Sourdough Starter

Making bread with a natural starter is a wonderful, enjoyable experience. Making bread with a commercial starter was always a hurried, high stress, high energy, high risk project that took up too much of my time and energy. The slower pace of a natural starter is far less disruptive and makes for a much more pleasant experience. The ingredients for the bread recipe are the same with the exception of the yeast.

The following recipe for harvesting wild yeast and making your own starter is very easy to make and is not as wasteful as many of the starter recipes that I have tried. It is simple, straight forward, and proved to be the strongest and best tasting of the starters I have used. The pineapple juice adds a bit of natural sugar to the mixture and feeds the yeast quite nicely.

Harvesting Wild Yeast

I use a wide mouth, glass, quart size canning jar to keep my starter in. Unless you have a breathable lid, the lid of the jar should never be on tight, always have it loose. It will take about 6 weeks before the starter is a mature starter...prior to that you can make bread, but it will not rise as well as it will when the starter is mature.

½ C unsweetened pineapple juice
½ C whole grain flour
1 C whole grain flour (additional starting on day 4)
1 C water (make sure you use reverse osmosis or distilled water)
¼ t cider vinegar (optional)

Day 1: Mix 2 T whole grain flour and 2 T pineapple juice. Stir well, cover and let sit for 24 hours at room temperature.

Day 2: Add 2 T whole grain flour and 2 T pineapple juice. Stir well, cover and let sit again. You may or may not see bubbles at this point.

Day 3: Add 2 T whole grain flour and 2 T pineapple juice. Stir well, cover and let sit again.

Day 4: Stir mixture and measure out ¼ Cup. Dicard the rest. To the ¼ C add ¼ C whole grain flour and ¼ C water. Let sit 24 hours at room temperature.

Repeat day 4 until mixutre expands to double it's size and smells yeasty. Mixture may start to bubble after a couple of days and then go flat and look totally dead for a couple more days. If this happens, at day 6 add the ¼ teaspoon vinegar with your daily feeding. This will lower the PH and wake up the yeast, which will then start to grow.

Once the yeast starts growing, starter should be fed equal parts of flour and water in a quantity sufficient to make enough starter for your recipe. Store the starter in the refrigerator when you are not using it. It needs to be fed equal parts flour and water once a week to keep it alive. This is very important to maintain a healthy starter. (You can either use or discard part of it when feeding so that you do not become overwhelmed with starter.)

Use and Care of Your Starter

(this should be done weekly-but not more often than every 72 hours)

Remove starter from refrigerator and stir well.
If you are baking, remove amount of starter required for recipe and set aside.
Measure remaining starter and place in a clean glass quart jar.
Add equal amounts of whole grain flour and water and stir well. (ie...if you have ½ C starter, you will add ½ C flour and ½ C water.)
Allow to sit at room temperature overnight.
Return to refrigerator.
Wait 72 hours before using the refreshed starter.

STEP BY STEP FEEDING OF THE STARTER WITH PHOTOS

STEP 1:	STEP 2:	STEP 3:

Remove starter from refrigerator. In this photo you can see a clear liquid on top. That is called hooch, and it is perfectly normal. The color of the hooch can range from light amber to nearly black. A darker colored hooch is just fine. Stir the starter well.	Measure the starter. If you are making bread, this is the time to measure out the amount of starter needed for your bread recipe.	Pour measured starter into a clean glass jar.
STEP 4:	STEP 5:	STEP 6:

Add equal amounts of freshly ground wheat flour and distilled or reverse osmosis water. (example: if you have ½ C of starter, you will add ½ C of flour and ½ C of water.) Stir well.	Place a loose fitting or breathable cover on jar. Here I am using a lid sold for sprouting in canning jars. A cloth and rubberband work equally as well.	Set the starter in a warm place on the counter and leave undistrubed overnight. The following morning place the starter in the refrigerator. It will be ready to use again 72 hours after you have fed it. Starter should be fed a minimum of once a week.