WEEK
49
A Levain of My Own

If I could convince you of just one thing about making bread, it would be how little effort it takes to cultivate a sourdough.
—Daniel Leader, Local Breads, 2007

Charlie van Over’s levain was making great bread, but it was time to create my own personal, local levain. The wheat, after all, was local, the water was local, and if I could build a starter from local yeast, I’d literally be feeding on—becoming, in a sense—my environment.

And beginning a tradition. The notion was irresistible. But where to get local wild yeast? Actually yeast is everywhere — in the air we breathe, even in the flour we buy. I thought of just putting a batter of flour and water in the yard and seeing what local flora settled in, but images of spiders and fungi and pollen discouraged me. Then just before leaving for France I happened to read that the haze you see on grapes is actually wild yeast.

I didn’t have any grapes, but I had seen something strikingly similar to that haze, more commonly referred to in our household as “that damned haze,” since it had to be wiped off each and every backyard apple with a dish towel. For years I had wondered, What on earth is that stuff ? Pollen? Pollution? A by-product of the apple? It reminded me of the haze that accumulates on the windshield inside a car (which is caused by outgassing from the plastics in the interior).

Thus I had my yeast source, but the problem was that every time I opened a book to learn how to make a levain from scratch, the directions were hopelessly confusing and intimidating: feed it every twelve hours, stir every six, discard half, put it in the refrigerator, take it out of the refrigerator, start with rye, switch to wheat, leave open, wrap tightly, watch for bubbles, mark the container so you know when the mixture doubles, and so on. Adding to the confusion was the vocabulary — words such as chef, seed, and barm, used to describe the various stages of levain development.

At the Ritz, however, Chef Didier had made a levain with no fuss at all, starting by letting a cut-up apple sit in a bottle of water for three days, then mixing in some flour. It seemed uncomplicated and foolproof. I cut up a nice, hazy apple from the harvest, added the peel of a second for good measure, and dropped it all into a bottle of our good Hudson Valley tap water (which I had first let sit out overnight to dechlorinate). Three days later, I measured out equal weights of apple water and my Indian-stone-ground organic wheat,* covered the bowl with plastic wrap, and waited.

Within twenty-four hours, small bubbles had appeared. I fed the starter with more flour and water, and by the next morning, it was vigorously bubbling away. When I uncovered the plastic, I was greeted with the wonderfully tangy aroma of fermentation. I’d done it! It really was that easy. I fed it again and went off to work.

But what had I done? I felt as if I’d created life, which of course I hadn’t. I had just encouraged the life that was there to reproduce at an accelerated rate. My starter was a rich mixture of wild yeast varieties (all wild yeast belongs to the species Saccharomyces exiguous, a different species from commercial yeast), flour, and the by-products of fermentation: alcohol, carbon dioxide, and an assortment of organic acids. I may not have started life, but I had started a tradition, one that might even outlive me (though I hoped not anytime soon).

Well, there are traditions, and there are traditions. This one appeared fated to be short lived, for upon my return home that evening, although my levain de la maison Alexander had doubled in size, it contained no bubbles, a detail whose significance wouldn’t become apparent until later. I unwrapped the plastic, stuck my nose in to inhale that yeasty aroma, and was almost knocked over by a foul, evil smell. I called Anne over to confirm.

“Eeww! Throw it out!” she pleaded, not aware of the emotional attachment I’d already formed to my two-day-old creation. Instead I discarded about two-thirds of it (Anne immediately removed the garbage bag from the house, apparently fearing that the thing might overwhelm us à la friendship bread) and fed it with fresh flour and water.

What happened? How had it gone from exquisite to foul in only eight hours? It wasn’t until the next morning, in the shower (where I do some of my best thinking), that I realized something truly startling: I had M. Bigo’s problem, the very same one that led Louis Pasteur down the road to the discovery of the chemistry of yeast! My levain wasn’t just wild yeast; it was wild yeast and bacteria, and it is the bacteria that give sourdough breads their characteristic sourness. But over the past few hours, the bacteria had flourished, choking out the yeast, which explained the absence of bubbles, not to mention the foul smell.

My mind moved forward a hundred or so years from Pasteur to the Lallemand yeast factory in Montreal and the lessons I’d learned there. The trick in producing commercial yeast is in creating an environment that is more conducive to yeast than to bacteria. That means plenty of oxygen. I’d kept my starter tightly covered, partly because I’d seen fruit flies hovering in the vicinity, and after all, I’d figured, yeast thrives in an anaerobic environment.

I had forgotten the most important lesson to be learned from Lallemand: yeast undergoes fermentation, the kind desirable for bread, in the absence of oxygen, but to make it thrive—that is, reproduce, which is exactly what building your levain is all about—it needs plenty of oxygen. How could I have forgotten the deafening roar of the blowers in the yeast factory? My tightly wrapped, oxygen-starved bowl was not conducive to yeast reproduction but, like M. Bigo’s, was quite receptive to bacteria.

Throwing on my bathrobe, I ran down to the kitchen, where I again discarded most of the sour-smelling starter, added fresh flour, and whipped vigorously, trying to introduce oxygen. Then, to allow some oxygen in, I covered it with a screen instead of plastic wrap. If a couple of fruit flies got in, well, that’s life. I wasn’t giving up yet. I owed it to Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur to see this thing through. After several more days of stirring, discarding, and refreshing, wondering if I was throwing good flour after bad, I opened the container and was greeted with the smell of ethyl alcohol. The patient had survived. And I had a levain of my own.