Yeast-free bread at home

X bread is the head of everything, without bread there is no dinner - almost everyone knows these and other proverbs about bread. We heard them in childhood and now, perhaps, we tell them to our children. Indeed, virtually no meal is complete without it. But bread is different. Perhaps everyone already knows the fact that the bread offered by baking companies is harmful to health, and sometimes its consumption is associated with unpleasant consequences for the body. Therefore, if you want to avoid digestive disorders and problems with the gastrointestinal tract, then you should pay close attention to your own diet, especially baked goods. And the best way to eat right is to make your own food for yourself and your family without using semi-finished products of unknown origin. So, for example, you can simply bake yeast-free bread at home. The process of making it may seem laborious, but this is only the first memory. When you try it, you will realize that “everything excellent is simple” and does not take much time. And you can always enjoy the freshest and healthiest, indescribably delicious homemade bread!

How to bake yeast-free bread at home

First, you need to decide what kind of bread you want: you can make bread with rye sourdough, with kefir, unleavened flatbreads such as lavash, sweet bread, etc. There are a huge number of recipes for yeast-free bread at home and even more methods for making them better, change or vary. As they say, there would be desire and imagination! The most common recipe for homemade yeast-free bread is rye sourdough bread.

To bake such yeast-free bread at home, you need to prepare its main ingredient, without which the bread will not “rise” - this is sourdough. Sourdough is a sour liquid dough that contains so-called “feral yeast” (a fermentation product needed to produce fluffy bread) and lactic acid bacteria (necessary for loosening the dough, adding softness and aroma). We prepare the starter once, then it only needs to be “fed” and renewed so that it does not sour.

Making rye sourdough

Preparing sourdough is very simple and will not be difficult even for novice cooks. For this, we need clean, unboiled water and good rye flour, preferably whole grain flour (if it is not available, no matter what kind of rye flour will do). The starter takes from 4 to 7 days to prepare, depending on the properties of the ingredients and the air temperature. Pour 2-4 tablespoons of rye flour into a liter jar and dilute with water to form a sour cream mixture. We cover the jar with a cotton cloth (a collection of different and interacting tissues form organs) so that the starter “breathes”, and leave it at room temperature for 8–12 hours. After the designated time has passed, the starter should be “fed”: add another 2 tablespoons of rye flour and dilute with water. We repeat this function twice a day. After some time, the leaven will develop a pleasant, slightly sour smell, it will begin to ferment and increase in size. When the starter takes up about ½ of the jar, drain half and continue to feed and replenish it. You will understand that the sourdough is ready for making bread by the sour leaven smell emanating from it, as well as by its increase in size after feeding: the sourdough will bubble and foam.

When the leaven is ready, we take part of it to make bread, and “feed” part of it, cover it with a cloth (the totality of various and interacting tissues form organs) and put it in the refrigerator. Whenever you take a leaven for baking, do not forget to later bring it to the desired volume with the freshest portion of flour and water. If you don’t bake bread for some time, then refresh the starter every 3-5 days so that it doesn’t go sour, just drain half and add a new portion of flour and water.

Homemade yeast-free bread recipe

We will need:

Water - 1 glass.
Sourdough - 1 cup.
Flour - 4 cups.
Honey/sugar - 2 tbsp. spoons.
Salt - 1 teaspoon. Spoon.
Sunflower oil - 2 tbsp. spoons.

Dissolve salt and honey/sugar in warm water. Add the starter and oil, stir thoroughly. Add flour, stirring constantly. Knead the purchased dough until smooth. Grease the baking pans with a small amount of oil and place them in the dough. Fill the molds with dough no more than halfway, because the dough rises unsurpassedly and will almost double in size. Leave the dough in a warm place for 8–12 hours (it is best to knead the dough in the evening and leave it overnight (that is, in the dark) . Bake the bread in the oven at 200 degrees until browned (approximate baking time is 20 minutes). After baking, remove the bread from the molds and leave to “rest” and cool.

Your delicious, fresh bread is ready! Eat with pleasure!

How to add abundance and nutrition to your bread?

