Our Daring Bakers Host for December 2011 was Jessica of My Recipe Project and she showed us how fun it is to create Sour Dough bread in our own kitchens! She provided us with Sour Dough recipes from Bread Matters by AndrewWhitley as well as delicious recipes to use our Sour Dough bread in from Tonia George’s Things on Toast and Canteen’s Great British Food!
Well. This was QUITE the exhaustive challenge! Not only making bread, but actually cultivating the natural yeasty-beasties that turn it from flour-and-water-glop to bread, and then creating an edible to showcase said bread. See, exhaustive.
Sourdough bread begins with a “starter”, which is essentially a mixture of flour and water left long enough to get all bubbly and alive. Yes, alive – those little yeasties in the starter are living and need to be fed their own weight in flour and water in order to stay lively enough to make bread rise. When I began this challenge, I thought that making a starter involved catching wild yeast from the air (does that sound crazy?), but it turns out that the yeasts in question are actually on the grains that the flour is made from, and the flour-water mixture just wakes them up to they can do their yeasty thang. For this reason, whole, organic grains are best for making a starter: less processing equals more natural yeast in the flour, which means a more active and effective starter. You can turn a whole grain starter into a white flour starter (which is a little more versatile) by simply feeding it white flour after it has been established.
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