(this is not meant to throw shade or anything – I’m purely curious)
So – story time!
I went to the fanciest bakery in town to try out their so called sourdough bread, since everyone praises their bread.
Thankfully they also have a website and for some of the breads, they do list the ingredients by %
I couldn’t find one single bread that only had sourdough starter as the sole raising agent.
They either state the ingredients as:
– sourdough yeast OR
– 16% sourdough starter, 0.04% bakery yeast
Based on the look of the bread, it looks more like a high hydration yeast bread, but the blisters do indicate some sourdough starter was used (I guess).
Furthermore, the taste and texture is nothing like my loaves: no sour flavour at all and quite dry (compared to how moist my regular bread is). It’s also very light for a 500g loaf.
I got the bread because I wanted to compare how my loaves taste compared to “the real ones”, but now I feel a little betrayed.
I can understand that using only sourdough starter might get the bread too sour for most people (my Dad won’t eat my loaves because they taste “spoiled”). But don’t call it sourdough bread 💔
So – does anyone have knowledge if professional bakeries (not micro-bakeries) actually use yeast too for their sourdough bread?
by StrawberryOwn6978
17 Comments
Tartine Bakery, Manresa Bread, and Acme Bread are the famous professional bakeries in our area and looking through their ingredients, they don’t have yeast listed for their sourdough breads. it might depend on the bakery
I would imagine that yes they would , it’s a consistency thing. Selling bread is their ‘bread and butter’ (pun intended) if the conditions are not favourable then adding a tiny amount of of yeast can allow the dough to do its thing in the time needed by the bakery.
I think they would also try – as much as possible – to avoid this.
.2 % max (per wt. of flour) is legal in French Sourdough Baking Laws
Ken Forkish’s book (Flour Water Salt Yeast) uses both levain and commercial active dry yeast, often in the same dough. Whether his bakery did or whether Ken’s Pizza does, I don’t know.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them do. I know most bread sold by inhouse supermarket bakeries as “sourdough” are dry/ instant/ whatever yeast breads with a bit of “sourdough culture” added – probably for legal purposes. But these breads are to proper sourdough kind of as expensive versions of instant coffee are to freshly ground.
I own a bakery and we do use commercial yeast but only in non-sourdough breads like our brioche that we use for pastries. Our sourdough loaves, focaccia, bagels, baguettes, etc are all 100% leavened with our starter.
We are a very small bakery though and I imagine what we do is far from the norm.
If my math is correct, for a 500 gm loaf, .04% would come out to .2 gm of yeast. I can’t believe .2 gm would do much of anything to raise a loaf of bread. Maybe it is listed due to the possibility of mixing from other products being made.
Entirely depends on the bakery. Scaling up in volume of loaves you are producing makes naturally leavening your dough increasingly difficult. If it is cheap (less than $8 or so a loaf) I would venture to guess it is yeasted. If they aren’t making a point to tell you it is naturally leavened, it is probably yeasted.
Maybe. 0.04% is quite a tiny amount. I would guess that moderates any small variation in the sourdough culture day to day. I would expect a bakery adding yeast to speed up process to be adding at least 0.5%.
I make my own bread or when I am lazy I have to go in search of: LaBrea Country White Sourdough, which seems like the most “real sourdough” I can find locally. They specifically call out over 24 hours to make their breads.
Ingredients: Unbleached Enriched Flour, Water, Sour Culture, Salt, Wheat Germ, Semolina.
“Our La Brea Bakery Country White Sourdough loaf has a subtle sour flavor, a hearty crumb and a beautiful, golden crust.
From starter to finish, it takes over 24 hours to make a loaf of La Brea Bakery bread. Our complex flavors, open air crumb and crispy crunchy crust are developed through a long fermentation using our original natural sourdough starter, high quality ingredients and long proofing times.”
Why do we use the word “yeast” to mean “industrial yeast”? All bread has yeast, whether it’s slow/sour or fast/industrial. I know this is the convention in the community, it is just so cringe to me, it’s like we have a medieval understanding of bread.
Judging from my kitchen, there is enough yeasts of all varieties floating around that no product is ever purely one or the other.
Former sourdough bakery owner. We used zero commercial yeast at my bakery, but as others have said, it can be common to include small amounts for consistency.
i used to work in one and we absolutely didn’t use yeast for the bread. only added some yeast, in addition to levain, to the croissant dough.
also, this is the bread from that bakery, right? i truly wouldn’t give the okay to sell that.
Most likely the 0.04% commercial yeast is being used to create a yeasted preferment.
I’m guessing the bakery isn’t dumping Fleischman’s in their doughs, but they probably have different starters for different recipes, and some may include yeasted preferments.
I’ve suspected this from the super light, dry, extra chewy, flavorless loaves I’ve purchased in the past from bakeries that weren’t particularly transparent about their practices.
Type 2 and Type 4 sourdoughs are inoculated with baker’s yeast. The bakery I work in inoculated their starter with standard instant yeast and has been maintaining it for several years using the traditional feeding schedule of traditional type 1 sourdoughs. S. cerevisiae is used for consistency and uniformity in proofing and baking.
[Some of them don’t](https://bordenavesbakery.com/). Bordenave’s, the one I linked, makes a lot of loaves, but only their boulé is pure sourdough. But that particular loaf of bread has been my index for great bread for a great many years. I was surprised how similar my own loaves tasted once I got my starter going.
The lack of sour flavour is mostly down to how long it fermented. They will advertise that they fermented it for 24 hours or so.
Yes many bakeries use yeast in sourdough. Depends where you are what the requirements are to call something sourdough, probably it’s just got to have some sourdough added and that’s it