Yeast is one of the great natural miracles – and one that we should hold in great esteem as it enables us to make three essentials: bread, beer and wine!
When the first caveman baked his first loaf, however, he didn’t have baker’s yeast available to him. The process of fermentation is enabled by the hundreds of thousands of strains of yeast that float upon the breeze. In Belgium they make an ale called lambic by leaving it in a flat open-topped vessel high up in the brew house and waiting for the indigenous yeasts to land on the new source of food. The resulting brew ferments very slowly and has a delightful sour character. But distinctive yeasts are also found much closer to home. Home bakers can even make their own sourdough starter from airborne yeasts. In his rather good book “The Handmade Loaf”, Dan Lepard sets out a way for home bakers to make a “leaven” or sourdough starter. He suggests that you add small amounts of rye flour, strong white flour, raisins and yoghurt to warm water and then “feed” the mixture daily with additional flour until it is bubbling with life. Then you nurse this “mother” and re-grow it whenever you take some out to make a loaf.
At Country Style we have grown our own unique culture and it is the backbone of all our breads. It is said that during the Californian gold rush prospectors would carry a jar of their sourdough starter with them (clamped in an armpit to keep it warm as they stumbled through the rocky mountain winter). Perhaps the well regarded sourdough bread in San Francisco owes its rich taste to the descendants of those prospectors yeast colonies? There’s no doubt that good sourdough bread has a magnificent depth of flavour. We hope that Country Style will be known for its unique strain of “Yorkshire” natural yeasts.
We visited the site of the old Knapton Lane Orchard. Once, one of the network of commercial apple orchards which ringed the city of York and supplied the local markets from the mid 1800s up to the 1920s.
The old orchard is divided into domestic gardens now but many of the original trees still remain. These trees form a unique and invaluable repository of the diverse apple varieties that used to make up our national heritage. Rare and indigenous varieties such as Flower of the Town, Ribston Pippin and Lord Hindlip can still be found here and it is the yeast cultures which flourish on the skins of these apples which we were looking for to help us grow our levain culture.