Beauty from the Beast

About eighteen months ago, I got it into my head to try and make a sourdough starter.  We love sourdough bread at our house and what else did I have to do, right?  Yeah, right.  But when I get a bee in my bonnet about something, I have to do something about it.  That's just how I am.  I did a bit of research and figured out what to do to start a starter.  A sourdough culture is a mixture of wild yeast and lactobacillus bacteria living in a mixture of flour and water.  The microorganisms are usually living on the flour and just need some water to help them grow.  Some people think the microorganisms come out of the air, and some do, but mostly they are in the flour.  It actually takes quite a while to get a good sourdough starter really active and robust enough to use for baking.  I worked on mine for about a month before I attempted to use it.  A sourdough starter is a living organism and needs to be tended regularly.

I have named mine "the Beast."  The Beast lives in the refrigerator most of the time.  I take it out and feed it about once a week or whenever I'm ready to do some baking.  The Beast is a happy and healthy starter as you can see by the lovely bubbles. The longer it lives, the more sourdough-y it smells.  It has a great yeasty aroma at this point. 

Once I got the Beast going, I tried all kinds of sourdough recipes.  I made pancakes, waffles, biscuits, breads, and English muffins.  After all was said and done, though, the family decided that the bread and English muffins were the keepers.  We have other recipes we like better for pancakes, waffles, and biscuits.  But the bread and muffins are wonderful.  I have tweaked the bread so that it contains about a third organic hard white wheat flour (from Bob's Red Mill) and two thirds regular unbleached white flour.  I'm not sure why it's called white wheat flour but it is like a fine whole wheat.  We really like the combination and it makes nice firm, healthy loaves of bread.   These just came out of the oven and the whole house smells of freshly baked bread with just a tinge of that sourdough smell, too.  I think it's time to cut a slice and do a taste test.