Answer 1:
First thing's first -- bread can be made without adding store-bought yeast at all! This involves creating a starter, which can also be called a mother dough. The starter is made from a flour and water mixture set out at room temperature for a few days. Yeast fungi actually live in the air, and along with bacteria, they make their way into your flour and water mixture to create a SCOBY, a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. This ecosystem is complex and a little different each time depending on air temperature, humidity, season, and geographic location, but both the bacteria and the yeast are important in the bread-making process. Basically, the yeast helps decompose the wheat starches in the flour and creates byproducts the bacteria like to eat. The important byproduct created by the bacteria is CO2, which is what causes bread to rise.
Now let's think about what affects the chemistry of a starter. Perhaps you knew this, but most of the articles you'll find online will cover making a sourdough starter because it is a simple process (basically, put a 1-to-1 mixture of flour and water on the kitchen counter and feed it daily for about a week; when it looks bubbly and active, it is ready to use in a bread dough). The experienced sourdough starter parents in my life tell me that the wetter the starter, the more sour the taste of the bread. This is because in a wetter starter, the bacteria are slightly favored. If you've ever seen the Great British Baking Show, the judges warn contestants during bread week that any flavoring agents they add to their dough will slow the rise.
From this perspective, I would think of black tea as a flavoring agent. It is an acidic liquid that will affect the population of bacteria able to survive in your starter (i.e. the bacteria which are happy at the pH of drinking water may not be as happy at the pH of black tea). If you want to try it out instead of water using the sourdough starter process, it is very important that the black tea be well-strained and sugar-free to give your water-loving bacteria their best chance. If I had to guess, I would say the acidity of the tea would make for avery slow-growing SCOBY, if a SCOBY formed at all.
Perhaps you also suspected this, and you just want to know what might happen if you use black tea when you make your dough, not your starter (you can of course just use added yeast to make your dough, instead of using a starter; store-bought yeast is bred to produce a fast rise in water-and-flour dough, so I might expect it to work less effectively with more acidic, black tea bread dough). Wherever you source your raising agent, adding your black tea flavor is going to slow the rise of dough, perhaps making a long, overnight prove essential, or perhaps inhibiting rise altogether. I tend to think of my SCOBY as happy (read: active) in the conditions in which I bred it (flour-water-kitchen-counter), and less happy if I change those conditions. With that in mind, perhaps creating a SCOBY with dilute black tea will create a culture that will rise when you make bread with black tea.
You can design a little experiment, wherein you create a 1-to-1 water-flour starter, a 1/2-to-1/2-to-1 black tea-water-flour starter, and a 1-to-1 black tea-flour starter. Many people use glass jars with a paper towel rubber banded over the top when they leave them on the kitchen counter. Feed each starter a little flour each day for a week (stir it in), and see which starter bubbles up the most after a few days. You can also smell the starters to compare the balance of yeast and bacteria in each one. The flour-water starter should smell sour like sourdough bread. Compare this with the smell and the activity of the black tea starters. After a week, the general wisdom is that a SCOBY can be refrigerated (to slow the fermentation activity) and fed once per week. To use it, one must then leave it at room temperature at least overnight until it becomes bubbly and active again, before making a bread dough. Baking bread takes a lot of planning. I hope this was helpful!
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Answer 2:
Tea contains tannins, caffeine, and other chemicals that are not of value to the yeast doing the fermentation. There are bacteria that can ferment as well, but they use a different chemical process, and the fermentation of starch that causes bread dough to rise is done by yeast. I don't think that black tea will help the fermentation, and may hinder it.
You might flavor the bread with tea, assuming that the tannins and other chemicals in the tea don't poison the yeast.
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Answer 3:
Your project sounds great!
1. Here's one for making the yeast ' go a long way' :
Leader says another way to go is to make a sponge with whatever yeast you're using, along with a portion of the flour and water. He suggests using 1/3 of both the flour and water from the recipe. Use warm water, and let the sponge rest at least a few hours, or even overnight, on the counter.May 15, 2020
2. And - using less yeast:
What happens when you add less yeast? Putting less yeast in a bread recipe slows the development of the dough. Slowly fermented bread made with less yeast makes a better loaf of bread. ... It also makes a stronger gluten network which gives the bread a better crust and crumb.Dec 27, 2020
3. Then there's this cool idea, where you let black tea & honey & water sit until wild yeast grows in it. Supposedly you can drink the resulting 'yeast water,' but I don't recommend it. The bread should be fine, though, because you bake it and kill any microbes. Also, I don't see any evidence that people are worrying about toxic chemicals from this - it's a 2012 post, which gives time for complaints, if there were any. There's also a post about making yeast from a potato, for when packets of yeast started disappearing from our grocery stores!
link.
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