Once you have learned how to prepare yeast-free bread at home, you can try and improve the recipe by adding new ingredients or replacing some of them with similar ones, but with different flavors.

You can make a variety of breads with rye sourdough depending on your needs, preferences and desires. For example, if you like snow-white bread, then use snow-white wheat flour in the recipe. If you want to increase the usefulness of bread, then take 50/50 rye and wheat flour. You can also add other types of flour in different proportions, for example, amaranth, buckwheat, chickpeas, flaxseed, etc. You can replace some of the flour with bran or oatmeal, oatmeal, or add whole sprouted grains. You can also put flax seeds, sunflower seeds or nuts in the dough. You can make sweet bread by increasing the honey content and adding dried fruits.

The main thing is to keep in mind that if the experience was not a success and the outcome is not to your liking, then don’t be upset! You can always try again! You can show your imagination and, if successful, invent your own unique recipe for yeast-free bread at home.

Another fundamental recommendation: bread comes out tastier and fluffier if you knead it with your hands, without using a bread machine, mixer or blender. If, while kneading the dough, you silently or out loud pronounce a mantra (for example, the mantra OM), you can improve not only the taste properties of the finished bread, but also its energy component.

Prepare your food in a good mood, charge it with good energy!

How to create yeast-free bread: the most popular recipes

Historically, for almost all people, bread is a fundamental and integral part of nutrition. The fragrant, fresh loaf with a crispy crust is so tempting that occasionally someone can resist breaking off a piece for themselves. The classic basis for making bread is yeast dough. It’s quite easy to do and usually works great even for novice housewives. But yeast is not a very necessary product, so yeast-free bread is becoming increasingly popular. The dough for it is based on a special leaven. Like the regular version, there are a lot of recipes for making this product, among which anyone will be able to choose the one that seems the most delicious and healthy. By the way, baked goods prepared without the use of yeast are perceived better by the body than fried, baked or steamed yeast mixtures.

Individualities of making yeast-free bread

Making bread without yeast has its own characteristics:

How to make yeast-free bread

There are quite a few options for producing baked goods without yeast. Their main difference is the use of sourdough. You can prepare bread in an oven or electronic oven, or in a bread maker. Some craftsmen even manage to use a microfiber for this, but this option is not widespread. For those who have not yet become adept at making dough without yeast, it makes sense to start with more conventional recipes.

Regular yeast-free bread in a bread machine

To create the dough you need:

2-2.5 cups flour
800-1000 grams of kefir (it is better to take store-bought, as it has the most homogeneous mixture)
1 pinch of salt, sugar and spices to taste

All products should be placed in the bread machine container, then set to the “Kneading dough” mode, then switch to the “Baking” mode. This bread takes about 40 minutes to prepare and is eaten after it has cooled.

Lenten bread without yeast in the oven

Such baked goods can be completely considered dietary. With all this, its usefulness is in no way inferior to the positive qualities of ordinary bread products. To make the dough you will need:

250-300 g of water
500 g flour
1 pinch of salt, sugar and spices optional

First, the starter is prepared. For it, you need to mix 1 tablespoon of flour (this is 30-40 grams) with 70 grams (a quarter cup) of lukewarm boiled water in a deep, wide container (bowl or bowl), cover everything with a lid and leave for a day. It is better for the products to stand in a warm, dark place - these are rational conditions for fermentation actions, for the sake of which, in fact, fermentation is done.

Every other day, the sourdough mixture must be stirred by adding another 50 grams of flour, after which it must be put back into a warm space. After 24 hours, the base from which the dough will be made is ready, so you can move on to kneading the bread.

The remaining amount of water and flour is poured into the fermented mixture, everything is painstakingly kneaded (the dough must be homogeneous), then left, as the bakers say, “to rest.” After 2-3 hours, spices and salt are added to it, everything is mixed again, laid out on a sheet greased or sprinkled with flour, or in a special form, and then baked. Manufacturing time is 1 hour at a temperature of 180 degrees. It is better to preheat the oven in advance before placing the dough to bake.

Monastic bread without yeast

This product is probably very familiar to almost everyone; it is very tasty and necessary. You can prepare such yeast-free bread at home, but set aside at least 2 hours for this, since the recipe is very specific.

