Much to the dismay of preppers everywhere, yeast does expire. It loses the ability to make bread rise, as it’s a living culture. You can get it to last about a year or more in the freezer, but since it isn’t great for long-term food storage, alternatives to making bread should be made.
It isn’t that difficult to make bread without yeast, but you need to understand your options and prepare your food stash accordingly. Personally, I like to practice too. It’ll help you know what method you prefer and which changes can be made to the recipes to be more palatable for your needs.
SOURDOUGH – The first thing I would try to make is sourdough bread. Sourdough is bread with “wild-harvested yeast”, meaning that it’s yeast you can grow naturally at home. Sourdough bread takes practice, but there are several great guides out there. You can keep your starter going and your yeast alive all the time, so you’ll never run out. You can also buy starter if you don’t feel like making it from scratch.
Baking Soda ONLY – If all you have on hand is some baking soda, you can make what is often referred to as “salt-rising bread.” This the bread pioneers on the Oregon Trail made often. The salt was saleratus, or what today, most closely resembles baking soda. Give this one a try! Unfortunately, this isn’t a great option for those with any kind of sensitivity to dairy. Most recipes call for milk or buttermilk.
Baking Powder ONLY – If you have some baking powder on hand, you can make bread using it as a leavening agent. You can make some pretty good biscuits and cornbread using baking powder. The Augason Farms Biscuit Mix, right, has no leavening, meaning that you will need to add leavening to make your biscuits, but can do so with baking powder. Cornbread mixes also require baking powder. Once you make the batter, you can also make muffins.
Bread With Baking Soda and Baking Powder -These breads will have no yeast, but require both baking powder and baking soda. Try Irish Soda Bread. Mixes can be purchased at most grocery stores and online and the flavor is not too bad!
Unleavened Bread – unleavened bread, such as tortillas and flatbreads are made without using rising agents at all. Try making hardtack or matzo. Matzo resembles a cracker, much like hardtack. It’s made generally only of flour and water (the flour is barley, oat, rye, spelt, or wheat). Here’s a great recipe showing how to make a homemade Matzo (sometimes also called Matzoh).
These options for bread when you have no yeast should be a great place to start! The important thing is to experiment with making these types of breads so you know what you personally prefer. While you should probably still store yeast, it is important to realize that it has a fairly short shelf life, so knowing how to make some tasty bread after the SHTF will be beneficial for helping you stay satiated.
I have heard that yeast expires but never really had any that wouldn’t work. I keep a tub in the fridge and have a buncha packs in the freezer for years. Both kinds still proof for winemaking, or bread, or to make a batch up to treat the septic every couple months.
It’s still good to know how to make it without yeast. I didn’t know about baking soda bread. I will try some since we have a lot of that vacuum packed away.
There is an old, timelapse vid of a fly landing on sugar water. The ‘mother of vinegar’ spreads from where it’s hairy, dirty feet have touched. It’s offspring are in some of the more-adventurous, third worlder markets, here. “Vinegar eels”.
And, there is a tribe, which uses mycelium, from the root hairs on a Khadia cactus, to start fermentation. (Common groundcover, in my semi-arid, urban sprawl.)
“pastrami (n.) 1940, from Yiddish pastrame, from Rumanian pastrama, probably from Turkish pastrima, variant of basdirma “dried meat,” from root *bas- “to press.”
(Soured, between the horse and rider.)
There are countless sources of wild yeast, including on the bottom of your compost pile and wastebasket, in the dust on all the surfaces you touch and the air which you are breathing, right now.
But, in religious descriptions, this is deservedly unclean. You’re taking a calculated risk.
For instance, compost tea should be buried at the drip line of the crown of the plant — not inhaled, not on broken skin, not eaten off the leaves; this is infectious, afaic.
Or, it might start a wine or a cheese.
I have been in contact with stinky food, stinky people, ate all of the animal, and have become critically ill, for some time, so help me God. Intelligent people, tread wisely (if I like you).
An aerobic and acidic environment is most preferred, for mostly friendly bacteria (you hope). Even the correct ones will be cathartic, and the uninitiated should generally build a tolerance to food poisoning, akin to dogs and garbage-eating primitives. Take me for an example.
I use sourdough. Using sourdough alone it takes about 3 hours for the first rise, which is punched down and divided into loaves. The second rise is also about 3 hours.
When using sourdough it mix the start with 2 cups water and two cups flour. You will know it is active in a couple of hours by the bubbles in the batch. The next morning, pull off 2 cups and put into a loosely sealed jar and put that aside in your refrigerator. (This is your start for next time).
Use the remaining to make bread, pancakes, or whatever you’re making. The start is always ready to make and continues to be active. The longest I’ve kept mine in the refrigerator before using it is about a month. Refrigerator storage only slows down the growth, not stop it, so it needs to be refreshed from time to time by adding flour and water and pulling some to place back to maintain the culture.
This is what my grandparents did, and my parents, and I am passionate this down to my kids and any of my neighbors that want to keep their families fed when times are good or when times are bad.
Two loaves of bread cost about $1 to make. Way cheaper than what you get in your supermarket. Plus, you know the ingredients.
CM
This site is never coming back is it??
AB,
Doesn’t look like it.
Hows the secession movement going?
Seems that way. If this reply gets moderated, I may never come back. Is Mac trying to kill it, or is he bored, or is he just incompetent?
Use a unique figure of speech, and hear it appear in a radio show.
Kraft Calumet baking poweder is toxic! Don’t use it! It contains
sodium alluminum sulfate! Aluminum has been attributed to Alzheimers! It is not supposed to be ingested like iron and other minerals!
Kraft used to use cream of tartar, but to save money, decided to poison bakers and their families, like the dental and water industry which started poisonning the water with sodium flouride, which is a hazardous biproduct of the aluminum smelting process! A study had been conducted prior to flouridated water, dental treatments, and toothpaste concluding that regions with naturally occuring calcium flouride had fewer incidents of cavities and osteo-porosis. Naturally, it was the clacium and not the flouride which led to stronger bones and teeth! So now we get sodium flouride which leads to flourosis!
Here is a non toxic recipe for baking powder, which is what it had been until recently, within a few years:
Cream of tartar is a natural biproduct of the fermentaion process of wine making, so, it is kind of expensive.
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/4 teaspoon of corn starch
1/4 teaspoon of baking soda.
Anon, Yep the bastards are putting Aluminum in everything. Try finding a brand of tortillas that doesn’t contain aluminum. Here in central Arizona they’ve been chem trailing us non stop for years. Eventually the food chain will collapse, aluminum and barium are showing up in soil samples and streams, and getting worse. Just depressing really !
Does it help if your Wife has a Yeast infection ?
It helps closet cases.
fwiw, the immune compromised and exposed…
let’s say, exposed to live foods…
might experience a systemic infection, even through inhalation, open pores, or broken skin.
No bacteria outside of it’s normal place is beneficial / symbiotic.
my wife has been making bread since 1970, start with quart jar, 1/2 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons instant potatoes, 1 cup of hot water. To start make it with the same recipe for 2 to 3 weeks, you can tell when it starts fermentation by the change in color. Debbie feeds hers every 2 weeks, sometimes she makes bread, sometimes she just pours enough off to feed it again. Keep it in the frig and take care of it, lasted as long as our marriage so far make a small hole in the jar lid. good luck