adventures with yeast

...and without.

I've recently gotten into my brain to create my own sourdough. Let's ignore the fact that I also recently swore to reduce my carbohydrate intake. (tee-hee) So I've been combing the web and trying to find some recipes for making sourdough bread, but they all ask for this one important thing . . . a "starter." If you're from Northern California like I, then you understand that there ain't nothing like a San Francisco sourdough bread. In fact, there truly isn't. The SF Bay Area has its own particular kind of lactobaccillus (that's the bacteria that helps make food twang) called L. sanfranciscansis (I didn't even have to look that up. . . I saw it on a History Channel show once) that is only found in the Bay air and once you move the starter away from the Bay it picks up the local flora and loses its San Francisco taste.


Okay, bird walk about the SF dough aside, apparently it is possible to start your own starter without a "mother" or a kit. So I started yesterday morning hoping to do it right. The reason you make a sourdough starter is not only to get the twangy flavor, but to make your bread rise without keeping little yeasty beasties alive (since they're already alive and kickin' it in their "sponge" starter). It takes equal part by weight of water and flour, a clean bowl, a moderate room temperature, a loose cover, and a couple days. I started with 8 oz. tap water and 8 oz. regular ol' white flour. Here was my starter after a couple hours. It was barely bubbly and smelled like paste. Boring.

This morning I checked on it. It had gotten a little dried out and a little dark colored on the top. I decided I didn't need a whole ton of starter so I discarded half and then added another 4 oz. water and flour and stirred it all up. Then I stuck it in the oven with the light on (not the oven on) because we had so much wind drafting through the house this morning that my starter was down in the low end of the growth range (60-80 degrees F). I got the air in the oven up to 93 degrees in 2 hours with the heat from the light and from the heat from the outgassing. He was starting to smell a little like gym socks. Then I sat him on the counter. Here he is after about 36 hours total. He's pretty bubbly on the top and definitely smelling like yogurt. I wish I could say it was unpleasant, but in my reading I learned the only way to make sour dough is to get the starter sour smelling. Go figure :) And if you couldn't tell by now, we've taken to calling the startr "he" and "him". He's like another little baby right?








On a side note, here's a little loaf of french bread I made yesterday afternoon. I wish I could take all the credit for it, but I definitely let the bread machine do the kneading. I don't have the guts to try mixing or kneading by hand yet. But I seem to get the loaves to come out write. It was delish.