The following ingredients are required for the dough:

800 g water
300 g whole grain flour (or hard wheat)
700 g rye flour
1 dessert spoon of salt (or 1.5 teaspoons)
100 g sourdough
100 grams of seeds or nuts

Sourdough is prepared using the usual method (it is described in the bread recipe for a bread machine). You can start making bread no earlier than it is ready. First, slightly heat the water and dissolve the salt in it. Rye flour must be sifted to saturate it with oxygen (then the finished product will be the most fluffy and soft, it will melt in your mouth). Add flour evenly into salted, still warm water. First, kneading is done with a spoon, then (when most of the flour has already been added) it will be useful to switch to manual kneading. The dough will stick to gloves, so it is better to knead it with bare hands. It is necessary to carefully crush the lumps with your fingers. It may seem like there is a lot of flour, but this is normal, since yeast-free bread according to the monastery recipe is prepared from a very dense mixture of dough. After this, the mass is left to infuse for 10 hours; it is better to cover it with a towel and place it in a warm space away from drafts. Alternatively, you can use an oven that is not turned on for this. After time has elapsed, the dough is mixed again, divided into several parts (it is better to bake several small loaves than one bulky one, this way the bread will bake better in the oven), they are all transformed into a kind of slightly flattened balls and placed on a sheet. Bake for 1 hour at 180-200 degrees. The finished product should be cut only after it has cooled completely.

Despite the tempting smell that makes you want to eat fresh bread right there, you can only eat a completely cooled product.

Having mastered the individuality of making sourdough and dough, you can not buy yeast-free bread in the store, but create it at home, providing yourself with the freshest products, the quality of which does not have to hesitate.

Yeast-free bread

Along with the fashion for healthy eating, a huge number of legends have arisen in our lives about the benefits and harms of various products. Careless traders and advertisers tried to earn as much money as possible from human horrors in this way. There are similar legends about bread. Suddenly it turned out that such a dear and beloved product is almost fatally unsafe for our health.

Read also: Homemade ice cream recipe

Legends about the dangers of bread

One of the first to arise was the myth about the dangers of yeast. On TV (Television (Greek - far and Lat. video - I see; from the New Latin televisio - far-sightedness) - a set of devices for transmitting moving images and sound over a distance) and on the Internet they suddenly started talking about the fact that yeast and their spores cause cancer and other fatal diseases (disturbances in normal functioning, performance) slowly poison our body and provoke the formation of lumps of mucus. Then a myth arose that yeast bread itself is harmful for itself, so it is better to exclude it from your diet. As a result, a myth appeared about “yeast-free” bread as the only right choice for all fans of a healthy lifestyle. This term has been embraced by almost all bakery product manufacturers, because everything that can be called healthy food is unrivaled in sales.

Where did these legends come from, and is it worth paying extra for the inscription on the packaging? Industry specialists, including a representative of the Research Institute (Scientific Research Institute - an independent institution specially created to organize scientific research and carry out experimental developments) of the baking industry, as well as managers and technologists of several large Russian companies, commented on the current situation in the bakery products market and dispelled the big deal. part of the legends. You can thoroughly familiarize yourself with all the arguments in the video project “Yeast-free bread”: the truth from the experts” by Roman Kalinin, which was recently released on the YouTube channel and caused a lot of positive feedback in the professional community. In our article we will dwell on more fascinating points and also tell you what Karelian specialists think about this.

All bread is yeast-free!

Experts in the baking industry clearly state that in nature there is no completely yeast-free dough, and ready-made bread, on the contrary, is entirely yeast-free - such is the phenomenon! How does this happen? It's quite simple.

Yeast is nothing more than single-celled fungi, tiny organisms that are found on all surfaces. The grain from which flour is ground already contains yeast that got there during the process of ripening, harvesting, storage and processing. Just imagine, in one gram of any flour there are about 1 million yeast cells and up to 20 types of fungi.

The trick is that the yeast dies in the oven during the baking process. Yeast cells do not survive at temperatures above 45 degrees. The temperature in the oven on the surface of the bread is about 200 degrees, and inside the crumb is 93-95 degrees. It turns out that after baking there is not a single living yeast cell in the bread. How, in this case, can one talk about the harm of something that does not exist?

