Mead Bread?

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A sponge is a very wet mixture of flour and water (at least 1 to 1 water and flour by volume - sometimes depending on your climate and/or altitude you'll need even more water in it - and it can also have little extra fermentable sugar added). That serves as a starter growth medium for your yeast.

Oh, so THAT's what it's called, I did that all the time when doing sourdough! My sourdough starter was generally happy enough that I got decent results by letting the sponge do its thing for an hour or two.

I didn't do it this time with the mead bread though because I was in a hurry so I added bread yeast <shrug>.

That's funny we all chose the same time to actually do it, I made a gluten-free bread from fermented cranberries.

I mixed a cup of cranberry moosh with two cups of water, two cups of gluten free flour blend, some chopped dates, cinnamon, the rind from a clementine and probably two tablespoons of xanthan gum with the teaspoon of bread yeast.

I think I let it rise to much though because it fell, then when I took it out of the pans, it shrank!! The little loaves were OK (very light texture and I tried using a lot more xanthan gum than previous on the hopes that maybe this one wouldn't fall like the last one) but the big one's pretty funny looking.

Just cut it open and it's all collapsed and gummy looking, so into the toaster it goes!!
 
Loaf number 2 is currently baking, and it's full of Golden/Incan berries and the lees of the mead made with those. While it was baking, I had an idea...

I'm taking this loaf to a party later along with some of my mead. I wanted to get something to go on the bread (other than cheese...), and I had the idea of making a mead, using it's lees to make sourdough bread, and then making a reduction of some of the mead along with whatever was used (in my case Incan berries) to make a nice dip to accompany the tasting. Is this just over-kill, or is this a potentially wonderful tasting/food pairing idea? ;D
 
i think its cool.... i was whatching brewmasters and the egyptians made wort my dipping bread loafs in the must and then dquizing it out........so if they can do that can you take mead bread to make more mead?
 
i think its cool.... i was whatching brewmasters and the egyptians made wort my dipping bread loafs in the must and then dquizing it out........so if they can do that can you take mead bread to make more mead?

Probably? Mead bread is basically just a culture of yeast. I think it might work better before cooking, though. Just a thought.
 
so then new yeast is on the bread than in the dough, is it the same strain or totally different type of yeast? for example i use lalvin1118 if i brew, then use the lees for bread and try to use the bread to make another batch of mead, is it still lalvin 1118????
 
so then new yeast is on the bread than in the dough, is it the same strain or totally different type of yeast? for example i use lalvin1118 if i brew, then use the lees for bread and try to use the bread to make another batch of mead, is it still lalvin 1118????

Probably. But you would have to use the starter, not the baked bread, to start a batch of mead. So...as long as you keep your starter alive, you can potentially have whatever yeast you use. The only concern I'd have is with mutation. Theoretically, the yeast could evolve into something slightly different.

The other concern you might have (though I don't, because I like sour beer) is the yeast/bacteria culture accumulated in making the sourdough starter just from the air could do some funky things to your mead that you didn't expect.

One final thought, I'm not sure how well flour does in mead, but if it's a small quantity used to build up a starter culture, it should be negligible.
 
So I was more patient the second loaf and tried to get the wine yeast to start something, but it never did so I added more bread yeast to it... This time it didn't rise and fall, it just never really rose much, but the texture is better than last time. Reminiscent of a hot cross bun.

I think the reason old recipes sometimes called for a piece of bread to innoculate a must is because it's the ideal food to encourage the wild yeasties you're after - I mean, we feed our wine yeast with yeast hulls, right? And if you'r trying to get yeast overgrowth out of your body, you can't eat anything that feeds yeast or that has ever been near yeast, like bread, flour, sugar and vinegar (what a dull and dreary existence that is, let me tell you).

This is more like holding the yeast hulls (and the guts) out and going, "Heeeeere, yeastie yeastie yeastie!"

And in the way, way, way back, they didn't have powdered yeast purchased at the store, they just kept using the same culture by reserving a blob of dough from the last batch or keeping a sourdough going, and they probably reused the dregs from previous batches to get new batches started. I don't think you'd want to use a sourdough starter for wines because it more than likely is soured by similar bugs to the ones who want to turn your precious mead into vingegar...