Sourdough Starter

One of my net.friends who homesteads in the boonies started talking about baking day and I was fascinated by how sourdough helped her be more self-sufficient.  Growing your own yeast means not being dependent on one more grocery store item.

Sourdough can be started by mixing 1 cup each of water and flour in a jar and covering it with something that breathes like cheesecloth.  It needs to be fed once a day when it is out and you are baking with it. In the winter when it’s sleepy because it’s cold in the house I feed it every couple days. If you aren’t using it for a little bit you can store it in the fridge and feed it once a week. Feeding just means dumping out one cup and adding one half cup water and one half cup flour. If you are baking soon you don’t have to dump anything out, just let it grow until you have enough for the recipes you plan to make.

Within a day or so of creating your starter, yeast from the air will start setting up house and bubbling up the joint. Over time they will build a little community in there. Here is the tutorial I started with, for more information.

I started baking with my sourdough after one week because I was really excited about it.  But I found that my bakery didn’t come out terribly well for about the first 3 months.  The taste was still pleasant, so that didn’t stop me from baking and eating imperfect breads before that though. If you know you aren’t going to be happy with imperfect bread, consider starting with things like pancakes and biscuits where rise isn’t as important.

Edited to add: Here is the link to all of my sourdough posts so you can see everything I’ve made from my starter