Here follows a rough guide on how to create, cultivate, and utilize your own personal, historically authentic sourdough starter as taught to me by my mother, as taught to her by her mother, and so on.
Author’s Note: As far as I’m aware, there are no official pronouns for yeast yet so “they” and “it” used interchangeably will have to do.
First, get a Great Uncle Sven (or Ovid or Bartholomew or Edna or whatever ethnic background you desire your great uncle or aunt to be). When your great uncle dies in the height of the Yukon Gold Rush during a blizzard, make sure someone in history saves the sourdough starter from his armpit, where of course, he was keeping it safe and warm. Now your sourdough has its flavor.
Next, go out and acquire your great uncle’s sourdough starter from a friend, neighbor, local bakery, or even, God forbid, The Internet. Other than already having a familial history, whatever starter you acquire will truly become yours because once you set that baby out in the open (uncovered by the stove or heater) dandruff, spit, and microbial ecosystems riding on dust motes that are specific to your abode will get into it. Your dog will give it a couple of licks, maybe the cat will sneeze in it, maybe a mouse will drown in it and you’ll feel just awful — this is good, though. All of this interesting activity will give your sourdough yeast a unique set of genetics they couldn’t acquire otherwise; it will make it hardy.
Why does your sourdough need to be hardy?
Your sourdough needs to be dang hardy because inevitably you will forget about it. And in the back of the fridge, while you’re on vacation or mowing the lawn, it will be forced to wage a brutal war against some form of evil, universal fungus. Yeast make bread and beer, not war, and in the end they will always lose this fight. So, when you discover your starter again it will smell and look dead, and you will feel the disdain of your great uncle weighing on your shoulders.
All hope is not lost.
When faced with destruction, the sourdough yeast will send some reserve members to the bottom of the jar. Your mission is to rescue them. So, hold your breath and pour/scrape the top layer of pond-scum off into the trash or down the drain. Then another layer. Then again. The goal is to get just a few uncontaminated yeast, and if you just plunge a spoon down in there you’re basically helping the enemy break through the lines. You’ll have to make sacrifices. Such is war.
Now, your rescued yeast will be in a state of duress and dormancy. Plop them in a bowl with flour and water, give them a warm place to rest, apologize to them, be patient, and they will recover. This may take a few days (the key is constant warmth — 65 degrees or warmer seems to work best. And don’t feed them wheat flour, they don’t like that). If your starter is taking a long time to grow but there are legitimate signs of life (bubbles and it smells like a foot), transfer a liberal spoonful of it to another bowl and give it fresh water and flour. Add a little sugar, too. When a yeast is unhappy it pumps out a bunch of stress signals and gunk that communicates to all the other yeast: “Batten up the hatches! The war ain’t over yet!” Changing the water and flour is a good cleansing technique to create a happier, faster growing, yeast community. Also, you gotta use a wooden spoon or stirring stick for all this work. Metals can inhibit yeast growth. Ultimately, yeast have fitness and emotions, the more you let them exercise, the stronger and happier they will be.
Taking good care of a bunch of single-cell, eukaryotic, microorganisms is just a lot of biology and chemistry but it doesn’t have to be cold science. People like to compare sourdough starters to plants: water it, feed it and it’ll grow. But what plant gives you a fruit every day, percolates right before your eyes, and has as much sass? If you live alone in a cabin and your sourdough starter sits out on a regular basis, I’ll tell ya, it has an aura that’s a lot cooler than a dumb plant. You should cultivate a healthy relationship with your starter. That requires two-way communication. You’ll end up talking to it, watch.
Alright, now that you can manage to keep your starter alive and healthy, you’re all set to make waffles, pancakes, or bread. This all starts the night before.
So, flour and water the night before, you’ll figure out how much of each by trial and error. I ain’t here to hold your hand all the way, alright?
Leave it to perk by the heater and tell it: Grow, grow, grow!
In the morning, before you do anything else, put some sourdough back into the peanut butter jar you’ve been keeping your starter in (personally, I keep two jars of sourdough starter in the fridge for when I inevitably forget this step). Your starter jar should have at least one hole punched in the lid so that the yeast can breathe better. Yeast can actually live and grow in anaerobic environments but they won’t be as happy.
Pancakes/Waffles:
Start by cooking bacon. While that’s sizzling, add an egg to the sourdough, pour in some sugar, and add some salt.
Once the bacon is cooked, dissolve just a little bit (just a little bit now, ya hear) of baking soda in some water — how much b-soda you add will determine how soupy your sourdough mix is. Stir in the baking soda soup to your sourdough. But no more stirring than that! Leave it alone for chrissakes. Let it sit there a second while you flip your bacon.
If you’re making waffles, add bacon grease to the sourdough mix.
Begin the waffles or pancakes.
Start making eggs at the same time.
Somewhere in here the tale of Great Uncle Sven should probably be told, or at least acknowledged.
Don’t sin by using cheap syrup.
Give yourself a letter grade on how well you’ve done and make sure you announce it to any company that might be present. Announce it to the dogs on the couch if that’s who you got. If the smoke detector didn’t go off during this entire process that’s actually pretty impressive and you should up your letter grade by at least one letter or a plus.
Bread:
Go buy a 25lb bag of flour at Costco for $9 — you just saved yourself a million dollars in sourdough bread.
Wake your starter up the night before, and if you’ve been making at least one loaf of bread a week, it will be nice and thick and smelly by morning. Don’t forget to save some starter!
Add a little oil, some salt, bunch a flour. Knead that bad boy. Let it rise on the counter for a little while. Plunk it into the oven at whatever temperature you think should work. I don’t know, like 400 something. Check on it here. Check on it there. Set a timer if you’re that kind of kid. Take it out when you think it’s good. BOOM: loaf of bread. You’ll figure out what works best for you. Of course there’s lots of nuances in here but that’s for you to figure out. Don’t be intimidated, it’s OK. You got 25lbs of freakin flour to use up. Each day is a new experiment — that’s half the fun.
