So we’ve been stuck at home for the past 2 and half months with only ourselves for company. I decided that since I knew I was going to be home for a long time and not doing any travelling that this was the perfect time to birth a sourdough starter.
I went online. I searched. I googled. I youtubed. I found that there are tons of sites that say the same basic thing:
Take some flour. Take the same weight in water. Mix the 2. Wait a day. Add that same amount of each again and mix. Wait a day. Repeat. Toss 2/3 of what you have in the trash and feed what’s left with 1:1:1 ratio by weight (it you have 1lb of starter add in 1lb of flour and 1lb of water and mix.) Repeat the discard and feed daily.
(If you actually are maintaining 3lbs of starter and do not run a commercial bakery you might have a problem but that’s a topic for another post.)
So I started with 50g (yes I use metric, live with it) each of flour and water. I built it up to 300g of starter over the course of 3 days. I started the discard and feeding schedule. At some point I decided it was ready to bake with. I’m a coward so I went with the tried and true, I went to King Arthur Flour’s website and used this recipe. It came out really nice and since it uses commercial yeast as well it had a nice rise to it.
At this point I decided it was time to get more serious, to give Covey (that’s my starter’s name) a real workout. I’d checked this recipe out (thanks Karen for sending me that link!) and felt it was easy enough for me to do with a reasonable chance of success. The bread came otu delicious but every time I make that recipe it cracks at the bottom. I’m not giving up, I’ll try some more!
The last place I’m going to share that gave me inspiration is this recipe for sourdough croissants. I’m sharing that recipe because it’s cool and the failures I had the one time I attempted it were on me and not on the recipe. (I still have a bunch of the delicious croissants in the freezer – my failures were in shaping and sizing them.) I’ve used a bunch of her other recipes and it’s a site I reccomend.
That’s all right now for places I’ve gone for recipes and inspiration. I might do another one of these posts later on and if a recipe I’m making and sharing is inspired by something I’ll be sure to include that. Happy baking!
My Baking Adventures 