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Baking Campagne with Paradise Yeast

By ky

What on earth is paradise yeast?

Someone recently gave me a jar of something called paradise yeast. The name alone tells you something is going on. It appears to be a liquid culture of fermented apple juice. Looking it up: in 2007, apple juice at Anzai Orchard in Fukushima happened to ferment and go fizzy, and a portion of it was passed on to Paradise Alley, a slightly unusual bakery in Kamakura. That is the origin. Riding the fermentation boom, it has acquired something of a following — I am not much interested in that kind of mythologised story myself, but the sheer effervescence of it is remarkable, and it made me want to bake with it.

The first failure

I had been told the culture had been left alone for a while, so I started by feeding it and bought an apple at the supermarket. I grated half an apple, squeezed the juice out and mixed it into the culture. Carbon dioxide came off at astonishing speed. Yeasts breaking down proteins and sugars and giving off carbon dioxide is exactly what fermentation is, so this certainly looked capable of raising bread. I worked the way I normally do with sourdough: mix the culture with bread flour, leave it a while, and use that as a leaven for the dough.

Ingredients (leaven):

Ingredients (dough):

It did not work. It fermented, certainly, but the dough went slack and would not rise properly. I had noticed something similar when I baked with a culture raised from kiwi fruit: leave it too long and the enzymes in the fruit destroy the gluten in the dough during fermentation, so the rise cannot hold. That is presumably what happened to this first paradise yeast campagne.

What matters when baking campagne with paradise yeast

With sourdough, the point is to take a long time — drawing out gluten and fermenting slowly to bring out acidity and flavour. With paradise yeast, that approach clearly will not raise the dough. The aim instead is to ferment it thoroughly and get the rise in a short time.

Key points:

  • Do more stretch and folds at the start, to develop the gluten properly.
  • For the bulk ferment, use a proofing box or similar to hold the temperature and ferment fully in a short time.
  • Do the second proof, after shaping, cold in the fridge.

So — will it work this time? The second paradise yeast campagne. Let's bake.

Step 1 — Making the dough

Since I want to get from mixing to shaping as quickly as possible, I am combining all the ingredients at once.

Ingredients:

1. Dissolve the salt thoroughly in the water, then pour it over the bread flour. Add all of the paradise yeast. Think of it as bringing the flour and water together rather than kneading them. Start with the scraper, turning the flour up from the bottom of the bowl. Gradually the two become one thing. A tremendous amount of foam appears at this point; press on regardless. Once they are more or less combined, use your hands to bring it firmly together.

2. Cover the bowl and let the dough settle at room temperature for 30 minutes, adding a light stretch and fold every 15 minutes. The aim here is not fermentation but hydrating the flour.

3. Ferment at 35°C for two hours in a proofing box. Take it out once, an hour in, for a stretch and fold. Stretch the dough properly and fold it to the opposite side, rotating as you go, about eight times — roughly twice as much as with sourdough.

4. Using the scraper, ease the dough gently out of the bowl onto a floured surface. Flatten it lightly into a rough square, fold it in from all four sides about four times, round it into an oval, and place it in a cloth-lined banneton.

5. Second proof in the fridge for about three hours. It should roughly double, and press back against the pad of a finger.

Step 2 — Baking

What you need:

  • Dutch oven (220mm internal diameter, 100mm deep)
  • Baking paper
  • Razor blade

1. Put the Dutch oven in the oven and preheat to 250°C.

2. Once it is up to temperature, turn the dough out of the basket onto a sheet of baking paper.

3. Score the top with the razor.

4. Take out the Dutch oven, lower the dough in on its paper, put the lid on, and bake at 230°C for 20 minutes.

5. Take the lid off and bake at 240°C for a further 10 minutes.

Eating it, I thought the apple aroma was perhaps a little too strong. Using less paradise yeast would presumably fix that, though fermentation would then take longer. The fermentation also still feels somewhat weak. The bubbles fall clearly into large and small, and a wider spread of sizes would give a lighter result. There is more to work out here about the balance of fermentation and dough tension.

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