I’ve been trying to make a single loaf of sourdough bread for months…
Let’s start with the basics. Bread needs yeast to rise and there are two ways of getting that yeast into bread. Either you purchase yeast from the store or you create your own yeast through the fermentation of water and flour. Thats the part I’ve been struggling with. I’ve been trying to create a healthy strain of yeast and it’s just not happening. Each and every starter ended with weeks of mixing and discarding with no progress. I had so many friends reach out on social media or by text offering advice and help. Nothing was working.
Eventually I figured out a couple of things I was definitely doing wrong.
Leaving the starter in the windowsill, absolutely not. The heat from the sun was killing off all of my good bacteria because the starter was getting too hot.
Oh I also added too hot of water one time to my mixture, killing off all of the good bacteria.
We have hard, well water treated with a water softener. The starter definitely did not appreciate all of the salt in the water.
Finally I had a girlfriend tell me she had ordered some dehydrated starter for me as a gift. Shes’s an angel. Many times people who have a healthy yeast strain will take some of that starter, spread it out on a plate, dehydrate it, and then crush it and bag it up. The dehydrated starter can then be rehydrated back to life and used for bread. Well this was certainly the way to go for me, because it has worked phenomenally.
I started noticing that the starter would rise about 30 minutes to a half hour after I fed it. I added 1 ounce of lukewarm filtered water, and 1/8 cup of flour. Sometimes I would add a little more flour to make sure that the consistency was similar to that of pancake batter or even a little more mousse like. But it was working. After about 3-4 hours the starter would die back down to its resting state and not be as active. I went through a couple days of watching the starter to make sure I knew what it was doing, then I decided to bake with it. I’ve read that the best time to use your starter to bake with is when the starter is at its peak of activity and I did just that. With great success.
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