For a while now I’ve wanted to try making sourdough bread. As I’ve said before, I love to bake and I do make bread from time to time but given my lack of time it’s usually fairly quick yeast based stuff. Which is perfectly yummy, don’t get me wrong, but for the denser, chewier, tangy really satisfying sorts of bread, you need a longer process (sourdough being one of the options).

Last December I read Barbara O’Neal’s wonderful How To Bake A Perfect Life, which features a baker heroine and many divine sounding recipes (as her books always do). I wanted to try sourdough then but promptly got sick with a horrible stomach bug that wiped out much of my January and after that the year sort of accelerated and I didn’t come back to it. But the last few days I’ve been having one of those serendipitous things where sourdough starts popping up everywhere and I had the urge to read How To Bake again (which I did in one long luxurious reading last night…happy sigh…though warning, you need snacks on hand to read Barbara’s books as they make you very, very hungry!. So I woke up this morning determined to actually try it for myself and hied off to the shops to buy some bread flour and a few bits and pieces.

A sourdough starter is the essentially a mix of flour and water (with other ingredients) which is left to develop over a week or so and it (in the purest form) gets its yeast from the naturally occurring wild yeasts that surround us (hey, you didn’t know you were surrounded by teeny tiny yeast monsters, did you?). It starts to ferment and bubble away and from the point at which it’s ready, it can then be used to make sourdough without needed commercial yeast. This is how bread was made before commercial yeast existed. Plus you just keep it in the fridge and keep feeding it flour and water (perhaps I shall name mine Seymour) and it will just go on and on and on.

The recipe I’m trying is the Easy Sourdough Starter featured in the book…(go buy it!) which isn’t a pure sourdough as it includes commercial yeast to give the process a bit of a kickstart, but as Ramona (the heroine) says, start with something reliable while you’re figuring how to work with the stuff. It also uses potato water (ie water that potatoes have been cooked in…so bonus potato salad for dinner for me) to give the little yeasties some extra starch to munch on to help them along. It takes anywhere from 4-10 days to get to the “ready to use” stage, so I shall report back. It’s meant to be warming up here in Melbourne this week, so I’m hoping it will be on the shorter end of the scale (if it doesn’t get too hot for the yeast!) and I might be able to try making some bread next weekend!

Here are some pics of what it looks like today…

Starter...day 1

This is kind of like dough soup…flour and potato water and the yeast. It’s meant to be a mix of rye, wholemeal and white but my health food store was out of rye, so mine’s just wholemeal and white.

Pretty much straight after stirring.  You can see it’s already got some teeny tiny bubbles. That’s from the added yeast. To do it the other way, you start with smaller amounts of flour and liquid and the wild yeast gradually colonises the mix over days (it’s like the world’s tastiest science experiment!).

And here it is about two and a half hours later.  As you can see it’s foamed up and thickened a lot already (it’s a lovely warm but not hot day today, so perfect for bread). I’m glad I chose to put it in a big bowl. It’s doubled in depth, as the next pic will show! Now I just leave it to sit (covered!) and stir it and taste every day until it’s ready (and consult wiser baking heads than mine if it all goes pear shaped) : ). In the meantime I can read up on what to do with it once it is ready!