Yeast Water in 3.5 days
Tuesday night I put together one cup of currants (in my last post I wrongly called them sultanas - what's the difference?) and two cups of water. Every day I kept them in a warm 29C environment using my yoghurt maker and by early hours Saturday morning it had matured. All the currants are floating and it's fizzing. It's now in the fridge. Tonight I'll put together a preferment to make a bread tomorrow. So far so good. I do have some questions on maintenance though...
Is it better to take off however much YW I need, keep the remainder in the fridge and when needed just feed and allow to mature at room temperature?
Or is it better to feed straight away, allow to mature and then refrigerate?
If the second way could I just proceed straight onto a levain build using the YW that has been sitting in the fridge for a while or would I need to repeat the process first? This is why I think the first way might be best should one need to do this.
How often do I replace the fruit?
The yeast water did produce a 'skin' which I just stirred in as I thought it harmless. Was I correct in doing so?
Oh and any recipe ideas are welcome!
here is my .2 worth. When the fruit is floating I leave it alone. I just joined the Fermentation baking Facebook page and they remove the fruit from the YW once it gets fizzing well . So they store in the fridge without fruit. They then remove however much they need for a bake and feed it back to very active fizzing. I would just as soon keep fruit in it, remove it when it sinks and replenish water as I use it.
Lately I have taken out about 25g of apple yeast water , this is my mainstay that is almost 6 yrs old, I add enough water to it to make 100 g and 6 dried dates and leave in warm place for a couple hours. Ready and fizzing like crazy. Add as part of overall water in formula. That is enough for a 3 boule 750g each batch.
Of course I now have an apple YW and a date YW since the dates were/ are still good and floating.
Make sure and keep a nice large piece of orange peel in your YW . It keeps it fresh and fruit lasts longer. Don’t add sugars or honey to the stored YW... isn’t necessary.
So in answer take out YW and replace with more and no need to put it on counter in warm place again. Just leave the base YW in fridge and use out of it and replace water and fruit as needed.
Hope this helps. I will say so far it is impossible to mess up
as far as recipe just do a 1-2-3 sourdoughand sub some YW for the liquid. There are lots of formulas in the TFL search.
Sounds simple enough. I'll need to go and get some oranges. I've settled on a recipe and have begun the Pre-Ferment. Will let you know how it goes. I was thinking about a Sourdough/YW combo but I want to do something 100% YW for now so I can appreciate it for what it is and then I can go into hybrids.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/55266/swiss-farmhouse-bread-hamelman