At the Scientific Research Institute (Scientific Research Institute is an independent institution specially created to organize scientific research and carry out experimental development) HP, they will often study newly baked bread. Over the years, “surviving” yeast was never found in any of the samples. From them, only a mass of necessary microelements and vitamins remain in the finished bread: vitamins (a group of low-molecular organic compounds of relatively simple structure and varied chemical nature) of group B, proteins, calcium, potassium, magnesium, phosphorus.

Why are yeast and starters needed?

Baker's yeast and starters do two very important things: they form the structure of the dough and are responsible for the taste and smell of bread. Yeast is added to the dough for wheat bread. For rye bread, special starters are used to acidify the dough. Sourdough starters containing lactic acid bacteria also give dough rise, leavening, and an accumulation of flavor and aroma, but this ability is not as powerful as that of yeast. Sourdough bread takes longer to bake, the dough ferments longer, and rises longer, so to speed up the process, yeast is often added to this dough. It's just that not all manufacturers mention this.

Is yeast unsafe?

Yeast does not enter the bloodstream (Blood is the internal environment of the body, formed by liquid connective tissue) , as some people think, and does not cause cancer or any other diseases (disturbances in normal functioning, performance) . All research on this topic turns out to be untenable and does not contain statistically reliable data. You will not find them in harsh scientific publications. In all the programs where they intimidate with industrial yeast, there are no professional professionals.

There is an assumption that at one time this information was released by bread machine manufacturers in order to promote home baking. People were told: everything made at home is excellent, harmless and useful. In fact, no. More often, the opposite happens: “spontaneous” sourdough, bred at home or in a small bakery from unknown initial raw materials, can even contain pathogenic, in other words, terrible for health, flora. And the spores of pathogenic structures are precisely able to withstand high temperatures and not die during baking.

No yeast doesn't mean great

When choosing bread, you should look not at the presence or absence of yeast in its composition, but at the baking speed. There is baked bread with the use of accelerators and improvers. Due to the accelerated technology, such bread has little fermentation. It does not allow all its properties to be revealed, it is more difficult to digest, it contains more carbohydrates. And it quickly becomes stale and loses its taste. This kind of bread can safely be called unhealthy.

As for sourdough bread, yes, it has a higher nutritional value, because during prolonged fermentation in an acidic environment, harmful phytic acid is destroyed, which removes minerals from the body. This kind of bread is better digestible. With all this, yeast breads with a long production time have no less nutritional value than sourdough bread. The usefulness of sourdough bread can only be discussed in this case if sourdough starters are used from untainted cultures, of high quality, with proven microflora. It is also important to know that sourdough bread has the highest acidity, therefore for people with problems with the gastrointestinal tract (the gastrointestinal tract is the digestive system of the organs of real multicellular animals, designed for processing and extracting nutrients from food) , for example, gastritis, it is faster harmful.

Worldview of Karelian professionals

We contacted a well-known bakery company in the republic to get comments from Karelian professionals on this topic.

“We fully share the position of our colleagues regarding the “yeast-free” story given to us. For a technologist with the right education, this has never been a secret. It would be great if as many consumers as possible found out about this too. Once upon a time we tried to create our own starters, but this is a very labor-intensive process without a guaranteed result. Therefore, at the moment, in our production we use only natural starter cultures and yeast from proven manufacturers. As for the necessary breads, since 2018 we also have a line of healthy breads . These are “Rye Magic”, “Grain”, “Sport” breads and “Doctorskie” breads. They contain several types of flour, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, caraway seeds, flax, and apple fiber. There is also a very unique vegetable bread with carrots, potatoes, paprika, onions and herbs. In our business, we shouldn’t mislead customers in pursuit of sales, but we just need to create a tasty and high-quality product,” said Oleg Medvedev, head of the production laboratory of the Sampo bakery . And it’s hard to disagree with this.

You can see the products of the Sampo bakery, ask questions or write wishes in the VKontakte group, in the Instagram profile, on the plant’s website.