After a few months I decided it's time to bake sourdough bread again. Reading Deb's nice comments on Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery, I finally decided to get hold of the book. I might try to get a starter, according to her method, sometime in the future, but getting my own going again seems easier and less time consuming. If it works. My self-made starter remained, till yesterday, stored as a dry sheet. I had read this starter-storing tip, on eGullet I believe, a while back and it made sense to me then. After all yeast and bacteria build spores which can survive for years. I wasn't that sure yesterday; as I mixed my crumbled dried starter with water visions of dead yeast and bacteria cells was all that came to mind. Will they start producing CO2 happily again? Did I have starter-related nightmares tonight? Well, no, but the first thing I did waking up was checking the starter. It bubbles!
Alberto -- I have been wanting to make a sourdough starter for sometime now. But...the fear in my belly whenever I wander towards the kitchen with the intention of doing so has won out thus far.
Any suggestions? Hints? Tips? Secrets (shhhh!)?
Posted by: Jennifer | May 04, 2004 at 02:10 AM
Jennifer, sourdough is not as difficult as it might sound. I admit I tried twice, before getting something useable, and I still don't see where my mistake was. There's plenty of tips in books, on the web and so on, but they can be so different that the only thing that will start bubbling is your brain :-). So I'll limit myself to what worked for me. I made a rather stiff whole wheat organic flour ball of dough, using plain bottled water and a pinch of malt extract. Put it inside a bowl covered that and waited. After two days the dough ball became dry on the outside, I split the hard skin open and the dough showed loads of bubbles. I removed the skin and mixed it with new water and flour in a 1:1 ratio (this is called feeding) and went on from there, following the typical feed once a day schedule you can find almost in any bread book. The starter smelled quite strong at the start but became better and better with time. You can also start with a more fluid dough but it didn't work for me. It's actually a lot easier than one thinks.
Posted by: Alberto | May 04, 2004 at 09:07 AM
Jennifer
You can trust the one available on
www.sourdo.com/italian.html
Posted by: Marco | May 06, 2004 at 08:29 PM
Marco, I'm leaving your comment up although I was quite tempted to remove it. It certainly is pertinent to the topic, but I don't feel this is the place for commercial links. Please consider this for the future.
Posted by: Alberto | May 07, 2004 at 09:17 AM