<$BlogRSDUrl$>
Digital Dish copyright 2005 Press For Change Publishing LLC
Digital Dish is the first ever compilation of the best writing from food blogs. Find out more at Press For Change and place an order!

 

Enter your email address to subscribe:

Delivered by FeedBurner



The Meatrix I'm not a vegetarian but I dislike factory farming and I support small, family farms.

 

Tomatilla! Feed


Monday, September 29, 2003

Sourdough Starter


This weekend I started to get back to something I spent most of last year doing -- making sourdough bread and keeping an ongoing live starter. It takes a couple of weeks for the full sourdough flavor to develop but initial results for this new batch were warmly received.

I got the starter going with some flour and a bottle of ordinary New Zealand lager I had lying around. Just mix the beer and flour together - use about a cup and a half of flour for a bottle of beer. You want it quite runny - nothing like bread dough really. But bottled beer doesn't have very much live yeast, plus for authenticity you want some wild yeast, so I left the beer and flour mixture uncovered in the kitchen for 36 hours. Then as it started to ferment a little I fed it again (add warm water and flour) and stirred it up and let it work a second time. Now it was really starting to grow, so I divided it and made a batch of bread with one half and once again fed the other half and left it for twelve hours and put it in the fridge.

For the batch I made into bread, I simply added a little salt and enough flour to make it a proper bread dough with the right consistency and then kneaded it properly. I let it rise three times, since sourdough started bread is low on yeast to start with. Then I formed two french bread loaves and baked them. It all worked out great.

If you want more information about making bread, especially with bread machines (I didn't use a machine in this case but I own one and DO use it pretty frequently) then I strongly recommend the best bread baking book in existence:

Comments: Post a Comment