Sourdough

In keeping with our winter baking run, I am attempting to make sourdough bread. This is not new for us; Maggie has been successfully making sourdough bread for years. I have limited myself to using store-bought yeast, so I thought I would give sourdough a try.

The first step has been to make a starter, which is just an equal mixture of flour and water. I am following a routine from America's Test Kitchen, which creates a small volume of starter that then gets scaled up when needed. The intent of the small scale is to reduce waste. I started by mixing 10 grams of flour and 10 grams of water in a small canning jar. This slowly ferments with natural yeasts in the air to create the starter. The waste part comes in because each day I remove about half of the mixture and replace with more flour and water. This is the 'feeding the starter' routine that tends to exhaust most bakers after a while. Maggie found that a combination of all-purpose flour and a little rye flour provides a good food source for the natural yeast.

The question is always what to do with the waste. In watching a YouTube video on bread baking, the person poured the 'waste' starter into a frying pan and made a small pancake/flatbread. I sprinkle my version with a little salt and 'everything bagel' topping. The pancake tends to be a little underdone, but I have been trying to thin the mixture with a little water to get a thinner flatbread that cooks through, and cover the pan to retain heat, and that seems to improve the bake. This has been a welcome addition to my lunch every day.

I have been feeding this little starter since December 20, and it looks like it may be active enough to try and actually make some bread. My hope is that once I bake a loaf, I can feed the starter and store it in the refrigerator. The cold should slow the yeast so I do not have to feed it The alternative is to bake bread every couple of days, which would probably not be a bad problem.