Beer Barm Bread
Some days planning is over-rated. I was standing in the kitchen of a friend and watching them bottle the Stout that they had made and realized that I was looking at a ton of yeast that I could be making bread out of. I asked for the barm and was gifted two containers full of beer and barm. Originally it was thought that it would take up to 72 hours to settle, but it took until the next morning and I immediately started looking for recipes and found the following:
http://bewitchingkitchen.com/2009/09/09/barm-bread/
The first instruction is:
Heat the beer to 160F, remove from the heat and quickly add the flour. Transfer to a bowl and allow it to cool to 68F, then add your white levain.
This would kill off any of the live yeast and then re-populate it with the yeast from the levain. I decided that I would try this method, as well as simply feeding the barm with flour and water like I would any starter. I put 250g of barm in each container and followed the heating instructions for one (adding 1 T commercial yeast rather than a levain, because I didn’t have a levain) and just fed the other. They were labled “heated” and “unheated”.
I really need better names.
Notes:
2/2
The heated starter, because of the amount of yeast in it, was really bubbly and vigorous. It tripled in volume in about an hour, surprising me greatly. The unheated one was bubbly, but the overall appearance was smoother. The heated starter collapsed about an hour after it trebled.
2/3
Added 1/2 c bread flour and 1/2 c water at around 8:00 a.m.
About 50 minutes later, the heated starter was very bubbly and the unheated one was increasing at a rate of about half the amount of the heated starter.
At 10:00 a.m. the heated starter was very bubbly and the unheated starter was now increasing at the same rate.
At about 11:00 a.m., I started following the instructions to make bread. I used Jennifer Heise’s recipe for barm bread (http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/SCA/cooking/recipes/bread1.html) with some modifications for the unheated yeast. I did not add honey and did not add baking powder.
At 1:50 p.m. the unheated yeast bread had increased by half.
At around 3:00 p.m. it was time to knead the heated yeast bread and realize that I really needed to name these things because the whole heated/unheated thing is really confusing to write. Based upon the recommendation of a good friend, I shall now refer to them as “Thor” (heated) and “Grim” (unheated).
I put the raising bread into the refrigerator overnight around 4:00 p.m. as my window for bread making was closing and I wanted to slow everything down. The most notable thing that happened was that the starters were both continuing to double and bubble well into the night. I checked them before bed and they were both just over doubled (not quite trebled). The activity had slowed by morning. I fed them again on 2/4 with 1/2 c bread flour and 1/4 c filtered water and they commenced to bubbling again in about 30 minutes.
2/4
The bread came out of the refrigerator around 8:30 a.m. and Thor was smooth and beautiful and looked ready for baking. I heated the oven to 450F and stuck a dutch oven into it for 40 minutes. Then I dusted the bottom of the pot with corn meal and plopped the raw dough into the hot pot, put the cover on, placed the whole shebang into the oven, and dropped the temperature to 425F. I set the timer for 30 minutes and walked away.
About fifteen minutes into the baking time I realized that I had made a fatal error in both loaves - I forgot to add salt. This will decrease the flavor in the final loaves, but as I will be doing this again soon, I can fix it the second time around.
When I took the lid of the pot off, I was greeted by a beautiful, rounded loaf that smelled absolutely amazing. I put the bread back in for another 15 minutes, uncovered, and gloated to a friend online that I would have fresh bread in 15 minutes.
Why did I cover and uncover my bread? Crust. There are a few methods for gaining an awesome, crispy crust and one of them is trapping the steam generated by the liquid cooking off of the bread with a pot lid. You can also spray the top of the loaf with water and/or put a cup of ice cubes in another container on the bottom rack of the oven when you put the bread into the oven. I’ve used all of these methods and they all work very well.
While Thor was being baked, I put Grim on top of the stove in a bread pan and allowed it to come up to room temperature with the intent to bake it when Thor was done.
I got impatient, and good thing, because Thor was ready to come out of the oven five minutes before I had set the timer. The bread needed salt, but we knew that. It had a nice crumb and was spongy and very tasty. You could faintly smell the beer, but the taste wasn’t there.
I slung Grim into the oven at 425F and set the timer for an hour. In retrospect, it should have been more like 45 minutes at 450F. The crumb was similar to Thor but was darker and a bit more dense, which is more because of the wheat flour than anything else. I have to wait for my husband to get home from work for a final determination on the bread’s tastyness to people who aren’t me.
To recap the recipes:
THOR
This is the heated and repopulated starter.
The recipe used was: http://bewitchingkitchen.com/2009/09/09/barm-bread/
The dough was refrigerated overnight to slow the raising process.
I then heated up a pan at 450F for 40 minutes, put some corn meal in the bottom of it and put the dough into the pot.
The oven door was closed and the heat was dropped to 425F and the bread cooked, with the lid on the pot, for 30 minutes. Then the lid was removed and the bread was cooked for another 10 minutes.
GRIM
This is the barm that was fed and nothing else done to/with it.
The recipe used was: http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/SCA/cooking/recipes/bread1.html
The dough was refrigerated overnight to slow the raising process.
This dough was put in a standard bread pan and cooked at 425F for 45 minutes.
In both cases, I checked to make sure that the bread was 210F internally before slicing them open.