Now that I’ve been trying my hand at bread baking for a few months, I’ve been reading more and more on sourdough.  Everyone knows about the famous San Francisco sourdough bread, and many think, because of that, sourdough means sour tasting (pleasantly) bread.

Actually, sourdough is a way to bake bread without using commercial yeast.  The starter is made from very basic ingredients (flour and water).  The combination  is allowed to attract wild yeasts and bacteria (good bacteria) from the air until the starter starts to bubble and becomes stable.  Once the sourdough is stable, it can be fed and maintained fairly easily.

There are plenty of sourdough recipes, but sourdough can also be substituted in recipes that call for yeast by using 1 cup of starter for 1 ounce of yeast cake or about 2/3 ounce of dry yeast.  Using less is just fine, as one of the things I want to try is to allow my bread to rise much longer than I have.
I’ve been doing 2 hour rises, but less yeast may take up to a day to rise as the yeast has to have time to do its thing.

So why make my own starter?  Sourdough attracts the local wild yeasts.  I could buy a San Francisco sourdough starter, and the first few loaves would taste like it, but, eventually, the wild yeasts in my starter would be the ones in my kitchen, and I’d no longer get the original flavor.  This isn’t a bad thing; it means that every loaf of bread will have the taste of my kitchen in it and nowhere else!

So, on top of anything else I talk about over the next few days, I’m going to be posting the progress of my sourdough starter!

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