August 2008 Archives

I love sour dough bread. I love rustic grilled sandwiches made with thinly sliced meats and melty cheese. Nowhere in the world will you find better sour dough than in San Francisco but you can make awesome sour dough bread in your own kitchen from naturally occuring yeasts in the air. You just have to catch them!

1 cup bread flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk

Combine until smooth - I use a wire wisk.

Pour into a container that can sit on your countertop.

Loosely cover with cheese cloth or a dish cloth. The mix needs to breath. Wild yeast bacteria naturally occuring in the air we breath should make a home here and do all the work.

Look! I caught a wild yeast. Woot!!! It bubbles and rises. It is a living food culture.

See that line of liquid that is rising to the top? That is the 'hooch'. It is the fermented sugars we used to feed the yeast cultures. The mix does smell like rich beer. No worries! When you bake with it the alcohols cook away.

Every day the mix needs to be stirred. Every 5 days it needs to be fed. I feed it the same simple recipe - 1 cup bread flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk. After the first 10 days you can begin to bake with it. Lovely breads and sweets. Anything you can do with a yeast recipe you can do with this starter. You can search google and turn up tons of awesome easy recipes for your dough starter.

If you have trouble catching a yeast you can still make your own with some starter help. In your original recipe add 1 package of dry yeast dissolved in 1/4 cup warm water allowed to sit to for 10 minutes to activate. Then continue feeding the mixture the simple recipe above (1 cup bread flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk) every 5 days. On day 10 you begin cooking with it.

You much tend your starter. You must feed it. Without your TLC it will die. If you find yourself in a position where you have too much starter or you don't have time to use it you can freeze it. After having been frozen you will need to let it thaw and come up to room temerpature. Then you want to watch for it to be to activate again. You want to feed it and help it to grow. If you don't want to freeze it you can give it away by the cup full to your friends and neighbors.

Think about it. It is the perfect sharing food. You feed it and it feeds you and your family and your friends and their families.

Now go get busy. It will take you 2 minutes to make the mix. The rest of the work is done by nature.

Chop. Chop. Get to moving. I haven't asked you to do anything in a long time. ;)

I am, today.