sourdough

Sourdough Starter

April 10, 2010

There are at least a million different ways to make a sourdough starter. It is worth making.

I wanted a starter that used just water and flour and didn’t force me to toss out gallons of extra starter in the process, so this is how I made mine.

Supplies needed:

Glass jar with a lid
Spoon (preferably not metal or plastic)
Flour
Filtered water

Day 1: Sterilize the jar and spoon with a bit of boiling water. Let cool to the touch. Add ½ cup flour and ½ cup water. Mix well. Set on the counter. Cover lightly with cheesecloth if you wish.

Day 2: Depending on how warm your home is, the starter may have started to lightly bubble and may have even formed a thin layer of liquid on top. The liquid is not a cause for worry. It’s called hooch and is the alcohol from the fermenting grain (and will be baked out of the sourdough later). Just mix it back in.

Now, it’s time to feed the starter. Dump out half of the mix (unless you want to end up with cups and cups and cups of starter) and pour the rest into a clean sterilized jar. Add ½ cup flour and ½ cup water. Mix well. Set on counter and cover if desired

Day 3: Repeat day 2

Days 4+: The starter is ready when bubbles pervade it within eight hours of a feeding and it has a nice, slightly sour scent. The warmth of your home makes a big difference in how quickly this happens. Keep feeding daily until it does.

Once you have an established starter it’s quite simple to care for. If you bake constantly leave it on the counter, use all but ½ a cup of the starter daily and add ½ cup each of water and flour and stir.

If you don’t want sourdough dominating the kitchen, give it a light feeding and store it in the fridge loosely covered to keep any unwanted fridge odors out. It will contentedly eat the flour you gave it for a week or two. If you still don’t need it after that time, take it out, dump half of the starter, give it a fresh feeding and put in back in the fridge.

Random tips and comments:

Contrary to what I first thought, the more sourdough starter you use in a recipe, the less sour flavor you get because it takes less time to rise. The longer the dough rises, the more the flavor permeates the dough.

Once you’re done with a jar, spoon or anything else that’s come into contact with the sourdough, wash it. The longer you wait, the more persistently the starter clings to the surface.

I’ve yet to find an authoritative consensus on where the wild yeast comes from. Many claim that it comes from the air, but others say that it must be present in the yeast since you can cover the starter with a lid and it still works. What do you think?

Here are a few other sourdough starter “recipes”:

Sourdough: benefits, catching and care

Sourdough: How to begin

How to make sourdough starter

Tagged with: recipes • sourdough

Sourdough: Adventure in a Jar

April 9, 2010

Sourdough. An adventure in a glass jar. A simple example of dominion in the kitchen. Water and flour transformed into a bubbling colony of microscopic bacteria, oozing their tangy scent as they aid our digestion.

Even the recipes are less of a science and more experimentation and adventure. Your starter controls how long it takes to raise, the flavor, how much flour to add and so on. Yet the added work is certainly worth it when you consider how much healthier (and yummier) sourdough bread is.

I used to not like sourdough bread. The flavor was too pungent. But some foods are worth learning to like. As Brad Belschner pointed out, “Good taste, like good morals, is acquired and built. If something is obviously superior, then why shouldn’t we teach ourselves to enjoy it?”

Wheat was designed with phytic acid to preserve the kernel until it was ready to grow into a new plant. The phytic acid protects the kernel and prevents the nutrients from being consumed until the grain is planted. While this is great for the wheat, it causes problems for us. Not only are the nutrients carefully guarded, the phytic acid actually leeches nutrients from our bodies. Occasionally this can be a good thing; like if you wanted to detoxify your body of heavy metals, but usually the point is to obtain nutrients from our food!

The solutions to this problem include soaking the ground wheat in an acid like vinegar or buttermilk before baking, sprouting the grains or making sourdough.

Sourdough is the simplest option and has been used for centuries. It wasn’t until the middle of the 1800s that commercial yeast even became readily available. Before that, you had to capture the yeast. Sourdough starters were treasured and even passed on for generations.

As the wild yeast spreads through the flour it eats the sugar and causes it to ferment and rise while breaking down the protective phytic acid.

Folks have been making sourdough for centuries—before they had ovens or running water. The plethora of recipes for starters can make it appear deceptively difficult, but when I stopped procrastinating and began the search for the perfect starter recipe, I realized that the shelves full of unique recipes underscored its simplicity. The fact that you can use wheat or white or rye flour; add grapes, sugar, yeast or nothing but water; leave it on the counter or store it in the fridge doesn’t prove it’s complicated. It proves it’s simple.

photo by Jana Koll