-water.html
I put the raisins in a jar with tap water. In about a week, the raisins were floating and there was a layer of foam across the top. I used a peasant-style pot bread recipe from Nancy Baggett’s Kneadlessly Simple cookbook. It is a kneadless bread that relies on a slow rise of over 18 hours. For the second rise, you fold in the outer edges of the dough.
The recipe is available at
Instead of mixing instant yeast into the 2 cups ice water, I simply used two cups of the yeast water. And guess what? It rose! Woo Hoo!From the photo, it looks like it didn’t rise on the one side. That is more the result of my clumsiness in moving it from the bowl to the hot stew pot. In transferring the dough, I accidentally collapsed the one side. I really liked this bread despite it being a white bread. That’s mostly because of the crust. Placing it in the hot pot really created a wonderful chewy yet flaky crust. This is a crust that you do not want to cut off.
I’m not sure if I can just add water to the jar and continue to generate yeasty enough water, but I’ll give it another try with another bread.
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Excellent job! You might consider making a starter from your next yeast capture. Then you have the potential of sourdough. Mmmm sourdough
So basically you replace the dry yeast with 2 cups of yeast water?? Just being sure.
Yep, that was basically it. It all worked so much more simply than I expected it to.
I read elsewhere about using grapes as a source of yeast. How very Italian! So I guess the raisins are just a dried version of this. Gotta try it!
Actually, I probably should have added to the original post that the raisins I used were ones that we had dried at home from grapes that we didn’t get eaten in time. We just hung the grapes up with the pots and pans and eventually got raisins.
How delightful!!! I shall try this clever idea asap :). I’m a noooooovice breader, so here goes :) xo, mrs. T
If you shake the water and raisins, you want have a foam on the top. The raisins will be floating and you just use a small strainer and pour the water off and you have liquid yeast. Now you can add flour and in a week the flour and yeast will rise inside the glass.