Fun With Sourdough

I figured since I posted how to *use* sourdough starter to make bread, it might be handy to know how to make the starter in the first place.

Ok, first off, this is how I made a sourdough starter that worked for me. I'm pretty sure there are loads of people who can and will detail how I'm DOING IT WRONG, but this is how I did it.
Here's the super complicated process:
Put a half-cup of water and a half-cup of flour in a bowl.
Take a whisk and stir it up. Walk around your kitchen while you whisk. Visit the fruit bowl. Go hang out where you keep your bread. Stand by an open window. You're trying to capture some native yeast spores in your sticky flour paste.
Now cover it loosely and let it sit for 24 hours.

Super complicated, I know.

Anyway, it's certainly not ready to use yet. Now you need to feed it. Most sourdough instructions say to discard some before feeding so you don't have too much, but I don't do that. That would be wasting!

To feed your starter, you put in another half-cup of flour and slightly less than a half-cup of water. Whisk it up. Cover it and let it go for another 24 hours.

At this point, you should be noticing bubbles. It should look like at least *something* is happening. It might not smell that great, but there should be some activity. If there isn't, this is the time to CHEAT. Take about 5 granules of active dry yeast and pop them into your starter, all sneaky-like, so nobody sees what you did. Then feed it and cover it like before.

If you keep feeding it at least once a day, you should have an active, sour-but-yeasty smelling bowl of goo by the end of the week.

I kept mine on the counter in a lidded ceramic bean pot that I found at a resale shop. It held a good amount so I was able to accumulate plenty of starter before I had to "discard" any.
But....I didn't actually discard it. Instead, I made pancakes! The starter, made my way, is already just about pancake batter consistency. So it was easy enough to just throw together a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants pancake mixture and have it work. I didn't even really bother measuring anything, but I will attempt to approximate, just for you.

Scoop out about 6 cups of starter. (If you really want pancakes bad, you can always feed your starter 2 or 3 times a day. It may even behave better for you with more frequent feedings.)
To that, add a couple eggs, a few tablespoons of a fat (I use butter, of course) and a couple tablespoons of sweetener (I use honey or sucanat) and a bit of salt. If it looks a bit too runny, add a little flour.
Now, for the magic. Make sure you've got your griddle ready to go, and dissolve about a quarter-teaspoon of baking soda in a little bit of milk or water, then beat it into the starter-batter. Make sure there is extra room in your bowl or pitcher, because it'll poof right up and get all bubbly and fluffy!
Then just fry up your pancakes like usual, and enjoy! They turn out a lot more spongy and resilient than your typical pancakes, but they really are quite delicious!!

Now, naturally, you're also going to want to make bread with your starter, and I posted that process in another blog. It's pretty simple stuff.

I should tell you that I do not have an active sourdough pot going right now. I'm not an OMG I LOVE SOURDOUGH kind of person, and I got very tired of the flavor of it very quickly. That's just me, though. And the beauty of it is, I can always start again whenever I get the taste for it :) So don't feel bad if you let yours die. There are always wild yeasts in the air, waiting for you to catch them!


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