Starter Bread
Nowadays most folks make their bread with storebought yeast; the older method was to keep a starter going (perhaps a lump of bread from a previous batch, perhaps flour colonised by wild yeasts and bacteria), and use it to propagate the leaven from loaf to loaf. I’ve been brewing for a dozen years, so I’m pretty comfortable with fermentation and keeping yeast and bacteria happy (all beer’s made with yeast—a type of fungus—and certain sour beers are also made with bacteria); I’ve even performed a wild fermentation using lactobacilli found on the outside of barley grains and recently made sauerkraut, so even spontaneous fermentation is nothing new to me. I’ve enjoyed breadmaking for the past year or so, so it makes sense to take my bread to the next level and quit using instant yeast.
Making a starter is pretty simple: put equal amounts of flour & water in a large jar (some references say to start with 1 cup each; others 2, but it works either way), then wait. There are wild yeasts in the air we breathe and on the flour we use, so the starter will start to bubble after a few days as the yeast get going. It’s then ready to use, or can be fed a tablespoon of flour a day in order to increase in size.
To use the starter, form a sponge of one cup each starter, water and flour, then let sit somewhere warm for 8–24 hours. Once the sponge is good & bubbly, stir in 3–4 cups of flour until it’s the proper dough consistency, then knead and rise as for any bread.
What I’m wondering is how sour my starter will become. The local flora are a strong influence on the taste of the starter (hence lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, the source of the famous San Francisco sourdough tang). My condo’s flora are composed of an absolutely huge number of yeasts from my brewing (and yes, brewer’s yeast and baker’s yeast are the same stuff), along with some lactobacilli from my cheesemaking and some acetobacter from my vinegarmaking. Right now the starter is really sweet-smelling, with a slight hint of alcohol (that’s from the yeast); will it sour, or is my air so choked with yeast that nothing else has much of a chance? Regardless, it’s all quite exciting.
For more on starter making, S. John Ross’s sourdough page is a useful reference.
