Natural Yeast Bread Recipe for Beginners

So you’ve survived the sometimes brutal initiation process of bringing your own little natural yeast ecosystem to life. Hooray for you! Now that you have this lovely yeast bubbling happily away in your jar, what do you DO with it? How do you bake with natural yeast? Let’s start with the fundamentals, then put what we know into practice with a Natural Yeast Bread Recipe made just for beginning natural yeast bakers.

Don’t have a starter yet? Learn More:

How to Bake with Natural Yeast

Let’s get one thing straight: Natural yeast CAN NOT be used in place of commercial yeast measure for measure.

Remember, we are not using lab-created Schwarzenegger yeasts-on-steroids. We’re using the real deal, and that requires a bit more yeast to leaven a loaf than we are accustomed to in commercial yeast baking. So here is our basic rule of thumb when it comes to using natural yeast in a bread recipe:

Use 1/4 cup starter for every loaf in the yield of your recipe.

For example, a recipe that makes two loaves of bread will require 1/2 cup starter. Of course, if you are baking from a sourdough or natural yeast recipe, follow the amount in the recipe, but when converting or creating your own recipes, this is the rule of thumb.

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Wild, natural yeast will also take longer to leaven a loaf than commercial yeast. This is because the process we call “leavening” is so much more than it seems at first glance. The yeasts are eating, reproducing, and making the wheat easier to digest and more nutritious. This process is necessary for our health and should not be “hurried.”

Learn More: (Summary)

What Does Naturally Yeasted Bread Taste Like?

Most people don’t realize that the bread they buy at the store often tastes more like commercial yeast than wheat. Your naturally yeasted loaves will have a more enhanced wheat flavor (especially if you are using 100% whole wheat), and will also bear the flavor of the starter. Depending on how healthy your starter is from regular feedings, the flavor of the starter in your bread can be as mild as you want it to be. When you are first getting started with natural yeast, it is not uncommon to have a few heavy, “sour” loaves. But with practice and good starter habits, your starter flavor will be consistently mild and unnoticeable (if you want it to be).

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Natural Yeast Bread Recipe for Beginners (Finally!)

Natural yeast/Sourdough recipes written by professional bakers usually require 3 things the average person doesn’t have.

Hardcore Baker’s Recipes Require:

A Food Scale. Knowledge of Baker’s percentages. 4-5 hours dedicated to multiple rises on a strict schedule.

As a mother of small children who’s only goal was nutritious bread, I had none of these things. What I did have was determination.

So I experimented. I tweaked and tested until I came up with a system that gave me all the nutritional benefits of natural yeast on a schedule that worked for me.  The result was a refrigerator-starter method that later became the basis for my first cookbook .

The Bread Geek Uses:

Tools found in the average kitchen Measured ingredients, not weighed or calculated One long hands-free rise during which you sleep/eat/work/play.

Does that sound as good to you as it did to me? Well let’s get to it then!

Natural Yeast Honey Whole Wheat Bread

Yield: 2 loaves

Ingredients:

1/2 cup start (stir before measuring)

2 ½ cups lukewarm water

2 tsp salt

1 tbsp coconut oil

¼ cup honey

5-6 cups whole wheat flour

Setting up the dough: (At least 10 hours before baking)

• Combine water, start, coconut oil, honey and salt in mixer.
• Add flour 2 cups at a time, allowing mixer to incorporate flour before adding more. Continue adding flour until dough “cleans” the sides of your mixer bowl. (There may be residual bits near the top, and here and there along the sides, but the lower half of the bowl should be clean)
• Once the sides have cleaned, allow the dough to knead for 10-20 minutes, or until dough is smooth and strong.
• Dampen a large work surface with water and pull the dough out of the mixer bowl onto your work surface. (You want just enough water to keep the dough from sticking, but not enough to water-log your dough)
• Dampen your hands with water, and knead the dough a few times, until the texture is uniform.
• Place dough smooth side up into a pre-greased bowl or container (remember to choose a container that allows your dough room to double in size. You can also split your dough and use two smaller bowls)
• Cover your bowl with greased plastic wrap or with a thick, damp kitchen towel (thin towels dry out too quickly and stick to the dough). Place on countertop to rise overnight, (or all day) for 6-10 hours.

Shaping and Final Rise

• Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
• After a minimum of 6 hours rise-time, turn dough out of bowl onto wet work surface.
• Wet hands and use dough scraper or sharp serrated bread knife to cut the dough into 2 equal pieces.
• Set pieces aside on a damp surface and grease your pans. (This gives your dough time to “relax” before shaping)
• Take one dough section and pat it out on your damp work surface.
• Shape each piece individually into sandwich loaves, artisan boules or rolls.
• Allow the loaves to rise in a warm place for 2-2 ½ hours, or until the dough slowly returns a gentle fingerprint.
• Bake for 30-35 minutes at 375 degrees F, or until a thermometer inserted into the bottom of the loaf reads at least 180 degrees.
• Remove immediately from pans and allow to cool completely before cutting.

You will have many questions along the way of your natural yeast journey, and I will do my best to answer them through posts and comment replies here on the blog. Be sure and post photos of your Natural Yeast Bread Recipe loaves on my facebook page The Bread Geek so we can all ooh and ahhh over them. You deserve it! For more Bread Geek Natural Yeast recipes, search the blog and be sure to pick up copies of my natural yeast cookbooks (scroll down for amazon links at bottom of post). What are some tips and tricks you have for newbie natural yeast bakers?